• Harryette Mullen: Urban Tumbleweed (Graywolf, 2013)

I started this “Finished” experiment on the last day of 2018, and I just realized we’re approaching halfway through the year, so it seems appropriate to have a midway check-in.

I have logged 41 poetry books since the week starting on the last day of 2018, and that number would be higher if I included the four or five books I abandoned. The initial “To Be Read” shelf held just under seventy books, so you’d be forgiven if you thought this meant I’d managed to complete well over half of all the books on my TBR shelf.

But these numbers don’t tell the whole story. I’ve bought 17 additional books of poetry this year, so I still have (consults a calculator…) almost 45 unfinished (or unstarted) books waiting for me to get around to them. I’ll never cross the finish line if it keeps receding before me (said every bookworm ever).

However, I consider this experiment a complete success so far. It has encouraged me to actively engage in reading poetry almost every day, and it’s also made me realize just how difficult it can be to do something you love. If I struggle to find time to read poetry, then how much harder is it for people with a far more casual relationship to it?

It’s much easier to find the time for things we’re addicted to rather than for the things we love.

For now, I will continue to post weekly updates, but I may choose to go monthly for August or September, and give myself a chance to focus on a few more longer books (like Laura Kasischke’s collected poems, or Geoffrey Hill and JH Prynne’s enormous collected doorstops).

And at this point, I’m definitely planning to take this through to the end of the year. And beyond? We’ll see.

• Tomas Tranströmer (Bly, trns): The Half-Finished Heaven (Graywolf, 2001, 2017)
• Jenny George: The Dream of Reason (Copper Canyon, 2018)

• Tomas Tranströmer (various translators): For the Living and the Dead (Ecco, 1995)

Another week in which I didn’t actually complete anything. I’ve been drifting through some poetry collections that are re-reads for me, but the bulk of my reading has been non-fiction and several novels.

Nothing. Between Anniversaries, which I just started last week, and pushing almost everything else aside to finally finish Through the Eye of a Needle, I have devoted very little time to reading poetry.

• Melissa Stein: Terrible Blooms (Copper Canyon, 2018)
• Ada Limón: Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015)

Limón: Before buying her book from the publisher’s booth at Wordplay last week, she was only a name to me.

There is a popular trend in the current era to strive for a very informal, conversational style. When done poorly, it’s insipid, self-indulgent, and therapeutic, like reading someone’s diary. I found her best poems to be all the more powerful precisely because of how deftly she employed a quotidian voice that at times almost verged on clumsy, only to tighten up into a musical clarity all the more surprising.

I did find the collection to be a bit uneven, but that’s not remarkable; I find most poetry collections uneven.

Despite a short trip to Florida and other distractions, I somehow managed to finish three short books this week.

• Whitman: Leaves of Grass (1855 Edition) (Penguin Classics, 1986)
• Ron Padgett: Big Cabin (Coffee House, 2019)
• Todd Boss: Closer than Home (self-published chapbook, 1993)

• Christopher Logue: War Music (FSG, 2015)

This book is sort of a cheat: it’s a new edition of a book I’ve already read, gathering some new material I hadn’t seen before. I only read those sections, and browsed the rest; it definitely merits a cover-to-cover re-read.

• JH Prynne: The White Stones (NYRB, 2016)
• Claire Wahmanholm: Night Vision (New Michigan Press, 2017)
• Claire Wahmanholm: Wilder (Milkweed Editions, 2018)
• Ronald Johnson: ARK (Flood, 2013)
• John Matthias: Collected Longer Poems (Shearsman, 2012)
• Jim Harrison: Dead Man’s Float (Copper Canyon, 2016)

Johnson: I’m not sure I actually read the whole thing. I started at the beginning, but then opened it randomly further in, and simply wandered about after that. It’s not a poem you read, it’s a poem you live inside of.

Matthias: Old-school high modernist. These poems are direct descendants of Paterson and the best of The Cantos (and The Best of The Cantos would, by the way, be a very short book, including not much more than the Pisan cantos.) John Matthias could be read comfortably alongside Geoffrey Hill or Peter Dale Scott as well as Lyn Hejinian or CD Wright.

Extremely smart, lots of footnotes, and with a startling music, as bewildering and mesmerizing as hearing bebop for the first time.

Harrison: I put off reading this for a year because it is the last new poetry by Jim Harrison I’m ever likely to see, barring any unpublished manuscripts they find in the cabinet behind the bourbon.

