1978, the poet Frank Stanford shot himself three times in the heart. His second wife and his lover were in the next room.

During his lifetime, Stanford’s poetry never found a broad audience. The rare and worn copies of his published works were passed poet to poet. His short, autobiographical film, It Wasn’t a Dream, It Was A Flood has never been digitized.

What About This is the first collection of Stanford’s published and unpublished work in one volume. It is important not just for readers already familiar with Stanford’s poetry, but for the rest of us who have never seen our South with such a sharp eye nor heard it recorded by a pitch-perfect ear. His poems are pinched from the world around him, changed just enough that the lines are both familiar and strange.

Born in Richton, Mississippi, Stanford lived in an orphanage until Dorothy Gilbert Alter, a single mother, adopted him. In 1952 she married Albert Franklin Stanford, a levee engineer from Memphis and shortly afterward, the family moved to Arkansas. Showing poetic promise, Stanford was asked to enroll in graduate level courses in creative writing as an undergraduate student. But he never finished college.

It is easy for the exploits of a poet’s life and death to overshadow their work. The life and death of Frank Stanford is no exception. His self-destruction hums on every page. Death stalks his lines:

I am not asleep, but I see

a limb, the fingers of death, the ghost

of an anonymous painter

leaving the prints of death

on the wall… –from the “Transcendence of Janus”

Frank Stanford is a disguised intellectual. He is among us when we are knee-deep in mud and grass, he sits beside us on the front porch and cracks one open, he’s in the hot summer nights and the still air, and he watches as nothing much happens except the slow close of day. He sifts the banality of the every-day for poems that are more then they are.

His poems wade through dreams and reality. They are a surrealist vision of the muck and grime of life. Of the workingman. Of juke joints and women and rivers that govern the pace of living.

Throughout the collection, Stanford appropriates from Southern heritage. Jimmie Rodger’s Blue Yodel’s are reimagined into ballads of the hard life. In “Blue Yodel a Prairie,” Stanford captures the spirit of Jimmie Roger’s down-and-out songs, but with a poet’s sensibility toward images heavy with meaning:

Whenever I think of the shadows

Two oranges cast on the piano

When the sun drives a horse mad in a dry spell

I think of Virginia Day

Hanging up sheets in her backyard

She has a pair of blue jeans and a brassiere on

Holding the prairie

With a clothespin in her lips

A 20^th century Walt Whitman, Frank Stanford sings of the South. In a place overflowing with literary voices, Stanford holds his own alongside James Dickey and Faulkner. He is a troubadour of the Mississippi Delta.

Nearly forty-years after his death, Stanford’s poetry is still a poignant and accurate depiction of the South. Our traditions hold us close to the ground. Our rivers roar and crawl, they overrun their banks and seep into the earth, but we keep a record; we remember our past.

So have respect for the dead my dear

And watch your heart like a jukebox. –from “The Visitors of Night”

Hear, hear! Lemuria is fully behind making Jackson the best, most awesome city in the state. Let’s get moving.

Written by Jimmie Gates for the Clarion-Ledger on Saturday, May 2 2015.

It’s time to get moving on spending the $12 million in the 1 percent sales tax fund to make Jackson better.

Mayor Tony Yarber said he will present the city’s infrastructure master plan next week to the 10-member committee that he serves on to gain approval for spending some of the money.

Voters approved the 1 percent sales tax increase in January 2014 to pay for infrastructure improvements.

Only projects listed in the city’s infrastructure master plan can receive funds generated by the special tax, based upon the legislation which created the commission.

The commission first met in September. Seven months later, it will finally have an opportunity to vote on how the money should be spent.

The infrastructure master plan includes both short-term and long-term projects. It calls for spending up to $50 million on streets and other infrastructure projects the first year.

The 1 percent sales tax increase is projected to bring in about $13 million a year. The city will have to find additional money for infrastructure needs to go with the sales tax money.

Some City Council members are urging that the sales tax increase money be used now to help stabilize the city because of a crisis situation with pothole-filled streets causing hazards for motorists.

