It was interesting that I was reading Fanny Howe's Selected at the same time as Jordan Davis. The UC press poetry series seems to be steering a middle course. Good-- but not very radical poets-- like Fanny Howe. (Calvin Bedient, Robert Hass, and Brenda Hillman are the directors of this series.) These books can get reviewed in the New York Times (unlike, say, Sun & Moon Press). I love the poem "Veteran," which begins "I don't believe in ashes. Some of the others do." I keep wanting to rewrite it though, substituting my own terms of belief and non-belief. I don't know how to take so much unironic religiosity. Howe is how a language poet? Guilt by association?

My list of poets to read more of this year: Bernadette Mayer, Tom Raworth, early Clark Coolidge.