Negative capability

Well, it's finally happened, poetry's passed me by.

I knew it would happen someday, so it happened Sunday.

I was in Green Apple Bookstore, the little Green Apple on 9th, looking for the novels of Albert Cossery, the Egyptian-born French writer recommended to me by Antoine Sevilla of San Julien, France, a village so small it's just big enough for Antoine and his wife, Genevieve.

(Antoine's an artist. You may visit his website at antoinesevilla.com)

There was no Cossery--I'm 0 for 3 in my bookstore search for him, which means I'll probably have to go to City Lights, that corporate behemouth on Columbus that still poses as beat--and so I wandered aimlessly into Green Apple's "Poetry" section, as if by accident.

It's not much of a section, a couple of shelves, one at eye level and one below, as I recall. 

Looking at the poetry books there I had no desire to take any one of them off the shelf and start reading, as I always have had in the past. There were either the old familiar names or the new names that were unfamiliar to me. I saw that John Ashberry has a new book, as does Louise Gluck (not poetry, but essays on poetry). There were more women poets than men poets. I don't know if this means that there are more women publishing poetry than men or if Green Apple's poetry buyer has a predilection for women poets. 

In the past I would have stayed in the poetry section for at least a half-hour, going through the new books, able, I always believed, to discern from opening a book at random whether the poet had anything to say to me, going from one book to another, gathering up language that had been separated into lines so that at least it looked like a poem, knowing how rare poetry is and knowing how thrilling it was for me to actualy find it once in awhile.

This time my curiousity was completely limp. I had no intention of panning for gold I might find. The search I'd been on for so many years--finding voices new to me--was over, at least for the moment that I could imagine would be in perpetuity. 

What had changed? Why had this feeling come over me, taking away a pleasure I'd enjoyed for many years? The poetry section seemed like one long continuous book of poems, good and bad poems, indifferent poems, poems trying to be poems written by men and women trying to be poets? From the time I left the bookstore, walking through Golden Gate Park, to the time I reached home I thought about this, not yet coming up with an answer.

Sometimes you find the music you're searching for, and sometimes you don't.