Sylvia Beach
An appreciation of literature and writers with poems by Mark Brooks, Judy Ireland, Florence Weinberger, and Bonnie Naradzay.
TRANSCRIPT
Sylvia Beach was born March 14, 1887 in Baltimore and moved to Paris with her family when she was a teenager. She went back and forth between the US and Paris over the next few years, moved there permanently in 1916, and opened a bookstore and lending library named Shakespeare and Company. People that hung out there apparently included Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and—oh yeah—James Joyce. In fact, Shakespeare and Company published the first edition of Joyce’s book Ulysses.
Since so many major writers spent time at Sylvia Beach’s store, this week’s episode of Burning Bright will feature some pieces about appreciation of literature and writers.
Mark Brooks said that his poem “To Be a Romantic” reflects on the difficulties he had growing up with undiagnosed dyslexia. He said, “While I loved stories, the challenges I had reading, spelling, and writing only frustrated me. Looking back to my childhood and into my teens I would consider myself a dreamy romantic, but I was limited by my abilities. Older now, I have a new chance to express and grow those aspirations.” Here’s Mark’s poem.
I will be a Romantic,
no said the herd.
Love and Romance read like a dream.
Dream I did,
but the world said no.
Pip and Estella drew me in,
but no said the words.
The words betrayed me, they jumped
and reversed across the page.
You can not spell, you can
not read.
You can be sure we will tell!
It has been said, beauty and romance
are what we live for.
I believe it is true, even now
as the shadows start to grow.
Now I know the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
I will be a Romantic once more!
From Passager’s 2023 Poetry Contest issue, Mark Brooks’s poem “To Be a Romantic.”
Judy Ireland said she admired Amy Lowell’s defiance, symbolized by her cigar smoking. Judy said, “I admired her poems, her ability to keep writing and publishing despite criticism, and her quiet but firm insistence on living life as a lesbian. I hope I am as dedicated to my work as she was to hers.” Here’s Judy’s poem “Self-Portrait with Amy Lowell’s Cigar.”
I think of Amy often, how Ezra Pound took his pound of flesh
accusing her of ruining an entire poetry movement.
I’ve always liked the smell of cigars, and I like even more
a woman who smokes one
after writing the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Amy’s cigars were black, wrapped in leaves fermented and
roasted to make the flavor
robust like her words. Her lover’s words, in the dark, were
brighter than fireflies.
I imagine Amy standing in the shadow of a porch, the end
of her cigar glowing.
A small light. Just enough, for someone to see their way
through the garden at night.
“Self-Portrait with Amy Lowell’s Cigar,” Judy Ireland from Passager’s 2025 Poetry Contest Issue.
Also from the 2025 Passager Poetry Contest issue, “On the Way to Flannery O’Connor’s Final Home” by Florence Weinberger.
I stopped first at her Savannah birthplace,
where a docent slick with anecdote showed me
the toilet and tub she filled with flowers, a notion odd enough
to scare off her childhood friends.
The picture postcard I bought, a seated child
immersed in a book, mouth set, spirit wandering, prepared me
for Andalusia, where she dressed her hen in white piqué,
taught it to walk backwards.
A house fronted by a flight of stairs, stairs inside
she didn’t need to climb, the room she slept and wrote in just off
the entrance. Spotting her typewriter,
I thought of Wordsworth’s desk at Dove Cottage, which I touched
as if fingertips could suck up the winds and attributes of Grasmere,
and kept myself distant from the pair of crutches leaning on
a chest within reach of her chair. They chilled me more than
the wild miscalculations her characters made, violent trajectories
of lives she would not let them escape.
Florence Weinberger, “On the Way to Flannery O’Connor’s Final Home.”
Finally, from Passager’s 2016 Poetry Contest issue, “Reading Dante,” Bonnie Naradzay.
Unable to discern my way through the darkling woods
(how do you even know you’re lost), lured by ancient
travelers, I’m reading The Inferno, imagining Virgil
at my side. I knit my brows the way old tailors do
when bending over threaded needles in the gloom
and read this marked-up copy, my daughter’s text
from high school days, gleaning what she underlined.
I find her penciled comment – “the journey’s
universal.” Later she writes, “What you don’t see
is often more important than what you see.”
And then I see Ulysses in the flames and read
where Virgil intercedes, telling Dante not to speak,
since Homer’s Odysseus speaks classical Greek.
Why does his restless search enthrall me so? Ovid,
himself an exile, seized on what Tiresias foretold,
while Dante continued the story where Ovid ceased,
after Ulysses set out to sea. Who guides a pilgrim
to the good, and what’s the way to virtue and wisdom?
Ulysses heads for the sun as it sinks in the west. I still
mourn his ending. In Auschwitz, Primo Levi speaks
to his friend Pikito about The Inferno and struggles to recall
the lines he learned in school – Ulysses’s finest speech –
when the aging king exhorts his men to take the oars again.
“Listen,” says Levi, in a terrible hurry to deliver the soup
– cabbage and turnips – that day. Feeling the sea close
over his head, Levi reaches the Pillars of Wisdom and quotes,
For you were not formed to live the life of brutes.
“Reading Dante,” Bonnie Naradzay. Bonnie said she wrote the poem in three-line stanzas to mirror Dante’s form.
This episode about writers and literature has been in celebration of Sylvia Beach’s birthday. Here’s what Ernest Hemingway said about her in his book A Moveable Feast: “She had a lively, sharply sculptured face, brown eyes that were as alive as a small animal’s and as gay as a young girl’s, and wavy brown hair that was brushed back from her fine forehead and cut thick below her ears and at the line of the collar of the brown velvet jacket she wore. She had pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.”
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For Christine, Rosanne, Mary, Asher, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.
Due to the limitations of online publishing, poems may not appear in their original formatting.
