Philip Currie & The Power of Books

“I was only six years old when I ‘dug up’ my first dinosaur from the inside of a cereal box. The plastic model inspired my imagination in a powerful way that led to regular visits to the dinosaur galleries at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada. Several times a week, I would go to Sixteen Mile Creek near my home to scramble up and down the cliffs of Ordovician sediments, collecting marine invertebrate fossils while I fantasized about discovering dinosaurs. I read (and reread) every book that was available to me about any fossils from anywhere. After reading All About Dinosaurs by Roy Chapman Andrews when I was 11 years old, I knew that I wanted to be a dinosaur hunter. Such is the power of the written word.”

From that start, Philip Currie went on to help found the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, and is now a professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. He has worked extensively in China, and helped describe some of the first feathered dinosaurs. Philip is also the co-author of several books including The Flying Dinosaurs, and Dinosaur Provincial Park: A Spectacular Ancient Ecosystem Revealed.

And here’s the book and author that inspired Philip Currie. Roy Chapman Andrews (1884-1960) was best known for leading a series of expeditions to Mongolia and the Gobi Desert — bringing home the first-known fossil dinosaur eggs. Eventually Andrews became the director of the American Museum of Natural History. He was also a prolific author for both adults and children.

Chet Raymo & The Power of Books

Chet Raymo has long been a favorite of the Land Library. His writing offers a unique combination of science & spirituality — and what a beautiful writer! Here’s Chet Raymo on the roots of wonder:

“I have had occasion over the years to make reference to Dr. Suess, Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, Lewis Carrol’s Alice books, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Felix Salten’s Bambi, and other children’s books. In writing about science I have made reference to children’s books far more frequently than to adult literary works. This is not an accident. In children’s books we are at the roots of science — pure, childlike curiosity, eyes open with wonder to the fresh and new, and the powers of invention still unfettered by convention and expectation.”

Always in search of inspiration, the Land Library will continue to return to a central theme over the next few weeks: the intrinsic value of reading, the power of books, and those first moments — our childhood encounters with the printed page. Our continued source of inspiration for these posts will be Maria Tatar’s Enchanted Hunters: the Power of Stories in Childhood (pictured above), a wonderful blend of scholarly insight and personal memoir. Maria Tatar has also included an invaluable appendix which records writer’s recollections of how books changed their lives — writers such as Chet Raymo.

Next Week: Paleontologist Philip Currie and the Book that Shaped his Life

The Terribly Irresponsible Art of Poetry

Here’s our favorite new book at the Land Library — Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry, edited by Dorothea Lasky, Dominic Luxford, and Jesse Nathan. This is an inspiring mix of essays, interviews, and lessons plans on how we can share the joy of poetry with kids of all ages. The editors describe their intent in their introduction:
“A call to action for poets who want to teach poetry in their communities, Open the Door is also a practical guide for those interested in developing their pedagogical skills, or even in setting up community poetry programs of their own.”

Open the Door includes an invaluable roundtable discussion with leaders of grassroot poetry organizations across the country, including Bob Holman of the Bowery Poetry Club, Megan McNamer of the Missoula Writing Collaborative, and Dave Eggers of 826 National, a network of nonprofit writing and tutoring centers that help students age six through eighteen to improve their writing skills.

The essay portion of Open the Door provides a jolt of new approaches as well, from authors such as Kenneth Koch, Ron Padgett, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and a poet we wrote about just last month. We are still stuck on the wonderful words of William Stafford:

“Let’s face it, though — poetry will always be a wild animal. There is something about it that won’t yield to ordinary learning. When a poem catches you, it overwhelms, it surprises, it shakes you up. And often you can’t provide any usual explanation for its power.

For all of us in our careful role as educators, there is something humbling in the presence of the arts. There is no use thinking hard work and application and responsibility will capture poetry. It is something different. It cannot live in the atmosphere of competition, politics, business, advertising. Successful people cannot find poems. For you must kneel down and explore for them. They seep into the world all the time and lodge in odd corners almost anywhere, in your talk, in the conversation around you. They can be terribly irresponsible.” — William Stafford, from his essay The Door Called Poetry.

As the Land Library continues to plan for its urban learning center, Open the Door will remain close by. As will another idea-filled volume, Blueprints: Bringing Poetry into Communities, edited by Katharine Coles (also pictured above).

Zora Neale Hurston & The Power of Books

Inspired by books and stories, Zora Neale Hurston eventually found a way to stretch her limbs:

“In that box were Gulliver’s Travels, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Dick Whittington, Greek and Roman Myths, and best of all, Norse Tales. Why did the Norse tales strike so deeply into my soul? I do not know, but they did. I seemed to remember seeing Thor swing his mighty short-handled hammer as he spread across the sky in rumbling thunder, lightning flashing from the tread of his steeds and the wheels of his chariot….That held majesty for me….

In a way this early reading gave me great anguish through all my childhood and early adolescence. My soul was with the gods and my body in the village. People just would not act like gods. Stew beef, fried fat-back and morning grits were no ambrosia from Valhalla. Raking back yards and carrying out chamber pots were not the tasks of Thor. I wanted to be away from drabness and to stretch my limbs in some mighty struggle.”

Always in search of inspiration, the Land Library will continue to return to a central theme over the next few weeks: the intrinsic value of reading, the power of books, and those first moments — our childhood encounters with the printed page. Our continued source of inspiration for these posts will be Maria Tatar’s Enchanted Hunters: the Power of Stories in Childhood (pictured above), a wonderful blend of scholarly insight and personal memoir. Maria Tatar has also included an invaluable appendix which records writer’s recollections of how books changed their lives — writers such as Zora Neale Hurston.

