Caveat Emptor
January 23, 2013 | by Jason Novak
I was at Moe’s Books in Berkeley looking for material on seventeenth-century shape poems with my not-yet-two-year-old daughter when a wizened man with mutton chops spotted me reshelving the books she was piling in the corner.
“What are you looking for?” he asked.
I quickly learned that he’d spent his entire scholarly life immersed in the study of shape poems. Moe’s must be rich with encounters like this; it’s a four-story bookstore just three blocks from the University of California, Berkeley campus.
He told me about a contemporaneous vogue for something called emblem books. Perhaps the best known emblem book is Hans Holbein the Younger’s beautifully decorated The Dance of Death, in which woodcuts of various scenes and settings depict a skeleton reminding us of time’s wicked work on our health and aspirations. Beneath each woodcut is an epigram in verse. The best-known English practitioners of emblem books, Francis Quarles and George Wither, are hardly known at all, possibly because it’s hard to anthologize poems that are incomplete without an accompanying picture.
One of the themes that seems to be strong in all emblem books is secrecy. The emblems are rarely straightforward and often look more like Masonic devices than illustrations. With that in mind, I decided to try my hand at an emblem poem, drawing from my own experiences.
For the past few years, leading up to the birth of my daughter, I have spent five mornings out of the week standing in a small walk-in freezer, unloading and organizing food products. Before that, I was a fishmonger in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve often stopped to muse, as I unload packages of frozen Pacific cod and salmon pieces, on the sad tomb these fish have arrived at after their monumental struggle against the open ocean. In a way, it also helps cast my new role as a parent, no longer at loose in the northern wilds among freshly caught whole fish, but in the quiet domesticity of an environmentally controlled storehouse with processed blocks of bland, solid-colored cubes of once wild animals.
I take solace in the discovery that my daughter appears to be at least as feral as anything stalking through the Columbia Gorge.
Jason Novak works at a grocery store in Berkeley, California, and changes diapers in his spare time.
CDarcy | January 23, 2013 at 1:19 pm
Trader Joe’s? I spent many an hour slinging boxes, pondering life outside the -10 freezer. This poem puts it in words more poetic than ever I came up with.
GZ | January 23, 2013 at 2:14 pm
A chimeric triptych composed of poem, emblem and explanatory anecdote, none of which would be as strong if separated. The content is interesting too.
JMcA | January 24, 2013 at 6:13 am
292. The Study in Aesthetics
By Ezra Pound
THE VERY small children in patched clothing,
Being smitten with an unusual wisdom,
Stopped in their play as she passed them
And cried up from their cobbles:
Guarda! Ahi, guarda! ch’e b’ea! 5
But three years after this
I heard the young Dante, whose last name I do not know—
For there are, in Sirmione, twenty-eight young Dantes and thirty-four Catulli;
And there had been a great catch of sardines,
And his elders 10
Were packing them in the great wooden boxes
For the market in Brescia, and he
Leapt about, snatching at the bright fish
And getting in both of their ways;
And in vain they commanded him to sta fermo! 15
And when they would not let him arrange
The fish in the boxes
He stroked those which were already arranged,
Murmuring for his own satisfaction
This identical phrase: 20
Ch’e b’ea.
And at this I was mildly abashed.
Bob Lince | January 24, 2013 at 12:33 pm
I thought Moe’s closed a long time ago. Is there still a Shakespear & Co. across the street?