Alighieri to Zukofsky

Recently I posted my experience of reading Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, about a reading marathon involving a book a day. And I nixed that idea for myself, while remaining impressed with Nina Sankovitch's courage and determination. She was reading to deal with grief. I read to deal with boredom, restlessness, stress, and challenge. I've almost finished Bill Moyers' The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets, in which I keep noticing that what other writers say about their work jump starts my own writing. And makes me thirsty for deep drinks of poetry, makes me want to know far more than I do. So here's my challenge to myself, and it's so simple I don't know why I haven't done it before. I want to read/reread every book on my poetry shelf. And, like Sankovitch, comment on what I've read. I had to do this sort of response in poetry school, so why not refresh those skills and teach myself about the books I thought enough of to give precious shelf space?

This won't be the first time I've reminded myself how much I have yet to learn about poetry. It won't be the first or last time I tell myself that it's cowardly to hide out in my beloved mystery stories and fluffy non-fiction. It will supplant my goal of reading every book I have myself listed in Feed: Reading Lists for Those Who Eat. (That's my latest publication, soon to be available on Amazon.) But I want/need a break from food lit. I now want, as Mark Strand says, to eat poetry. I want to feast on the tasty truth that poetry provides.

Bam!

Many of my poems go first to friends who critique them. One, let's call him Lars, always goes for more clarity, more development, even at the cost of compression and subtlety. The other, we'll call him Arnie, wants further compression and an adrenaline rush at the end. Together they embody one of the great arguments about poetry: Is it meant to instruct or to entertain? That word or is a bugger. The best poems do both. Would that I could count on writing only the best poems. So writing exclusively for either of my friendly critics won't do. Why care what they think? Why try?

I write to be read or heard, to inform and to entertain, to argue that the world and my life in it are more complex and more braided together than I can easily say. I write from experience, not from ideas only. And not from emotion only, but to use all the ingredients of poetry in proportion. Each poem changes those proportions, but always the secret spice, the Bam! that kicks it up is discovery, mine and the reader's. I read and write poems to discover what life is about.

So, let's make that reader plural, because I'd like lots of people in on this ongoing conversation. The little world map on my blog stats page claims that I have readers in China, India, England, people in places I cannot otherwise reach. I would like to see what those readers want from me, so I'll add poems now and again to my website, keep my publication list up to date, scatter poems like seeds even if I rarely see the harvest. I have a foolish faith in poetry and choose to believe that my silent partners are there, be they Lars-like or Arnies, invisible, nodding or grimacing as they read. This spidery link keeps me writing.

Dog Days of August

Energy drains; air conditioning strains; interest wains. I've been stuck in a goo of rhymes lately and I don't like it much. One more symptom of summer doldrums. But I'm fighting back. I just updated the website, and that felt okay. I sent a revised poem to my critique group for tonight's meeting, and I've started my weekly poem for my on-line writing group. What I have not done is update my publications list here, but I think I can manage that today. Mostly though, I want to sit very still and play solitaire on my ITouch or read magazines on the Kindle. Right now out the window in front of my desk I see a vibrant blue sky, almost violent in its clarity and I know that the car will be an oven when I leave in a couple of hours to drive to a meeting in Denver.  But who am I to complain?

Just finished reading The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan. Having read Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath years ago, I thought I understood the Dust Bowl. I've known and loved Woodie Guthrie's music from that time. Truth? I knew nothing. Egan has educated me, which is a good thing because next month I'll be a reader at an event in Lafayette, CO called Dust Bowl Poetry. The whole town is reading Egan's book and a variety of events are planned in response to that communal experience. It's a great idea and I'm pleased to be part of it. Much better than having been part of the original event, which did involve parts of Colorado. If you haven't read this book, do so, please. It is a cautionary tale that relates to our current blind spots about global warming. We need to learn from our collective mistakes.