For years, especially as an undergraduate, I found my happy place in the quiet of the library stacks. There’s always a place to work—some low-lit nook, furnished with a slim desk and wobbly chair—where you can spend all day hashing out a story or paper in perfect quietude.
My best memories of this sacred place come from before the days of smartphones, streaming, and Wi-Fi, when spending an afternoon in the stacks meant being alone with books. Smaller, sensory things were important then. It was important to camp out in the part of the stacks with the oldest books, because these smelled the best and often yielded treasures—Victorian hair ribbons, tearaway calendar pages from the 1920s, tickets to dances long past—from between their pages.
The proximity of a lamp was important. Windows were a source of personal angst; it was nice to look out a window, but it was a distraction too. Recently the library at my alma mater, a small liberal arts college in the Canadian Maritimes, has been “reprioritizing,” to phase out the stacks in favor of open places with computer screens, outlets, and bright overhead lighting. I’m afraid that all the nooks are gone.
What a delight, then, to see the stacks celebrated here on the campus of University of Cincinnati, where librarians, poets, and artists come together to read and perform right between bookcases. “Poetry Stacked,” a series coordinated by our friends at the Elliston Poetry Room in partnership with UC Libraries, brings local talent and accomplished voices from University of Cincinnati’s PhD program in poetry together to create something entirely new in an unexpected space. Artists create live paintings in response to poems read aloud; interpretive dancers translate poems into pirouettes as onlookers sit in hushed contemplation. All around, people study in carrels. There’s no applause: only snaps, which might come off as pretentious anywhere but here, in a place where quiet is king.
On January 31 I attended the most recent installment of Poetry Stacked, featuring CR’s own Lisa Ampleman reading from her brand-new book of poetry, Mom in Space. Quiet is perfect for poems about space and its silence, and it was equally delightful as a backdrop for Pauletta Hansel’s poems about her (decidedly louder) Appalachian upbringing, reminding us of the geography that shapes our region and the voices that grow out of it. Both poets were featured alongside the work of poet and UC PhD student Dani Charles, whose work dives deep inside the body, exploring that inner geography and all its silence and noise.
Why stage a reading in a space like the stacks, traditionally reserved for quiet study and independent work? The series stands as an argument for the generative potential of libraries themselves. They’re not simply repositories, static spaces that serve a practical function and nothing else; libraries are the place where we, as creators and thinkers, are in conversation with other thinkers across boundaries of time, space, and language. Even in an era of remote work and Zoom meetings, they do something our living rooms can’t. Such is the power of a book that spills treasures from between its pages, and such is the power of “Poetry Stacked,” an event that brings that conversation to the fore. It also stands as a testament to the unique work that the Elliston Poetry Room does in collecting rare and often painstakingly made poetry books, broadsides, and chapbooks, in a welcoming place.
The next Poetry Stacked takes place March 6 and features poets John Philip Drury, Sara Moore Wagner, and Kristyn Garza alongside dancers from University of Cincinnati’s esteemed College-Conservatory of Music. Though no screen can substitute for the stacks, you can get a taste of the event via Instagram live—follow @ellistonpoetryroom to watch.
