More reading, less writing

Some days I feel like I'm drowning in poems and pieces of poems. I'm realizing that I need to step away from poem-a-day-type exercises (like the ones I sometimes do at Once Daily as Directed and the Poetic Asides blog) and concentrate on other things. Revising, for example, which is about the hardest thing for me to do.

Or reading. I used to think that the poets I was meeting were terrible name droppers. Some of them are. That said, I think that part of that idea came from the fact that, for the most part, only poets know other poets, so if someone like Alicia Ostriker or Adrian Blevins is going to become famous somewhere, it's among others of her or his own kind.

Many poetry books--and I'm speaking here, for the most part, of the sort of book that was published as a book-length collection by its author, not a "Collected Works Of"-type thing--are fairly slender. It seems to me that I ought to be able to manage to read a poetry book per week, at least for a while.

So I'm planning to get a stack of such books going and then go through them. I'll probably yammer about them here, in a highly non-lit-crit way. If you've got any book suggestions, please add them to the comments.

Colors, the colors, man...

This note is to remind myself to fix the colors in this blog. I think they're the reason that some of my text is disappearing.