Booklist #5

Last list of the semester:

• In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-1990, by Frank Bidart
• The Radiant, by Cynthia Huntington
• Letters to a Stranger, by Thomas James
• The Light the Dead See, by Frank Stanford
• Ill Lit, by Franz Wright

Love, loved, loved Cynthia Huntington. She and Larry Levis are the two finds of this semester for me. Perhaps I should not therefore have been surprised when I realized that The Radiant was the winner of the 2001 Levis Poetry Prize. You can read her work on Terrain.org, Verse Daily, and Orion Magazine, and there's a great interview on the National Book Foundation web site.

Booklist #4

It was prose poem month for packet #4:

• Moments without Names: New and Selected Prose Poems, by Morton Marcus
• Selected Poems, by Mary Ruefle
• The World Doesn't End, by Charles Simic
• Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writer, edited by Charles Simic and Mark Strand

The prose poem kind of mystifies me. I thought I'd have a better understanding of what it does and how it works as a result of reading so many and writing about one of Simic's, but I don't. I wrote two of my own this month, just to try something new, and they were both pretty terrible. All the decisions I made about htem felt arbitrary.

I imagine this is how writers of formal verse felt when free verse showed up...

Booklist #3

It was apparently "women poets" month for this packet. I'd never heard of any of them (no surprise, I guess, since I am such a comparative newcomer to poetry):

• Rouge Pulp, by Dorothy Barresi
• The Dig and Hotel Fiesta, by Lynn Emmanuel
• The Work of a Common Woman, by Judy Grahn
• Housekeeping in a Dream, by Laura Kasischke (not pictured because I had to return it to the library before posting this)
• Misery Prefigured, by J. Allyn Rosser

I wrote papers on Barresi and Rosser and read most of Grahn. I only read a little of Kasischke and wished I'd had time for more; she's on my list to read again in the future.

Barresi was by far my favorite. I love her statement on PoetryNet (probably because it confirms so many of my own prejudices) and there's a very nice interview with her on "The Creative Community." If this interests you, you can read some of her work on West Branch and Poetry Daily.

Hi there!

Remember me? The one who was going to blog her way through her first semester? The one who disappeared in September?

What the hell happened?

I'm still not sure, but I think it involved the trifecta of life, work, and the semester. My plan is to make up for it in December (a plan that also extends to exercise and eating something besides takeout) and try to do better in the new year. I turned in my last packet on Monday and I've got a few end-of-semester tasks to do this week. Once that's out of the way, here's how I plan to spend my "free" time:

• Organizing. Organizing my office, my filing cabinet, my jewelry box, my sock drawer. Nothing in our house doesn't look like a hurricane hit it. I don't care if everything's filthy, but clutter drives me crazy.¹
• Cooking ahead. Making and freezing spaghetti sauce. Making and freezing chicken and vegetable stock. Making and freezing chili². Making homemade granola.
• Reading for pleasure.
• Reading prose for pleasure.
• Sleeping. This weekend, for example, I have not ruled out the possibility of going to bed tonight and not getting up until Monday morning.
• And, of course, blogging. First up: my reading for the last three packets.

Talk to you soon!

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¹ My friend Hal likes to say, "But, Kathleen, why drive when you're close enough to walk?"
² Reorganizing the freezer.