Jim Harrison was this country’s Han-Shan. He acknowledged magic with a shrug, sometimes gravely toasting the gods with cheap red wine, sometimes exuberantly giving them the finger. Angels don’t fly; they crawl on their hands and knees, laughing and weeping at the same time.

This month, I’m going to let myself off the weekly hook, and try instead to complete several longer books by the beginning of May.

Several book-length poems have resisted my attempts at progress for too long: they always get passed over in favor of the short, skinny things, which always seem so temptingly easy to get through. (The shorties are certainly easier to throw in my bag, so I tend to grab one or two of them, rather than one of the bulky epics.)

So, for April, I will focus on getting to the end of two or maybe three of the big books. This means there will be no updates on my progress until just before Beltane.

• AR Ammons: Selected Poems (Library of America, 2006)
• Ursula Le Guin: So Far So Good: Final Poems 2014–2018 (Copper Canyon, 2018)

• Aimee Nezhukumatathil: Oceanic (Copper Canyon, 2018)
• Rosemary Tonks: Bedouin of the London Evening (Bloodaxe, 2014)

This is the first week that I haven’t finished reading any book of poetry, and there are several reasons for this.

First was an influx of new books (and not just poetry) that I bought last week during Sixth Chamber’s last week of business, which swamped my TBR pile.

Second was two long nonfiction books I’m reading, both engrossing; one of which I’m sprinting through the last 100 pages. I’ve therefore been juggling the two to the exclusion of poetry.

Third was that I’m trying to finish several poems of my own which are still in draft, and I’ve been finding it hard to read poetry while also trying to write it. (This isn’t always true for me, but it has been recently, for whatever reason.)

Last was the death on Friday of WS Merwin, which meant any other reading was put on hold as I pulled my Merwin off the shelf to revisit his work.

• Tracy K Smith: Life on Mars (Graywolf, 2011)
• CK Williams: The Vigil (FSG, 1997)

The third week in a row with only one completed book.

• Paisley Rekdal: Imaginary Vessels (Copper Canyon, 2016)

• Basho (Corman, trns): Backroads to Far Towns (White Pine, 2004)

Cid Corman perfectly captures the diaristic tone of Basho’s haibun. Informal dispatches from a roadtrip. I’ve read many translations of this work, but this was the first one that made me wish Wim Wenders would make a movie version of it.

• John Taggart: Is Music (Copper Canyon, 2010)

• WS Merwin: The Lice (Atheneum, 1967; Copper Canyon, 2017)
• Anslem Hollo: Guests of Space (Coffee House, 2007)

This may be the first week I finish only one book, if that. In fact, this may be a zero books week.

I’m pushing slowly through several longer things while trying to get to the end of a few shorter ones. But I’ve been fighting a cold, and I haven’t been able to focus on much more than my binge-rewatch of The Wire.

• Galway Kinnell: Three Books (Mariner, 2002)
• Tomas Tranströmer (Fulton, trns): The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems (New Directions, 2006)
• Nicola Stӑnescu (Cotter, trns): Wheel with a Single Spoke (Archipelago, 2012)

Stӑnescu: He bears a strong resemblance to early Residencia-era Neruda — that wild, defiant surrealism that’s almost violently playful. (Pairs well with Andrei Codrescu who, of course, sees Stӑnescu as a profoundly important influence.)

• Harryette Mullen: Recyclopedia (Graywolf, 2006)
• Linda Gregg: In the Middle Distance (Graywolf, 2006)

Gregg: Mostly harmless. A few bright and surprising poems in an otherwise pedestrian collection. Minimalism is one thing, but not quite going far enough is another. Some poets benefit from seeing many of their poems together, others are better one isolated poem at a time. Linda Gregg, for me, seems to be among the latter.

• Paul Celan (Joris, trns): Breathturn (Green Integer, 2006)
• GS Giscombe: Prairie Style (Dalkey, 2008)
• Rimbaud (Ashbery, trns): Illuminations (Norton, 2011)

• Larry Levis: The Widening Spell of the Leaves (Pittsburgh, 1991)
• Erin Belieu: Slant Six (Copper Canyon, 2014)
• Mary Ann Caws (ed): Pierre Reverdy (NYRB, 2013)

Levis: Fluent, grounded, and stunningly virtuosic.

• Ken Babstock: Days Into Flatspin (House of Anansi, 2001)
• Ursula Le Guin: Wild Angels (Copper Canyon, 1975/2018)
• Shirley Kaufman: From One Life to Another (Pittsburgh, 1979)