Returning to Talisman Books

Coming back to Charles Simic's Dime-Store Alchemy

Dear Friends,

As regular readers will know, I’ve been falling back in love with New York by keeping Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems in my back pocket. Lunch Poems is one of my original talisman books, books which I carry for their content but also for for their mysterious powers of inspiration.

“Every one of us has a secret book,” Hélène Cixous says. She’s talking about childhood books, and I have those too, but if you look in my backpack you’ll always find a secret book of the moment. One of my most magical secret books has been Dime-Store Alchemy by the poet Charles Simic.

This week, I’ve stepped away from my ordinary life into a personal writing retreat to work on a new book manuscript. Dime-Store Alchemy, Lunch Poems, and a stack of other talisman books are my companions. I’m re-posting this ode as a way of thanking them.

—Sal

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On Talisman Books

The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen, if recognized. —Charles Simic

There are certain books I think of as talisman books—books I carry around with me, keeping them close, whether or not I open their pages. It’s as if they contain a secret well of energy whose charge I can tap into at any moment. They are reminders of a certain way of being, and of writing, they are promise and potential and consolation.

Charles Simic’s Dime-Store Alchemy is my original talisman book. For thirty years I’ve carried in countless bags, placed it in countless stacks. During a time when I was separated from my library, I had to buy a second copy. I was glad to have it, but the new edition, while it has all of the contents, doesn’t have the magic of the original with its faded cover. I was relieved when my old copy and I were reunited. Picture me on the subway, reaching into my bag just to touch it.

Dime-Store Alchemy came out in the early ’90s, when I was living in Provincetown, a small town at the end of Cape Cod thick with artists and poets. During those years I worked variously as a papermaker, a weaver, a manuscript typist, and a barely-paid freelance writer. I taught poetry classes at my kitchen table and sent out my own poems to journals and publishers.

Charles Simic was a poet I already loved. He had recently won a Pulitzer for his book of prose poems, The World Doesn’t End. His poems are typically brief and imagistic, simultaneously observed and surreal. He would go on to be Poet Laureate, and was widely mourned when he died this past January.

Dime-Store Alchemy is Simic’s book of art writing; its subject is the artist Joseph Cornell who is best known for his boxes, small dioramas that juxtapose images and objects. They are neither painting nor sculpture, but rather constructions Cornell invented for himself, working in the basement of his mother’s house. Cornell’s boxes are dream-like and magical, evoking memories of childhood and states of absorption. Each one is an intimate cosmos.

If you open the pages of Dime-Store Alchemy, you will indeed find Joseph Cornell and his works, but you will also find poems, speculations, reveries, lists, memories. There are bits of history and of phenomenology. There are conversations between the imageries of poets and of painters. Each time I look in, I come across something surprising. Like Cornell’s boxes, there is a feeling of infinitude within its small confines.

The ideal talisman book is outwardly small and inwardly vast. It should function like an oracle when you open it at random. It should contain a multitude of ideas and images and its language should spark and inspire. It should hold your most secret aspirations in object form.

Simic quotes Joseph Cornell describing the collection of notes and materials that were the wellspring of his work: “a diary journal repository laboratory, picture gallery, museum, sanctuary, observatory, key…the core of a labyrinth, a clearinghouse for dreams and visions…childhood regained.” This could easily serve as a description of Dime-Store Alchemy.

On the cover my old paperback is a reproduction of one of Cornell’s boxes. Within the box is the image, cut from a magazine, of a young girl carrying a basket. She is facing away. A few white birds flutter around her, one landing on her hand. Resting nearby, on the bottom of the box, are a white ball and a long thin stick that reaches up through an empty, white space. Near the top, the stick meets a ring or hoop that circles part of the word “Apollinaris.”

Here’s some of what Simic says about that piece :

APOLLINARIS, Apollo, god of light. Apollinaire the poet, who loved street performers, musicians with cornets and tambourines, tightrope walkers, jugglers.

Here’s the long pole given to us by the god of sleepwalkers. Here’s the hoop of the dead girl and the parrot and the cockatoo that flew out of the pet shop into the snow when we were little.

Emptiness, this divine condition, this school of metaphysics.

Dime-Store Alchemy promised me something, a future I couldn’t quite see. What I imagined or hoped in the ’90s was that someday, somehow, I would write a book that answered that promise. In the years that followed I moved from Provincetown to New York. I put aside poetry and turned to making art. Only recently have all of my disparate selves of language and image and making begun to fuse again.

After decades of carrying around the book, the time has come to to answer Dime-Store Alchemy’s mysterious call. Of course this doesn’t mean imitating Simic’s way of writing—instead, it means writing something like my own talisman book, as impossible and hubristic as that task is. Still, I am embarking, with Dime-Store Alchemy close at hand, now transmuted from touchstone into atlas and guide.

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This essay was originally published as part of a series called “The Books that Made Us,” organized by

M. E. Rothwell

. The essay inspired a collaboration with

Julie Gabrielli

and

Tara Penry

—scroll down to find it.

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Exercises in Reverie

Excerpts from Dime-Store Alchemy and and exercise in reverie can be found here:

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Collaboration

This essay inspired a collaboration with Substack-friends

Tara Penry

and

Julie Gabrielli

. We all wrote in response to a work of Joseph Cornell: Nouveaux Contes de Fées (New Fairy Tales). Tara and Julie wrote poems, and I wrote a fairy tale.

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