OK. Here's a new thread. Having just dipped into Jonathan Mayhew's Blog and seen his omniverous reading habits, here's a question (or two, or six):
1) what are you reading?
2) how/where do you read?
3) specifically in terms of poetry
- how do you approach a new volume/new poet?
- how do you read a poet?
4) again, specifically in terms of poetry ... are you reading
- anthologies?
- chapbooks?
- major publisher volumes?
- online texts?
- magazines?
5) right now who are your 3 (or 6, or 12) key poets?
6) same as 5 - but other than poets?
And I'll play too.
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Today, boys and girls, we’re going to look at ‘Song of the Chinchilla’ by Lisa Jarnot*. I liked the poem immediately – and I’ve given it to ...
1 comment:
Oh crap. I hope someone other than me is going to respond. OK here goes.
1) what are you reading?
I’m really enjoying William Carlos Williams’s I Wanted to Write a Poem at the moment, reading the poems in the Carcanet two-volume Collected as he mentions them – a great way to really get to know a poet’s work. I wish more poets did this. He’s also very honest about having felt inadequate as a poet at various times, which is heartening for the wannabe. Alongside this I’m also dipping into his letters to James Laughlin, which are very good on the practicalities (and frustrations) of working with a small publisher, so it’s all WCW at the moment.
As mentioned before, I’m also still reading Robert Duncan’s A Selected Prose and Daniel Kane’s All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s.
2) how/where do you read?
During the day I read in my garden office. In the evening, indoors in a big chair under a lamp. On going to bed, bizarrely, I always read at least one poem in the dark using the torch on my mobile phone. (I first read Olson’s “As the Dead Prey Upon Us” like this and it totally blew me away. Oddly, when I read it again in the cold light of day, although it still impressed me, it didn’t have the same wow-factor. Perhaps some poems are written only to be read in the dark by torchlight.)
3) specifically in terms of poetry
- how do you approach a new volume/new poet?
Often with anxiety (but why? usually anxiety that they will not live up to expectations – how odd; but also sometimes anxiety that I will not be open enough to what they are trying to do – the need to stay open brings anxiety, although if practised correctly it soothes away all anxieties & brings joy) or alternatively with disdain (I used to belong to the Poetry Book Society, but I didn’t resubscribe because of the awful tosh they ‘chose’ for me. Sophie Hannah’s last collection was the final straw. I couldn’t have it in the house and had to sell it straightaway!).
- how do you read a poet?
This varies so much from poet to poet I’m not sure I can even begin to answer this question.
4) again, specifically in terms of poetry ... are you reading
- anthologies?
Yes, there’s much to be said for a good anthology. Recent acquisitions are Lisa Jarnot’s Anthology of (New) American Poetry and Kevin Prufer’s The New Young American Poets. I’m still trying to find my way around these, but three other anthologies important to me are Donald Allen’s The Postmoderns, Rothenberg and Joris’s Poems for the Millennium (Vol. 2) & finally Paul Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry.
- chapbooks?
I don’t think I have any, unless Andrew Mitchell’s Saltaire counts, which I don’t think it does. I’m not into the luxurious physicality of a book in quite the same way as you, I feel (interestingly, WCW wasn’t either, always saying that a book should be READ and not admired in expensive editions – although ironically almost all of his work first appeared in beautiful, expensive editions with tiny print runs).
- major publisher volumes?
New Directions seem to be getting most of my custom these days, but also Carcanet.
- online texts?
Only what I come across on blogs devoted to poetry or poetry magazine websites.
- magazines?
I have subscribed to several over the years. I subscribe to Poetry at present and I try to look at PN Review now and then. Not exactly plugged in, am I?
5) right now who are your 3 (or 6, or 12) key poets?
I’m not sure I have a ‘key’ poet. There are poets I admire, but that doesn’t necessarily make them ‘key’ to anything I’m currently doing. So I’m going to offer a truncated list of poets I truly admire and that are currently to the fore of my consciousness (alphabetised to prevent any sort of hierarchy):
John Ashbery
Paul Celan
Robert Duncan
Charles Olson
Ezra Pound
Wallace Stevens
William Carlos Williams
6) same as 5 - but other than poets?
Gosh, ‘key’ to what, though? I’m going to dodge this one. And so ends my catechism.
Walrus
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