Shelf Esteem is a weekly measure of the books on the shelves of writers, editors, and other word lovers, as told to Emily M. Keeler. This week’s shelf belongs to Michael Lista, who is the poetry editor of the Walrus, a poetry columnist at the National Post, and the author of Bloom, a book of poems about Canadian Manhattan Project physicist Louis Slotin. His shelves are at the literal centre of his home, a loft in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood, where Lista has lived for four months. All sight lines in the space extend toward his enviable library, which was lit beautifully by the afternoon sunlight on the day I visited.
My old place, I was there for three years. I had a bunch of random bookshelves, and the books got out of control. It was sort of like Hoarders-esque. It was really, really bad. Like, everywhere towering fucking stacks. So when I moved in here I got my sister’s boyfriend, who’s a carpenter, to build these shelves. And I got in touch with Carey Toane [a poet and librarian], I knew that she had gone through library studies, and I asked her if she knew anyone who wasn’t working and might be interested in organizing my bookshelves. So she put something on Facebook, and like five minutes later this woman, Elizabeth Ellie McAlpine, got back.
That’s why I’m attracted to poetry. I’m not interested in this—you have such a little chance of having your work be read and understood if you’re producing at that length. A poem, if you do it right, if you can have a poem that not only is a great little vehicle for traveling through time, but it can also do a lot of the same things that this does, just much shorter. And so as you get closer and closer to that ideal, you also limit the chances that you’re ever going to reproduce it, and have the joy that comes from it, ever again. You reach this finite point, where you’re doing exactly what you want to do, but the closer you get to it, the more danger you put your future self in of not being able to do it again.
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Shelf Esteem appears every Tuesday
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