Book Plates and Starlings

Last week was our 32nd wedding anniversary, and my husband surprised me with an inscribed first edition of Richard Wilbur's New and Collected Poems. I had told him about Wilbur's poem The Writer, and the lines I think of when I work with my students: "It is always a matter, my darling, of life or death, as I had forgotten." The line comes at the end of the poem, after Wilbur compares his daughter's struggle to write a story with the struggle of a "dazed starling" trapped in her room, the "sleek, wild, dark and iridescent creature" battling to find its way out through the open window. Wilbur's line reminds me that what, for me, is paper number 12 out of 14 may represent something of tremendous importance for the student who wrote that paper--and I should remember that when I respond. No matter the wrong citation style or the lack of a thesis, the paper and its author deserve to be taken seriously.

Anyway, though, Richard Wilbur inscribed to book "for Bill and Judy." The signing--according to the program that Bill and Judy slipped into the pages of the book, and which traveled with the book to me--happened on May 9, 1988, when Wilbur, then the U.S. Poet Laureate, gave a talk at the Seattle Public Library Foundation. Bill and Judy were fans, or acquaintances, of the poet's; they knew him as Dick. Was the poet making a joke when he helpfully put his nickname in parentheses? It's a trace of a conversation and an encounter long past. If the hands that made Flowers and Fruit had kept such careful records, we would not be here today.

I can imagine Judy and Bill and their friends going out to dinner before attending Wilbur's lecture that evening at the Seattle Center, talking about their favorite poems, or common friends, and then rushing to get the check in order to have time to park and get seats on the aisle. I can see them taking their copy of the book up to the Poet Laureate afterwards, waiting their turn, and then explaining their connection, reminding him of the time they met before, of the communal links they shared. And then the signing, the quick handshake, and Judy and Bill are out the door and into the Seattle spring night.

There will be a few opportunities over the next months for me to sign books here in Northern California--more about those later. But if you're not from these parts, and you'd like me to sign your copy of The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin, I will be happy to send you a signed book plate that you can stick inside. My editor's assistant tells me now that the book will ship on August 7. You who have read this blog have helped my project "clear the sill of the world," as Wilbur phrased it. Email me your address, as well as the name you'd like me to inscribe, and I'll be delighted to drop an signed sticker in the mail. You can find me at thedisappearinggauguin@gmail.com.