Councilwoman Margaret Barrett-Simon said she fears someone could be injured because of the deplorable condition of city streets.

Jackson is our capital city and deserves to be our jewel. We need good streets, good infrastructure and people willing to work together to make this city what it should be: a showcase for the state.

I know it’s easy to be critical of Jackson, and we should hold our officials accountable for the job they are doing, but we have a responsibility to help make our city better. It represents us, and it represents our state.

Citizens have to do their part. Stop trashing your city. I see too often people throwing trash out of vehicle windows, trash littering streets. Also, Jackson has a crime problem that citizens need to help police to tackle. Police can only do so much to curb crime. When you see criminal activity, make sure you let authorities know about it.

I see potential in this city. Jackson is the main city in the metro area. The capital city can’t and shouldn’t be isolated. As goes Jackson, so goes the entire metro area.

Metro-area mayors should be working together to make this a vibrant metropolitan area.

It does no good for those in surrounding communities to denigrate Jackson, and it does no good for Jackson residents and officials to castigate those living in surrounding communities. It’s time to improve Jackson and to make this a truly vibrant metro area for all to enjoy.

Contact Jimmie E. Gates at (601) 961-7212 or jgates@jackson.gannett.com. Follow @jgatesnews on Twitter.

Three hundred and fifty independent bookstores across America celebrate their tenacity and appreciation for their customers on Saturday, May 2—including Mississippi Independent Bookstores. National Independent Bookstore was inspired by California’s first Independent Bookstore Day in 2014 which was celebrated by an impressive 93 California bookstores.

One of the most legendary bookstores in California is City Lights in San Francisco, opened in 1953 by poet and activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter Martin, a sociology student and publisher of a magazine called City Lights. Martin’s idea was to open a quality paperback bookshop. At that time, paperbacks were sold at newsstands and little thought was given to the impact a small, cheap book could make.

A couple of years after their shop opened, Ferlinghetti heard the first public reading of “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg at the 6 Gallery. The poem opens:

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.”

Ferlinghetti had started a series of books called City Lights Pocket Poets Series and he famously sent Ginsberg a telegram after hearing Ginsberg read “Howl”:

“I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?”

“Howl and Other Poems” became Number Four in Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Pocket Poets Series, but hundreds of copies of the book were seized by U.S. Customs officials and Ferlinghetti was charged with obscenity. The charges were later dropped when Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the poem had redeeming social importance.

Through Ferlinghetti’s bookstore, his own poetry, the publication of “Howl”–which set precedence for the freedom to publish controversial literary works of redeeming social importance, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, now 96-years-old, embodies everything an independent bookstore and its booksellers could ever wish to be.

Ferlinghetti wrote dozens of poetry books, including America’s most popular selling book of poetry, A Coney Island of the Mind. Over the years, the poet has signed paperbacks of his poetry for fans who have visited City Lights bookstore. For serious collectors, Ferlinghetti’s books issued as signed limited editions will have lasting value and beauty.

Written by Kirby Arinder

1. Preamble

The assignment is to write “a couple of paragraphs” on why Lemuria is important to me. A fish, evidently, told me to do it, so I have to, obviously.

But I don’t think it’s enough, or it’s too much, depending on how you look at it; the content is too much for the space. So I’m going to try to allude and elide my way toward something that points vaguely in the direction of my goal and hope that satisfies our piscine overlords, while admitting that it’s going to both regrettably exceed the space requirements and still not actually adequately cover the points required. The worst of both worlds, but we don’t really get to choose our world, do we?

So in a spirit of deconstruction or self-criticism or just perverseness, let me start by talking about some pitfalls I think this sort of essay should avoid, things I can’t or shouldn’t do that I might find myself trying to do anyway. (And then there would be some sort of blog disaster; performative self-contradiction on the Internet leads, I’m told, to explosion.)