Next Week — Chet Raymo & the Roots of Wonder

Dusty, Dull Books on a Land Library Shelf

Why did this book become the Land Library’s page-by-page preoccupation over the past week? It’s title might seem a bit dull: Fodder and Pasture Plants, written by George H. Clark and M. Oscar Malte, and published in 1913 by the Department of Agriculture, Canada.

But here is where our reading experience changed. Our sense of touch was engaged first. The 100-year old cloth cover gave us a tactile pleasure that no modern dust jacket can provide. As we delved into the text, there was much to learn from Clarke and Malte’s complete botanical description of each plant, unexpectedly enlivened by occasional quotes from the likes of Xenophon, Pliny, Virgil, Chaucer, and Shakespeare!

Books are built of chapters and parts. Here’s the part we love best from our century-old copy of Fodder and Pasture Plants: more than 25 full-color plates, from the brush of Norman Criddle. Here’s just two of Criddle’s beautiful depictions:

“Brome grass is extensively grown in Hungary, where the climate is much like that of the Canadian West…“

“Red Top is indigenous to all European countries, Northern Africa, North and Central Asia, and North America.“

from the preface:

“It is, therefore, the purpose of this book to provide, in a form convenient for reference, fairly comprehensible information about those grasses, clovers, and other fodder and pasture plants that are generally to be of value in Canada.“

Yes — and maybe something more!

Our thanks goes to the folks at Small Farmer’s Journal. Their recent feature led us to the Land Library’s most recent acquisition — Clarke & Malte’s Fodder and Pasture Plants!

Mean Poets and Calm Cattle

“If you got to talking to most cowboys, they’d admit they write ‘em. I think some of the meanest, toughest sons of bitches around write poetry.” — Ross Knox

In 1908, a local rancher walked into the Estancia, New Mexico newspaper office, and inquired about printing a small book of cowboy songs he had been working on. For almost twenty years, Jack Thorp gathered cowboy ballads and poems from across the west. The finished volume was printed for just six cents a copy, and was the first book exclusively devoted to cowboy songs. Not only that, but Thorp is recognized as the first person to preserve the ballads sung by ranchers to calm cattle on the range. Western historian Mark Gardner has written a wonderful essay to accompany this new edition of Jack Thorp’s Songs of the Cowboys, which includes a CD selection from the songs Thorp has kept alive.

also pictured above: Cowboy Songs, Ballads, and Cattle Calls from Texas, a Library of Congress CD, featuring field recordings made by John A. Lomax.

And, to put a Western twist on National Poetry Month, here’s a few more books & CD’s from the Land Library’s Western Folklore collection:

Elko! A Cowboy Gathering (a CD from the 20th Annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada), Cowboy Poets & Cowboy Poetry, edited by David Stanley & Elaine Thatcher, Cowboy Poetry Classics (a CD of a Smithsonian Folkways recording)

Cowboy Poetry: The Reunion, edited by Virginia Bennett, Home on the Range: John A. Lomax & his Cowboy Songs by Deborah Hopkinson & S.D. Schindler (from our Waterton Canyon Kids Library), Graining the Mare: The Poetry of Ranch Women, edited by Teresa Jordan

The Poetry of Birds & The Legend of Pale Male

Thanks to the generosity (and imagination!) of a Land Library supporter, a few times each year we receive a shipment from an English bookseller. As you can imagine, we’re always excited to open a well-traveled box of new and used books, containing treasures we have never before seen, this side of the Atlantic.

In the middle of National Poetry Month, we wanted to sing the praises of one very special book from the UK — The Poetry of Birds, edited by Simon Armitage and Tim Dee. What a wonderful anthology!

The editors have arranged their collection by bird type, not poet. There’s Sylvia Plath on the shrike, Elizabeth Bishop on the sandpiper, Robinson Jeffers on hawks, John Ashberry on orioles, W.S. Merwin on crows, Edward Thomas on lapwings, Kathleen Jamie on the dipper, and Wallace Stevens on the red-winged blackbird. There’s certainly a wide range of birds written about in this 384-page collection, and just of few of the other featured poets include Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Charles Simic, Marianne Moore, Paul Muldoon, Alice Oswald, John Clare, Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and many, many more.

Here’s a very fun link to The Guardian, which lists Simon Armitage and Tim Dee’s Top 10 Bird Poems, starting with Gerard Manley Hopkins’ The Windhover: ” a poem that enacts as well as describes, as if Hopkins were channelling a kestrel hovering 100 feet up in the wind; it is mind-blowing no matter how many times you read it.“

And for all you bird-lovers out there — and come to think of it — all you poetry-lovers, now’s the time to get your tickets for the Colorado premiere of the award-winning film, The Legend of Pale Male!

The Land Library is proud to be a co-sponsor of this benefit screening for The Bloomsbury Review, a national literary treasure that has been celebrating and promoting great writing since 1980. We’ll be celebrating two legends that night — The Bloomsbury Review, as it launches into its next chapter, and Pale Male, the famous red-tailed hawk of Central Park, now courting his eighth mate somewhere over midtown Manhattan!

WHEN & WHERE: Saturday, April 27th, 6:30pm at Denver’s Montview Presbyterian Church

For more information on the April 27th premiere, call 303-455-3123, or 800-783-3338, or visit The Bloomsbury Review website!

We hope you enjoy this inspiring film clip!