Poets and Poems: Robert Penn Warren’s “Selected Poems 1923-1975”

The used book store where I spent a fair amount of money in the last 20 years has moved locations, forced to vacate the 19^th century farmhouse to make way for a storage facility. Its future was uncertain, but in the past week it reopened in a storefront two miles to the east.

I’m glad it’s survived, but I’ll miss the old poetry nook, nestled as it was in a small, sloped-ceiling room in the gable above the main door and filled with poets and poems. You have to bend over the make it through the small door leading to the poetry books, and once inside (two people was a major crowd), you couldn’t stand unless bent over. It was easier to sit on the floor, peruse the books and keep an eye on the black cat asleep on the pillow, inspired, no doubt, by T.S. Eliot.

One volume I found in the nook was a first edition of Robert Penn Warren’s Selected Poems 1923-1975, in hardback and priced at $14.50. You pick up a book like this, and experience a flood of memories.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.