My New York trip interrupted my reading of Chinese poetry. I'll get back to it soon, but I need to devour some of my New York acquisitions first.

Some works by Gilbert Sorrentino. I got a first edition of Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things which I haven't read since college. Also A Perfect Fiction, a book of poems which was published by Norton. Amazing that trade publishers were so hip back in the day. Also a selected poems published by Green Integer.

Also published by GI, Lightduress (Celan) translated by Pierre Joris. This is a book to be read and re-read ceaselessly, to be absorbed.

The Hejduk book I mentioned last week. Worth reading and re-reading. I'm going to read more by Hejduk: his works on architecture and pedagogy.

ING by Coolidge. An early work where the morphemes do the heavy lifting. Coolidge invented language poetry in the 1960s. At least one version of language poetry.

Creeley's The Charm. We see Creeley struggling to define a style in these early poems. The ones that don't work at all still tell us something significant: Creeley was not always Creeley.

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I've worked most of the ms. of Intravenus into A- form. Some of the poems cannot be improved much beyond that. In some cases the quality of the original is so strong that it seems relatively easy to make it shine through in the translation. In other cases, despite a strong original, the translation must be endlessly teased until it ceases to be embarrassing. There is nothing to guarantee that a given poem will fall into a satisfactory rhythm.