Has anyone here besides me tried to read a book of poetry? One fucking book is exhausting, and yet you're through it in about an hour. Lemme tell ya, you can take a book to get you through the wait at an airport but don't take a book of poetry.
Ok Original comment above. Below is what I meant: Ah, got it. I understand. Thanks
Well, you can get my point, which is that reading 7 poems in a row is different than reading 40, (not to mention many things, like for instance the time between when I put out that collection and now) or you can do what you just did in your comments, which I'll refrain from calling anything but less than thoughtful. Did you want a ribbon for reading a book of poetry or did you want to offer a different insight into the experience of reading a book of poetry via, idk, communicating about that experience and how it differed from mine?
Like in the conversation of "ref hating on modern poetry and expressing how she doesn't feel her writing fits into it," where does throwing shade bc you bought a minichapbook jawn of mine even fit in? I think the whole point of my argument is I don't feel my writing fits in with the ethos of the modern-day poetic community? Smdh fuckin lol
What? I have lots of books of poetry and I count yours among them. You let me know that it's too short to meet that qualification and I replied with "ok." I didn't think you were hating on poetry? Not sure where this is coming from. My favorite book of poetry is David Berman's "Actual Air." You should add it to your list.
I have. In fact, I still own multiple books, from Basho to Dorothy Parker to what the fuck ever, I'm not naming more cause name dropping poets is a good way to step into a dumb ass hipster minefield. Anyway . . . The trick is to just pick one at random, open it, read a poem, and mull on it for the rest of the day. Read poem after poem and not give them any thought? They all quickly muddle together and start to lose any meaning.
Well, and my question is: how is that any proper way to read a book? If the trick is that you can't read more than one or a few poems at a time without negatively impacting your enjoyment/understanding/recall of them, singly and as a group, then it stands to wonder why anyone writes or publishes books of collected poems at all. I'd wager it's because the book is the traditional vessel to convey money from readers to writers and so poetry has unfortunately been pushed towards that format despite that 50-75 pages (enough to warrant a volume) is really far too much poetry to send out, or process, at once. I do think lit mags are the best way to absorb poems. Better than books and chaps at any rate, for the most part. The lit mags are much easier to read, the many different writers featured within offer variety and a certain amount of discontinued freedom to the content which prevents readers from being overcome by the emotional monotony of poetry. But if you are reading lit mags you are already really putting yourself out there and doing work to be involved in the literary community; they aren't money makers for publishing houses. I think we agree that poems are like very rich bon-bons and enjoyed best spaced out hours or days apart from each other. If that's the case however it really begs the question, "why present poetry in books?" aka "how present poetry for enjoyable/successful mass media consumption in any way?" As for my experience with poetry books, I can read through one in an afternoon. I like to take a fair bit of time between poems especially weighty ones and more time at the end of a book to digest. But that, in my mind, makes poetry books really bad entertainment, if half the time I spend with it I have to close it on my lap and toss over in my mind everything the poems show me that I'm trying to process - if I have to spend an hour thinking about a movie to figure it out, it's just a bad movie. Anyway, just rambling ranting.
The best bands, imo, are still releasing albums that are meant to be listened to all the way through. My guess is that books of poetry are similar. The best can be consumed poem by poem but collectively create something larger than the sum of their parts. You know, like Voltron. love that about art. The same can happen at a photography or painting exhibition too. So cool.it stands to wonder why anyone writes or publishes books of collected poems at all
In music there has been a transformation to creating "singles" and having an album be a "collection of songs" instead of a cohesive work of art.
I can read a book of poetry but it has to be a poet that interests me. What poets have you tried to read?
lol Sorry, if I leave this at "lol" it's going to look rude, but as an amateur poet the list of poets I've read is extremely lengthy; here goes but imagine several volumes from many of these and countless unmentioned one- or half-dozen-offs. Louise Gluck - 4+ volumes Sharon Olds Robert Frost Dana Goia Claudia Rankine Danez Smith Dean Young Tomas Transtromer Patrizia Cavalli Charles Simic Mary Oliver Dorothy Parker Edna St Vincent Millay Bukowski Theodore Roethke Neruda Borges Elizabeth Bishop Li-Young Lee Bob Hicok Robert Hass Philip Levine etc etc etc Anything you can name that got named in your college intro-to-various-eras-of-poetry classes, I probably read it.