'New to Your Shelves'

“I still enjoy the history and other lectures here and keep  up with a great deal of reading--mostly history. I don't read a lot of fiction, except re-reading the best--currently Jane Austen. Movies I avoid, although Spielberg's Lincoln was an exception and was worth the effort, as was The King's Speech.” 

An email from the poet and scholar Helen Pinkerton (Trimpi) was always an unexpected gift. Not so much the note itself, as we regularly corresponded for years, but learning what Helen was reading, writing and thinking about. Hers was the least passive mind I’ve ever encountered. She sent the email excerpted above eight years ago, on August 8, 2013. Helen was eighty-six and would publish A Journey of the Mind: Collected Poems of Helen Pinkerton 1945-2016 (Wiseblood Books) three years later. She died on December 28, 2017.

 

Gift-giving seems to run in the family. One of Helen’s daughters, Erica Light, has sent me another box of books from her mother’s library. Last week she wrote:

 

“I have found that exploring my mother’s books is not to be done lightly or in haste. It is a constant joy and often leads me off into the unknown. Happily there are also extra copies for sharing, and so I have sent off another box to you which includes mostly Yvor Winters, Janet Lewis and the Stanford school of poets. I hope there are some among them that will be new to your shelves.”

 

There are:

 

Helen Pinkerton: Poems 1946-1976, Goodman Gybbe, 1984.

 

J.V. Cunningham: The Judge is Fury, Swallow Press/ William Morrow and Company, 1947.

 

Cunningham: The Journal of John Cardan (Together with The Quest of the Opal and The Problem of Form), Alan Swallow, 1964.

 

Cunningham: Let Your Words Be Few, Symposium Press, 1986.

 

Edgar Bowers: Thirteen Views of Santa Barbara, Occasional Works, 1989.

 

Bowers: Witnesses, Symposium Press, 1981 (inscribed by Bowers: “For Helen and Wes [Trimpi], finally, Edgar).”

 

Bowers: Chaco Canyon, n.p. [Los Angeles:] [The Symposium Press,] n.d. [1988].

 

Turner Cassity: The Defense of the Sugar Islands, Symposium Press, 1979.

 

Charles Gullans: Many Houses, Symposium Press, 1981 (signed by Gullans).

 

Timothy Steele: The Prudent Heart, Symposium Press, 1983 (signed by Steele).

 

R.L. Barth: Nine Years After: A Retrospective Anthology, Robert L. Barth, 1989.

 

Janet Lewis and Malcom Seagrave: The Birthday of the Infanta (an opera in one act based upon a tale by Oscar Wilde), Symposium Press, 1979.  

 

These books constitute a core sample of some of the finest American poetry of the twentieth century. Erica also sent assorted chapbooks, pamphlets, cards and journal reprints by some of the same writers and their literary offspring. Of note is the Winter 1961 issue of Sequoia, the Stanford literary magazine, devoted to Yvor Winters, who taught most of them at Stanford. Included is a review by Winters of Helen’s first collection, Error Pursued, published in 1959. He says her poems “are among the best I know” and continues:

 

“Very few poets write more than a few first-rate poems; most poets publish more than they should. Mrs. Trimpi is doubly fortunate.”