Books as Furniture

September 29, 2024 by James W. Gaynor

I’ve led much of my professional writing life under a range of akas, which encompass parallel identities as book reviewer, translator, erotica author, Regency Romance editor ( Midnight Miracle: A Regency Christmas Romantasy: Saint James, Nola: 9780997842869: Amazon.com: Books) and, under my legal name, poet. The various personas live, at times happily together, at times locked in strange sibling rivalry, for soon-to-be 45 years in an admittedly sparse NYC studio.

I’ve written on this site about how COVID and the related document-shredding led to my collection, I’ll Miss You Later. A side effect was the boxing of a lifetime of books, which were eventually supposed to find their way to thrift shops or recycling centers.

What actually happened

The boxes didn’t leave. Instead, they collaborated in the creation of a bench on which occasional visitors could sit (if, of course, they moved a few books), four nightstands of varying dimensions, and a version of a coffee table — on all of which now new books could be piled.

Which led me to thinking about books and their stories as furniture, particularly as I now have a towering assemblage of my latest book, Inappropriate Poems for Weddings + Funerals,  (40 Inappropriate Poems for Weddings + Funerals: Knowing what not to say is always a good first step: Gaynor, James W, Saint James, Nola: 9780997842876: Amazon.com: Books) on top of a pedestal made of three boxes of review copies marked “Cookbooks / Religion / Gilded-Age Biographies” (the latter a specialty for my androgenous alter ego, C. Schuyler Sedgewick).

Which, as it so happens in this environment, led me to writing poetry about the secret lives of furniture, which I’ve dedicated to a terrific neighbor with whom I exchange books (most recently, Edgar Keret’s The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God, Nancy Reich’s Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman, and Tom Gauld’s Baking with Kafka) (Links below)

                              Furniture Poems

[for Orli Shaham]

John Ashbery loved Erik Satie’s “Musique d’ameublement” — furniture music, which was written to be played between the acts of another work while people in the audience were milling around and talking to one another, so that they were only indirectly aware of the music. “It sometimes seems to me that my poetry is like that,” Ashbery remarked. “You don’t really have to pay that much attention to it — it’ll be doing its job if you’re just intermittently aware of it and thinking about other things at the same time.”