1. What love has to do with it (spoiler: Something, but not enough)

So, first, I don’t really think this should be a piece about why I love Lemuria. It’s tempting to try to say something about that. I mean, it really is my favorite place in town, and I go there when I’m sad to cheer myself up and I go there when I’m happy to reward myself. (When I say it that way, in hard public print, I just sound to myself like an addict more than anything else. But I digress.)

So why not an essay about loving Lemuria? Well, because love is idiosyncratic and ineffable and particular. Which is to say, your love may have causes but it doesn’t really have reasons; and in the absence of reasons, it can’t really GIVE reasons to anybody else; and I think this essay should have at least a tinge of normative character to it, because I’m not just setting out to say that Lemuria is good TO ME, but that Lemuria is good simpliciter, that you yourself, nameless and unknown reader of these words, probably ought to find it valuable too.

(Let me digress again, just enough for an example for clarification. When you love a person, obviously enough, even though that person may have a number of good qualities — and surely does, because he or she caught your eye and engaged your mind in some fashion — eventually, once you really LOVE that person, it’s not because of those qualities.

Imagine that a brimstone-smelling, suspiciously fork-bearded character offers to replace your beloved with an exact duplicate. Maybe he adds a little worldly wealth, just to sweeten the deal. I suspect I’d refuse, and I suspect you would too; the fact that this new person shares many good traits with your beloved doesn’t mean he or she IS your beloved, and it’s just not the same.

You love the haecceity, your beloved as him- or her-self, not as a collection of properties. (Not to get medieval on your ass, which suddenly occurs to me as a much more charming interpretation of Marsellus Wallace’s threat in Pulp Fiction.  Maybe he took his assailants away and had his hirelings discuss scholastic philosophy with them. But now this is a digression from a digression, and a much more sharply angled one.  Back to the point.)

Furthermore, and along the same lines, the fact that your beloved has a lot of good traits, and even that I can perfectly well see many if not all of those good traits, doesn’t actually give ME reason to love that same person. I can agree with you that someone is lovable without actually loving that person.

(Subdigression: The above points apply to things and places as well as people. If the cloven-hoofed gentleman above offered to replace your favorite shirt, the one you wore on that one perfect night that stands out in your memory as a time when the world felt in balance and hope seemed not merely permissible but rationally mandatory, with an exact duplicate, you’d probably refuse that deal too, though obviously the stakes aren’t as high. The new shirt wouldn’t be THAT shirt; it wouldn’t have the history, the essence.  And if YOU were offered a choice between my favorite shirt and an exact duplicate, in the absence of my standing there saying, “hey, don’t take my shirt,” it ought to be a matter of complete indifference to you which is which.)

Oh, and this sentence is just to end the big digression without using two parentheses in a row.)

(Okay, one more digression: I suddenly realize I just spent eight paragraphs saying, “I love a thing, and don’t want to talk about it.” From a detached perspective, this probably doesn’t indicate maximal emotional health. Not that it’s relevant, but it’s interesting.)

III.  Beauty and Truth: Not all ye need to know

Anyway. This shouldn’t be an essay about why I love Lemuria, even though that’s one of the first places my mind went when I saw the fishy communique.

But then, it also shouldn’t really be an essay about all the good things Lemuria represents to me, though it does represent many good things. I said earlier that I wanted to have a little normative character to this essay, to give you the reader reason to approve of Lemuria. So it’s tempting to move all the way from the particular — my love of the place — to the universal — why Truth and Beauty and Books are important things.  But I’m not sure that’s quite right either.

I mean, look, Truth and Beauty are important. (I’ll talk about Books in a bit.) We live in a world in which they’re undervalued, and I don’t just mean Deplorable Postmodernity and This Darn Internet Age; let’s face it, Socrates lamented that new-fangled technology (i.e., literacy) was ruining kids’ minds and that the popular intellectuals valued winning arguments and gaining political power more than they valued finding the truth, and that was two and a half millennia ago.  Plus ca change and all that.

In the ordinary course of things I think we all tend to undervalue Truth and Beauty, and maybe it’s because we just have to spend so much effort staying alive — avoiding sabertoothed tigers and the bubonic plague, passing on our genes, contributing to the global economy, et cetera — that out of sheer exhausted necessity we tend to narrow our focus to the goals that are important in the now, for immediate survival and putting bread on the table.

