I'm not racing through these books. I'm reading slowly, and reading many poems multiple times. There seems little point in simply passing one's eyes over the contents of 9,000 books! Of course, the amount of attention to each poem will vary considerably. It's not like reading a novel where the tempo of reading is more constant. You might slow down or speed up when reading a novel but you usually won't stop 15 minutes on a page.

Since I'm now officially between projects, this is now my work to which I devote a few hours a day. The next project will emerge out of my reading, in some way I have yet to determine.

I feel that I will start to understand something when I hit about 900 or 10%--a number that will force me out of my comfort zone of already familiar poets and texts. Nobody has written a comment yet here telling me I am insane. Either you think my plan is mere hyperbole or you already know I'm insane and aren't bothering to point that out.

The major categories are poetry written in English, in Spanish, or translated into one of these languages from a third tongue. I will also do some French in the original. I will be reading almost exclusively poetry I think I will admire in some dimension. My feeling is that, with certain popular poets of the day, there is little point in adding me as a reader. I am not particularly needed--as though Mary Oliver's readership would be incomplete without me! On the other hand, I think there are poets who do need me, or someone like me, to read them, that my reading them makes a material difference in the world, even if my commentary on them is very brief.