A) General:
1) How often do you recognise your own life in the fictive texts you use: the poetry, fiction or literary theory? (Ignore historical fiction and fantasy).
B) Poetry
2) In all the poetry you've read recently, putting aside your admiration for the occasional pyrotechnics: how many poems changed anything for you? How many would you have felt that had you not read them you would have missed out on something important? (Do not refer to dead poets or at least only those dead in recent years. We do not want another essay on Wulf and Eadwacer)
3) How many did you want to copy out in longhand to the anthology you keep of poems you admire?
4) How many said something to you other than:"Look at me, admire my cleverness", like a guitar player doing scales faster than anyone else? For how many did you feel that if you were to step outside the rules of the game and ask:"so what?" there would be no answer?
A tiny Australian chapbook, Carson's collected, The Midnight Court, much of the Herbert complete, Kairos, Troy town? Enough for six months?
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3 comments:
I've heard great things about Troy Town, but the days are not long enough ... at the moment, and I seem to be really caught up by classes and thinking about torture... thank you for the namecheck for Kairos - wow!
I desparately need reading time soon - I have your LG sequence (looks impressive from first glance and I keep thinking of Ride a White Horse to Banbury Cross, don't know why...) here to read, along with about ten other books crying for my attention, but they've got to wait until I finish Stepping Stones! If only I had a second life tacked onto my first.
So many books: so little time.
Do you like Stepping stones? I thought it was a wonderful book. But I've always admired the way the man advocates and deflects. As a critic he celebrates rather than swats. Great too for finding poets to read. I forgave him Beowulf (as if that maters) when i read what he said about it.
Troy town is definitely worth a look. Sometimes i felt it was a tad private, like I was overhearing a conversation, or needed footnotes, but it contains poems I wish I'd written. And ride a white horse is such a good rhyme it's probably more relevant company for Lady G than some links which have been suggested.
I love Stepping Stones, and I understand what you're saying about 'advocates and deflects.' I'm just reading about when he went to Harvard and took over from Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. That sort of puts him into the semi-god status... but then I remember what a humble man he can be in interview, where you get all the nuances of inflection and accent and of course the humour and the twinkly eyes ;)
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