A Vulture in Walter Benjamin’s Library

by Noah Soltau

I don’t know who Ann is—was; I suspect she’s dead. The signed copies of these books by Anne Carson and Jeff Daniel Marion that I am flipping through have her name in them. So we know some of the same people. Respectable. It looks like her next of kin sold off her library, and I’m happy to benefit. 

I’m not unpacking my library; I’m picking over other people’s scraps to make it. I’m not at an auction hunting for treasure; I’m hopping around the midden heap, all bright eyes and talons. And though I am writing, which, according to 20th century German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin, “is the most praiseworthy method” of acquiring books, the pile of drafts has yet to give up a manuscript. The prospect of a personal library is a daunting and perhaps even meaningless one, now. It may not have been for Benjamin when he wrote his essay, “Unpacking my Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” in Paris in 1931, but then, he did kill himself at the French-Spanish border in 1940, fleeing the Nazis. So there might be a lesson there.

Unlike Benjamin, I don’t have wooden crates of hard-covered volumes to crack open in my apartment chambers or an immediate, existential political threat to contend with. Like most of us, I can’t afford all of the books I want, all of the books I “should” buy, all the books I may need in ways I may not understand. So I end up at used book stores, most recently at McKay’s Used Books in Knoxville, Tennessee. 

The pricing scheme McKay’s uses provides its own kind of cultural critique and literary analysis. If you can brave the hostile architecture, the press of bodies and the attendant smell, you can find a pristine signed copy of Marion’s Lost and Found and a 1984 copy of Tess Gallagher’s Willingly: $0.75. Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic and Mosab Abu Toha’s Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: $8.50. Somewhere in the middle, Maggie Smith’s Goldenrod and a collection from Tupac Shakur’s notebooks, The Rose That Grew from Concrete. So, I buy books by my friends and colleagues whenever I come cross them, but the reseller’s shop is nothing if not a site of serendipity, and all of these books came home with me on a dark, cold Friday night.

Based on conversations with McKay’s employees, the store relies on a program that weighs the quantity, popularity, rarity, and condition of a book before assigning it a price. So a book like Marion’s Lost and Found, written in 1994 and published by The Sow’s Ear Press in Abingdon, Virginia, will have limited printing and distribution and will therefore never be, almost by definition, popular. This lowers its perceived value, despite Marion’s own decades-long role in the literary communities of southern Appalachia. And here, of course, I discover opportunity in the relentless intellectual and spiritual meat grinder of print capitalism, as I follow Marion’s injunction to “be still and know.” 

‘We are part of networks, yes. Literary, professional, transactional. We are part of systems. Cultural, economic, political. We pick over other people’s leavings for survival, to make a profit, for inspiration.’

My usual McKay’s run always begins with looking for books by writers I know, either personally or professionally. The most I’ve ever paid for a book like this is $5.50, which got me a copy of Silas House’s 2018 novel, Southernmost. Besides House, I have found books by Kari Gunter-Seymour, Linda Parsons, Anna Laura Reeve, Susan O’Dell Underwood, Frank X. Walker, and Crystal Wilkinson, all under $4.00. I mention these writers, not to name drop, but to establish a network, a system of Appalachian writers, and to note their books’ perceived value on the second-hand market. 

When I find books like these, and if I already own them, I buy them anyway. I give them away as gifts or put them in little free libraries around Knoxville. Jeff Hardin, whose books I have never found at McKay’s, notes that his books are a vehicle for in-person engagement. He will sell books at cost to create an audience. The audience, in turn, becomes some simulacrum for community. Real community cannot grow in a reseller’s shop, but a $0.75 book in the hands of a hungry reader might, might nourish something that looks like more than getting by. 

We are part of networks, yes. Literary, professional, transactional. We are part of systems. Cultural, economic, political. We pick over other people’s leavings for survival, to make a profit, for inspiration. But we also, in the cracks of these systems and around the edges of the trash heap of culture and history, develop a sense of our mutual need, our shared striving to understand each other, to be understood. 

A network of understanding began to reveal itself to me in the poetry aisle of McKay’s. Other than being shelved together, the poem “A Rose Shoulders Up,” from Abu Toha’s collection, drew in my mind immediate parallels with Shakur’s work. Gaza, Harlem, and Baltimore have more in common than we may first realize, as do these authors. Shakur, famously murdered, left a lyrical and political legacy that influenced a generation. New readers of Abu Toha are often quick to google him, fearful he has been killed in Gaza along with tens of thousands of others, including his family, friends, and students. Thankfully, he is still with us, writing, cultivating work that shoulders up among the ruins. 

Whether it’s neighborhoods destroyed by “urban renewal” or ring roads, or neighborhoods destroyed by American bombers and Israeli bombs, people killed by gangs and police or people killed by militants and the IDF, these poets tell us about the joy and terror of life, tell us about a future still out of reach.

