Have decided I can't talk in detail about poetry books I read on here or I will go crazy and get way behind.

But this weekend...

Dodie Bellamy, Pink Steam. I had read a lot of this before over the last years. But enjoyed rereading it. It has a story about where I work in it that I hadn't read before. This made me excited. Although because I've been in such a bad mood about my job lately, I kept wanting there to be less about the sexy male student (I guess graduate student) and more making fun of the institution itself. I assume though that this is a personal preference. The Vermeer poem joke is very funny.

Finished up Basho's Narrow Road: Spring and Autumn Passages, tr. Hiroaki Sato. I'm reading it for Worldly Prosodies course in the spring. I find it hard to read it without all the information about the tradition that comes out of it in U.S. poetries of the 60s and 70s (which sort of means I don't like it because it reads so much to me like a Gary Snyder poem). This edition isn't helping with its two layers of annotation. I checked out a few critical studies out of the Berkeley library which I hope will help me. I know it is great. I should like it. What is not to like? Just not sure how to get there in my body.

Also Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Found this one stunning and sad. It is more in prose than in poetry. It is all in my body. This struck me...

Or Paul Celan said that the poem was no different than a handshake. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem--is how Rosmarie Waldrop translated his German. The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handing over (here) a self to another. Hence the poem is that--Here. I am here. This conflation of the solidity of presence with the offering of this same presence perhaps has everything to do with being alive. p. 130

Also want to make note that she does an interesting annotation system at the back of the book (the writing is heavily news and her reading dependent). Sometime I want to collect a series of examples of all the different sorts of annotation that poets use for reference.