Elliot Silberberg remembers when, in an attempt to protect a town from certain thoughts and ideas, a poetry collection was censored into oblivion.
In the early 1970s, I gave up a college position teaching American literature on the East Coast, moved to the Colorado Rockies and found work in a small town library that served its ranching community. The head librarian, Dee Dee, took a chance hiring me. She couldn’t understand why I’d left academia for the boonies. I wasn’t sure either, but I sure needed a job.
The library had a Western Room full of dog-eared copies of cowboy tales by such as Louis L’Amour, Max Brand and Zane Gray. The Children’s Room was stocked with Red Ryder, The Lone Ranger, Peter Rabbit and The Little Red Hen. Hefty books by best-selling novelists James Michener, Harold Robbins and Irving Wallace enjoyed pride of place in the fiction section, while dusty, leather-bound volumes by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry Timrod and Steven Crane held sway in the poetry stacks.
The town was evolving into a ski area and young people were moving in. There weren’t many avid readers. My friend Tina Sharts was one. She came from New Jersey and commuted down to Boulder to study poetry with Anne Waldman and Joanne Kyger. Tina loved the verbal energy of these women, who influenced her own bold and bawdy poetic voice. She liked to recite her poems on evening walks with friends, even in winter, en route to soak in a hot springs under the stars.
Then one night Tina was killed in a car accident. Just like that she was gone.
A group of friends wanted to dedicate a memorial poetry collection in her name at the library. Dee Dee consented and put me in charge. Tina’s family funded the project. I ordered about seventy paperbacks from small press publishers of contemporary American poetry. There were the women poets Tina loved, Waldman, Kyger, Diane di Prima and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), poets from the Objectivist movement, the Black Mountain poets and the Beats. Among the names on those slim volumes were Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams, Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Fielding Dawson, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Reznikoff.
A small wooden bookcase with green leather trim housed the collection. To me it made the whole library glow. Each book contained a sticker with an astrological symbol Tina had liked, a verse from a favorite song, “Time waits for no one” by The Rolling Stones and the inscription, “Tina Sharts (1953-1975) Memorial Poetry Collection.”
The poetry didn’t go over big. At work, I’d watch ranchers’ wives peek inside with puzzled looks or frowns then ease the books back on the shelf. The content was too raw, some language too dirty, the ideas threatening. Dee Dee told me she was getting complaints.
The content was too raw, some language too dirty, the ideas threatening. This embarrassment would stain her legacy.
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Now she regretted giving me free rein to order. Things got chilly between us. Dee Dee was nearing retirement. This embarrassment would stain her legacy.
I’d put together the collection in good faith, wanting to honor the kind of exploratory, confrontational writing that inspired Tina. Those poets inspired me too. I’d abandoned my teaching career in part because of them. As a professor, their words silently shouted at me that I had nothing much to profess.
I ended up leaving town. When I returned after a few years, I dropped back into the library, dismayed to discover the collection gone. Dee Dee was on pension. The young girl at the front desk sheepishly muttered the books had been mixed into the library. There were but a few. A check of the card catalog confirmed they’d vanished.
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I considered the loss a lowly act of censorship. No matter how disturbing the ideas and emotions in those books may have been, they didn’t deserve to be eliminated.
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I considered the loss a lowly act of censorship. No matter how disturbing the ideas and emotions in those books may have been, they didn’t deserve to be eliminated.
I felt sadder still after recalling a reading by Ginsberg before a large audience of ranchers on the Front Range. That room emanated none of the blissed out aura of his university readings. Stern-faced cowboys and their wives sat rigidly on folding chairs, while a handful of hippies sprawled on the floor up front, like cheerleaders. The granny glasses the wives and flower children wore were all the two apparently had in common.
Ginsberg didn’t demure from reading his spiciest poems, but rendered them in a meek, sweet voice that itself implored the audience to pay him the courtesy of listening. They did. He dealt frankly with sex, capitalist greed, urban nightmares, the American war machine and mortality. Some folks shifted in their seats, but there were no catcalls.
No one clapped when he finished, but as the ranchers filed out, I sensed Ginsberg earned their grudging respect. Here was a man who spoke his mind to people raised to honor directness and honesty. They heard him out, regardless of not liking what he had to say. These were unsophisticated, country folk, but they knew books have covers, as easy to close as open.
Meanwhile, back at the library, a fine poetry collection went missing and may have been trashed. The censors had good intentions, trying to save the town from what they regarded as smut and fancy ideas. Their mistake was in believing books that challenge conventional mores have no place in a public library. Self-appointed judges of taste, they managed to insult the spirit behind the memorial to Tina, the work of fine poets and the tolerance of their own neighbors.
Not that it’ll happen, but varmints get run out of town on a rail for less.
—Photo cybrgrl/Flickr
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Hi Elliot. I’ve finished my story about Tina Sharts and will send you a copy if you give me your e-mail address. My old aol mailbox doesn’t work, so please make note of the new. I had fun doing research on the Boulder Library. Did you work at the building on Pine Street?
My best,
Tom Hallett