26 nov 2005

So much of reading poetry--and writing it--is ruminative and fragmented. An anxious, frustrating searching through books and magazines. The attention flags. There is not that unitary 6-hour experience of reading a novel, or the novelist's feeling of writing through a certain portion of the narrative.

2 comentarios:

Ray Davis dijo...

I've always wondered why I love collected poems (or a stack of little volumes) so much more than anthologies or zines. Maybe this is one of them? The single long poem of the poet's life providing the extended ebb-and-flow attention of a long novel?

Jonathan dijo...

Yes, there are endless strategies for organizing reading to be less fragmented and ruminative. One is to find a whole book of poetry that maintain one's attention.