Perplexity of Reading

A friend of mine at work is a poet, a rather gifted poet actually. She’s started a blog on writing poetry, and I am so glad she has. I find myself beginning to write poetry again! What I like about poetry is its succinctness, at least the poems I’ve been reading and writing of late. I don’t know why that is, but I’m having a very hard time sustaining the act of reading. The last full book I read was Ulin’s The Lost Art of Reading--rather ironic! That doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading. I have. But I’m reading bits and pieces here and there, like flotsam and jetsam of words almost. I’ve got three books going on: a biography of Abigail Adams, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and a collection of vampire stories written by women. But the books I keep turning to to read are poetry books, be they textbooks like the Norton Anthology or Donald Hall’s collection of poems, Without, that I picked up at a local Half Price Bookstore the other day.

I find my mind wandering as I read--even when I read student papers. (But that’s another story.) Anything that has long(ish) text, I lost interest in swiftly. Sometimes embarrassingly so.

So I think that poetry’s speaking to me more urgently now and I think my inability (unwillingness?) to read longer texts is fueling my renewed desire to write poetry. I’ve always loved reading poetry, not so much teaching it, but I do love reading and talking about it. I think because poetry is a personal experience, a personal journey, for me. And when I teach it, the personal is lost. Or it’s just too intimate and I don’t want to share it with students. So I stay on the topical level, the “this is a metaphor--look how it speaks to us!” level.

Poetry packs a wallop of a punch--it has to. And right now I want that. Need that. I don’t want to spend time (or energy) untangling the lines of thought in a story much less a larger text like a book. So I read poetry where each poem is itself a tiny contained universe of meaning. I have no problem diving into a poem, no matter its complexity, and untangling its various subtleties and connections. In fact, I relish that act. I love being awed by a poet’s turn of phrase or startling image. But when I read fiction or essays, I find myself losing interest. Or I challenge the writer with thoughts like “it would’ve been stronger if you added an image here” or “couldn’t you have omitted these unnecessary and flabby words?”

So I find myself reading a lot of poetry and I find myself writing poetry--badly, but I write poetry nonetheless. And I’ve started to have a teenytiny germ of an idea take root. What if I work on my own chapbook? And then what if I work on a collection of poems?

Who knows?