In Nikki Giovanni’s Forward to Shakur’s book, she notes that in his work, she thought, “something good is coming.” In “The Rose That Grew from Concrete,” Shakur sees the flower autobiographically, triumphantly looking back at his struggle for artistic and personal freedom, “Long live the rose that grew from concrete / when no one else even cared!” Abu Toha’s rose is more mournful, but no less resistant, resilient, resolute: “Don’t ever be surprised / to see a rose shoulder up / among the ruins of the house: / this is how we survived.” 

Abu Toha, for reference, has found temporary safety in Syracuse, NY, unable to return home, sharing with the (English-speaking) world breaking news from Gaza, creating and facilitating direct and mutual aid for people in need there, and confronting his audience with the daily horrors of genocide: children beheaded by bomb blasts, dismembered; bodies left in the streets to be eaten by dogs and vultures, whole families killed together in tents, neighborhoods bombed and bombed again, all the while nurturing a poetics of witness. 

Sometimes cynically, I want to rejoin Nikki Giovanni with this: maybe something good is coming, but all of us will have to keep waiting, shouldering up among the ruins or picking through them. She knew joy, though, and I think we should all try to follow her example more closely.

This impulse not just to survive but thrive, be joyful, in the face of impossible conditions is something Maggie Smith also examines in her work. The first and most obvious escape from this ruin is that “we could make this place beautiful,” but I found myself instead confronted with Goldenrod, and that “This Sort of Thing Happens All the Time.” The world falls apart, our lives do, “The anchor’s mouth / is moving, but outside you hear only / crickets in the cold.” Someone I don’t know is getting paid to tell me things I don’t want or need to hear. My heart is broken and the world is beautiful.

Ilya Kaminsky notes in his blurb for Goldenrod that this is Smith’s gift as a poet: she can “break your heart, and make you stop, astonished at the planet around you.” It can be hard to be astonished by the planet (the “natural” world) when an Israeli bulldozer kills the last olive tree in your leveled city, or Vladimir Putin indiscriminately bombs schools and hospitals and public infrastructure in an unprovoked war of conquest. But, if you’re Ilya Kaminsky, you help the children of Odesa write poems while they hide in bomb shelters, translate them into English so the world can know their stories, and, like Abu Toha, look clear-eyed at the horrors of war and criminality and tell us about it forcefully and faithfully. You are astonished by the planet, the people in it.

In Deaf Republic, Kaminsky reminds us that we “must speak not only of great devastation.” But we must speak of it. We have been living happily during the war, “in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money.” The devastation is not confined to Ukraine and Gaza, to the ravages of war; the country of money pulled it out of the ground and the hands of its people, and nowhere knows this more than Appalachia. Is a book by a well-regarded Appalachian poet really only worth $0.75? With McKay’s store credit from turning in best-selling YA fiction, every book I’ve written about here cost me $0.62. The book will sit on my shelf with the others, and I’ll return to it occasionally, to be still and know. If I find another one, I’ll buy it and give it away. As Benjamin notes in his essay, “Habent sua fata libelli;” books have their own destiny.

‘We get to choose to keep reading and writing. We get to choose how to make a future out of the ruins of the past. We get to choose not to do it alone.’

And if books have their destiny, what about writers, what about their communities? With I-40 collapsed into the river and Asheville, North Carolina and dozens of towns in East Tennessee and Western North Carolina still digging out from under the mud and piling the debris from a hurricane and devastating flooding, talking about ecology in Appalachia isn’t just for climate scientists and nature writers. The piles of smashed houses, lost futures, ruined lives and landscapes remind us again of Benjamin and, this time, his angel of history, who “sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet,” rather than a discrete chain of events. But this pile of rubble, of debris, is also the source of growth, a feast for carrion, cleaners and eaters of the dead, life-from-death.

If we’re going to understand the literary landscape ecologically, then we have to recognize the toxic wastelands and barren plains, sure, but much more important are the creek-side plots in the hollers, quietly and radically tended by dozens of serious, warm, heart-broken people. I wrote earlier that I wasn’t name dropping. All of those people work at or publish with or read for small presses and literary magazines. They teach. They grow food. They cook. They’re part of a literary ecosystem that sustains local communities of writers and readers. Like garlic scapes and winter squash, chamomile and clover, this environment—and the fruits of this rich-if-temporary soil—sustains each part of the literary food chain, through consumption, dispossession, rediscovery. 

We get to choose to keep reading and writing. We get to choose how to make a future out of the ruins of the past. We get to choose not to do it alone. I do sometimes feel like a vulture, picking over the scraps of other people’s genius, inspiration, humanity, looking for my own, looking for marrow to nourish me. So, my joy in having books is not the joy of the collector; my library is not a trophy case. It is a few shelves of well-worn books. Some of them have been there for decades. The spines are broken; they are highlighted and dog-eared and annotated; some have pages taped back into the binding. Some books only stay for a few days, serving their purpose and passing on to needier hands and minds.

Maybe, if I’m a vulture, I’m just making way for new life.