I'm not working on anything

Over at Paper Cuts a whimsical interview with Kay Ryan. Gorgeous stuff.

***

Meanwhile over at the Poetry Foundation, Paisley Rekdal has a fun piece about trying to read five books of poetry a week.

Personally, I think five books a week is overdoing it a little - I probably average more like 3-4.

Part of the problem, of course, is that 'poetry book' is such a vague term - there's clearly a big difference between reading the collected works of a major poet and reading a new 70-page collection by someone you happened to pick up because you like the Press they were published by.

Plus there's the question of what 'reading' a book means. I probably sample five books of poetry a week, but I'll usually end up abandoning two of them half way because they just don't work for me, and skimming through another two - spending time on the half dozen poems that catch my eye, and just glancing over the rest (somewhat in the way Stephen Burt suggests here). There's maybe one book a week, if that, that I'll really read with anything approaching the kind of attention to each poem that poetry really demands.

***

Am currently reading the Best American Poetry 2007. Some interesting poems, and some really terrible ones. I quite enjoy the BAP series, but I can't help feeling that 'Best' is a serious overstatement. Frankly, I'm not convinced that you couldn't do a random draw of poems from the journals typically featured in the BAP (for relevant statistics see here) and not end up with a collection just as compelling. And that's without even getting into the loaded question of whether those journals really represent the 'best' poetry being written today.