But it’s more broadly important for a wide variety of reasons — which I’m going to stay away from, because good gracious, this essay burst right past “a couple of paragraphs” some time ago, and the fish-lords are already probably unhappy — to reconnect with those things. To remind ourselves that some meaning and value are out there to be found, that survival, whether it means hitting the tiger with the rock or rationally maximizing expected life utility measured in U. S. dollars, isn’t the only or even the most important aspect of sapient existence.

And one of the best ways, I think, to connect with these things is to read (pace Socrates, above). And Lemuria is a great starting point for this sort of thing, pretty clearly. I mean, duh. Bookstore.

But as important as these things are — and I think if you’re reading this you probably agree that they are, and even if you don’t I think I could make an argument that you should, given world enough and time — I don’t think talking about them really captures what this essay should be about either.

Grand universal claims may well have a hold on us the way that somebody else’s love doesn’t. But if the previous section of this essay undershot, not giving the reader enough reason to care, maybe this section overshoots.

Because Lemuria may be a place where you can (and I do) go to connect with the eternal verities, to remind myself that human beings can be humane and that the world contains beautiful elements even if I haven’t seen them that day and that there are always more complexities to discover and that practically anything, anything whatsoever, is really interesting if you look at it hard enough.

But if Lemuria takes me to those verities, it isn’t the SAME as those verities, and describing the destination is really not the same as describing the means of arriving there. I mean, look, terrifying as the prospect might be, you can buy great books on the Internet; you might even avoid buying books at all, and just read on a screen or something, though I deeply distrust such an idea and am privately convinced it leads to moral turpitude and probably scrofula or something.

So I don’t want to talk about Truth and Beauty either. He says, nine more paragraphs later.

1. The Middle Way

So, then, let’s get to the point. What’s so good about Lemuria, in particular, such that I think it’s genuinely valuable for itself and not merely as a fungible ladder to Great Books bearing Universal Truths, such that I think not only that it’s lovable but also that if you got to know it you’d love it too, assuming, Dear Reader, that you haven’t and don’t already?

Well… maybe it’s this. Lemuria strikes me as a place that’s built around a recognition of the intrinsic value of what it does. I mean, there are all kinds of reasons that you could get into selling books. Some online businesses we won’t mention here started out selling books just because of their physical properties, because they’re easy to ship and store and hard to damage. To a business like this, in other words, books represent not so much things in themselves as abstract widgets that happen to have desirable characteristics when incorporated into a particular business model.

But that’s just treating books as another mechanism for survival, for bashing the tiger and maximizing the dollars. It’s taking a class of objects that can be a gateway to all the great things I mentioned in the previous section and treating them, if I may be permitted to misuse Kant shortly after having complained about such a thing, below their intrinsic dignity, or at least below the dignity of their contents. It’s deliberately commodifying, in a strong sense and not in the trivial way all stores “commodify” the things they sell, some of the greatest achievements of the human species.

But Lemuria isn’t like that. It’s a place built around the idea that a bookstore sells books, and not coffee and toys. It’s a place built around the acquisition of books that are interesting and worthwhile, not to the exclusion of popularity, but in addition to it, a place that recognizes that a facsimile edition of Jung’s Red Book is important to have even if it doesn’t fly off the shelves.

It’s a place where the employees are readers before they are retail specialists, where they can be relied upon to have genuine opinions and tastes not formed by demographic trends. It’s a place where the — for me — increasingly rare and utterly irreplaceable experience of bookstore serendipity is reliable enough that I don’t have to go there with a particular acquisition in mind; I can search a section of the shelf that I generally like and find a book that’s interesting and new to me, because the shelves aren’t filled with a thousand copies of some book selected by a poorly-designed sales-optimization algorithm. (Which I say with the greatest respect for statistical algorithms, believe me, but they’re also easy to screw up, and the ones designed to predict book tastes for purposes of shelf-stocking screw up practically ALL THE TIME.)

