In light of the appallingly large number of unread and under-read books of poetry currently glowering from the two full shelves behind me, I have resolved to finish reading two books of poetry each week this year. I’ll be keeping track of what I finish with this tag.

For quite a few reasons (which I won’t bore you with), 2006 was the worst year of my life, and it ended badly. I am heartily glad it’s over, even if a year is an arbitrary demarcation. All that was bad about 2006 fell within the human universe, and such demarcations, tho arbitrary, are also within the human universe. I am therefore confident that the latter will have a real effect upon the former.

I am thankful for the good things that happened during the calendar year of 2006, even tho I could count them on one maimed hand. I am taking seriously the notion of the “new year’s resolution,” never having done so before, and one of my resolutions is to step to the side of polarities. Black-and-white, for example, is a polarity; but to introduce “shades of grey” simply defines a new polarity of “black/white” v. “greys.” Instead, I resolve to look for a meaningful third space.

Also, I simply have a thing against the number six, and I’m glad to see it go.

Walter Ong, Orality & Literacy:

The personal diary is a very late literary form, in effect unknown until the seventeenth century… The kind of verbalized solipsistic reveries it implies are a product of consciousness as shaped by print culture. And for which self am I writing? Myself today? As I think I will be ten years from now? As I hope I will be? For myself as I imagine myself or hope others may imagine me? Questions such as this can and do fill diary writers with anxieties and often enough lead to discontinuation of diaries. The diarist can no longer live with his or her fiction.