Friday, October 19, 2007

I'm not working on anything

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

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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.

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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.

2 comments:

equivocal said...

As I mentioned over at the Poetry Foundation blog, I once heard John Ashbery (in conversation with David Lehman) say, "Well, I don't think it should be called the Best American Poetry. It should be called 'Some Ok Poems of the Year'. In fact," [Ashbery chuckles and turns to Lehman] "in fact, why don't you call it that?"

Lehman looked sternly on.

Anonymous said...

Totally unrelated, but to which side does it move for you - clockwise or anti clockwise? Different people will have different answers, even when they are all viewing it simultaneously, on one screen!

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22556281-661,00.html

~N.