PORT TOWNSEND — Port Townsend’s Winter Texts has published a limited run of 300 copies of poems by Ursula K. Le Guin, a famed sci-fi and fantasy novelist who lived in the Pacific Northwest.
The book’s themes are naming and unnaming, said Conner Bouchard-Roberts, who edited, designed and published the book.
“Us naming things and those close to us and how we named ourselves and the kinds of nouns that we carry in our daily life, like citizen or man or woman, all of the different ways we go about naming and being named in the world,” Bouchard-Roberts said.
Bouchard-Roberts said he was honored to work with Le Guin’s writing.
“I think that she is one of the great uses of the English language,” Bouchard-Roberts said. “It’s as if (Leo) Tolystoy was in the area, or (J.R.R.) Tolkien lived in the Northwest. There’s sort of a magnitude of the scale and quality of her work. There is a very real possibility that she has almost like an eternal lifespan with the quality of her work, and we’ll be talking about her the way people reference Tolkien or (Rainer) Rilke, (Virginia) Woolf, (T.S.) Eliot, (Jorge Luis) Borges and (Matsuo) Bashō.”
“Learning the Names” is the sixth collection of Le Guin’s poems curated, designed and published by Bouchard-Roberts over the last five years.
“A lot of my favorites made it into ‘Learning the Names,’” Bouchard-Roberts said. “There’s also a sort of thematic selection that is about naming and being in the world, about the natural world, the human world and daoism.”
Le Guin’s work can sometimes be satirical, epic or even jab at people, Bouchard-Roberts said. This collection leans toward the contemplative, he added.
The collection includes about 50 poems, Bouchard-Roberts said.
The poems were pared down, first from several hundred to an essential 100, before receiving a finer paring, Bouchard-Roberts said.
The collection includes two short stories. Both are sort of scifi-fantasy, as described by Bouchard-Roberts.
“They kind of ground the reader in the rest of her thinking and her work,” Bouchard-Roberts said.
One of the stories is called “The Author of the Acacia Seeds. And Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics.”
“It’s three articles from this fictional journal,” Bouchard-Roberts said. “It’s using humor to crack into these big ideas. It’s definitely not just a joke, but the humor makes it more palatable.”
Le Guin could come off as a very serious person, and she was, Bouchard-Roberts said. Also, she saw the value in humor, play, silliness, lightheartedness in resisting authoritarianism, and to thinking freely.
“If you get too dour and too serious, you forget there’s this whole capacity for play in the world,” Bouchard-Roberts said.
The stories lead readers into complex conundrums about language, he said.
One of the big problems throughout the course of her work is that of naming, which Bouchard-Roberts describes as a problem of language.
“When you’re writing in a sentence, eventually the grammar’s going to tell you that you’ve gotta throw a period in there and then that will narrow the frame of the picture of reality.”
Depending on the historic era people have lived in, different ideas have been cast upon them which might not be the full picture, Bouchard-Roberts said.
“She wrote on that theme in many, many different ways,” Bouchard-Roberts said. “Lot’s of times when she’s engaging with that theme directly, it’s through nature.”
The Chinese classical text the Tao Te Ching opens on the problem of naming, Bouchard-Roberts said.
Le Guin authored Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way in 1997.
Bouchard-Roberts said Le Guin was a huge proponent of science, facts and learning. She was curious and valued understanding, but she was allergic to dogmatic thinking.
Le Guin seemed to think that language, or human use of language, is fundamentally inadequate to fully grasp reality, and still she spent her life dedicated to words.
“That is the most endearing part of it,” Bouchard-Roberts said. “There’s a skepticism about the absolute quality of language, and then you pair that with someone who spent the better part of 80 years learning how to use language properly and ethically and eloquently.”
Le Guin’s first writing was poetry, and before she died in 2018, Le Guin was working on poetry, Bouchard-Roberts said. Le Guin’s poetry is unique in the greater body of her work in that it is non-fictional, he added.
“Usually, she is extremely direct in her poems,” Bouchard-Roberts said. “When she chose to use the form of poetry, she’s thinking on the page. She’s using all of the tools of language; rhythm, rhyme, consonance, resonance, imagery and this kind of sparingness on the page that I think will remind a lot of people of Mary Oliver’s style.”
The poems are an expression of the real Le Guin; Le Guin in the world, Le Guin next to a creek, Bouchard-Roberts said.
By and large, they are very accessible and a great entry point for those who might not think they like poetry, he said.
“There’s a gravity there,” Bouchard-Roberts said. “As a novelist, Le Guin understands that she’s engaging a very old tradition. When she chooses poetry, she chooses it very intentionally.”
She was influenced by William Butler Yeats, Shelly, Robert Hass and her beat poet contemporaries, Bouchard-Roberts said.
Bouchard-Roberts read a poem, ‘Learning the Name,’ from which his collection’s title was derived.
“Swainson’s thrush, it is! Now I know who sings that clear arpeggio, three far notes weaving into the evening among leaves and shadow, or at dawn in the woods, I’ve heard the sweet ascending triple word echoing over the river — but never seen the bird,” Le Guin wrote in 2006.
In November, Winter Texts will publish A LARGER REALITY, an anthology of Le Guin’s work.
Bouchard-Roberts has worked with Theo Downes-Le Guin, Ursula’s son and the executor of the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation.
The cover art for the book is an impressionistic image of a wide creek moving through a tall, arching grove of trees, by Czech landscape painter Antonín Hudeček, 1872-1941.
Bouchard-Roberts said there is a wood print on the inside cover from frequent collaborator and Port Townsend wood-worker Lydia Vadopalas, who has provided art for each of the six Le Guin poem collections.
Of the 300 copies pressed, Bouchard-Roberts said he has only about 20 copies left for purchase. The books can be purchased at the Winter Texts bookshop, on the second floor of Aldrich’s Market, 940 Lawrence St., Port Townsend, or on the Winter Texts website.
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@sequimgazette.com.
