Eight Hundred Books

For the past few years, I've worked--in various capacities--at the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell. I first came here in '94, as a "June Poet" (a Fellow in the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets)--a great program that I've since had the joy of teaching in. Anyway, the Stadler Center has its own poetry library, a small eclectic collection of mainly contemporary poetry. It had some gaps back then (there are still some gaps now, but the new director, Shara McCallum, is working on filling those out). As an obsessive book buyer, I had a few extra copies and started donating them back in '94 after the June Seminar ended and I went back home to Houston.

When we moved to Lewisburg a few years ago, I brought along roughly sixty boxes of books, and half of those had to stay in storage. There's only so much space for bookcases in our apartment, and though I had six bookcases full of poetry in my office last year, next year I'll be in a much smaller space. So even though I've been donating books pretty regularly since '94, this past year I did some major thinning--and lugged in donations every week.

I like to think that there are plenty of other book lovers who keep a running database of their collection. (If not, I've just confessed a bit too much, but oh well.) So it only took a few minutes to scroll through my "books" spreadsheet the other day and tally up my donations to the library: over 800 books to date.

This is not about me. This is about building a decent collection of contemporary American poetry that will benefit students for the forseeable future. I encourage my students to use this space, to hang out and read in the poetry center. And during the June Seminar, our little library is pretty much ransacked, with piles on the desk and floor to be reshelved. It's great to see the collection filling out, and to know that it's being used. We even have a grad assistant who logs each new book into a (yes!) database. So if you ever find yourself with an extra clean copy of a poetry book, let me know: we'd probably love to add it to our library.