I guess if I have to summarize, to present a thesis, as it were, before my aquatic masters, it’s this: Lemuria is a particular place that recognizes the transcendent values available through books. As such, it’s particularly valuable, separate from and in addition to the books it sells. If we just think to ourselves, “Plato will always be there on the Internet,” we’re just about guaranteeing that we relegate him to that virtual place’s dusty corners. And if we do that, we are making the world a worse place, one in which it’s ever harder to even imagine doing something more than hitting tigers and making dollars.

But if we value those places and people that themselves value things beyond the dollar and the dead tiger, then we are helping to make the world a place where, just maybe, more people have a chance to think more often about the things that genuinely matter.

And surely — I speculate, Dear Reader, because I can’t really know you in this respect — the kind of place that values those things and furthers those values in the world is the kind of place with which you could fall in love.

Written by Steve Yates

Saturday, May 2 is Independent Bookstore Day all across America.

Independent bookstores, including Jackson’s Lemuria Books, are inviting rank amateurs, such as me, onto the sales floor to work part of Saturday as Guest Booksellers in violation of almost every accepted business principle I know.

Imagine being greeted at your local law firm by a Guest Attorney. After all, President Dwight David Eisenhower did declare May 1 Law Day, so why not? “Hi, I’m Steve Yates, your Guest Attorney. You look like you’re really into estate planning? Great! Let’s light in here with Charles Dickens and Bleak House.”

Or imagine sitting down Saturday in confessional, and instead of Father Jerry, you are welcomed to the Solemn Rite of Reconciliation with, “Hey! I’m Steve Yates, your Guest Priest. Why so contrite? Look here, let’s read us some Gerard Manley Hopkins and get some perspective. Or check out the new Collected Frank Stanford—now that guy knew what was coming for all of us!”

With so many guests running around, I’m pretty sure the authors of The New Rules of Retail: Competing in the World’s Toughest Marketplace would say, “You have lost all control of your value chain.”

But, you see, anything can happen at an independent bookstore. The value in an independent bookstore isn’t just the shelves and all those whispering spines and enticing covers. The reading community that gathers there, that’s the preemptive, experiential, demand driven “thing” about Lemuria. That reading community is the reason you should come on in Saturday.

Where else could you meet Matthew Guinn and get to participate in his incredible story. And at any good book signing, you are going to see Marshall Ramsey, Rick Cleveland, Billy Watkins, Gerard Helferich, Teresa Nicholas, Carolyn Brown, Patti Carr Black, Alan Huffman, Diane Williams, Ed King, and so many other authors from our community with wonderful books. You can meet more authors in one good night at Lemuria than you will in a whole year at an MFA creative writing program.

But I’m not being entirely fair to Lemuria and its calculated business decision to allow me and other authors to join you in commerce. Lemuria has supported me through two novels—Morkan’s Quarry and now its sequel The Teeth of the Souls—and the Juniper Prize-winning short story collection, Some Kinds of Love. And in fact, The Teeth of the Souls would have perished in the dustbin had it not been for the close reading and tough love of Matthew Guinn and Paul Rankin, both of whom I met at readings by other authors at Lemuria. And Lemuria welcomes me all the time as the assistant director/marketing director of University Press of Mississippi. I may not be able to help you with estate planning or with your immortal soul, but I will know where some of the good books are shelved. And heck, I bet you can introduce me to several as well—I welcome that experience.

Maybe we should revise the headline here, and remember the extraordinary miracle of a great independent bookstore, remember why we would celebrate and invite in rank amateurs as Guest Booksellers.

THIS CAN ONLY HAPPEN AT AN INDEPENDENT BOOK STORE

What’s in that vague pronoun, this?

Real books

Real experience

Real reading community

What does it take to activate these three really wondrous elements, to create the spark so THIS can happen?

You. Come on in this Saturday.

Steve Yates is the author of The Teeth of the Souls: A Novel, and the Juniper Prize-winning Some Kinds of Love: Stories. Follow him at Fiction and History