Incendiary Lit

I have a bad habit, or a good habit, depending on how you look at it, of buying books that look interesting, despite the lack of time and already mountainous pile of books (I’m not even mentioning the nonfiction books on Easter Island, Peru, Oak Island, mythology etc etc) that I haven’t been able to read more than a little bit of, and it’s really annoying. Late night amazon.com shopping sprees are responsible for many of these, the rest are from discount shelves/bins. Today I’ll focus on poetry, and bear in mind, there’s a ton more in the stack of “to be read” beyond, and in some cases above these.

The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems of Albert Goldbarth. (also include Saving Lives by Albert Goldbarth). I wrote a paper on Goldbarth in the Fall Semester, and it very nearly caused me to apply to University of Wichita to seek his tutelage. Yeah. He’s really, really good. Unfortunately MFA applications were a gigantic bust from my grand plans, so I may still apply… it’s just, you know, Wichita. But that’s one of the only things the program has going against it, so anyone who doesn’t mind the small town school, check out their MFA website here. Goldbarth’s the SHIT. Both of these books were the result of a late night Amazon spree.

Toward the Winter Solstice by Timothy Steele. Dr. Bill Mohr’s one of the greatest assets possible for CSULB. He’s been in the LA poetry scene for decades and with Momentum Press published many tremendous artists. He introduced us to Timothy Steele, who is kind of a neo-classicalist. Or something like that. He usually writes with a very well handled rhyme scheme, but the subject matter is more of a gritty everyday sort, similar to Phillip Levine. I think, at least, from the little of the book I’ve managed to find time to read. Very good stuff. He handles meter and rhyme with such ease, I’m hoping to take this book on the next roadtrip I embark upon and hopefully learn a thing or two about rhyme while I’m at it. This was a $1.50 bin book at school. Who can resist that?

The October Palace by Jane Hirshfield. She’s a buddhist, I think, and she’s highly acclaimed. I can’t quite remember which poems of hers I’ve read in classes or journals, but I know there’s been quite a few. I’ve picked this book up a few times and read a couple poems, but still, less than half probably, and never in ideal poetry reading settings. This was a $5 purchase in a bookstore outlet (which was located in a vacant supermarket in Santee, CA).

The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees. Again, Bill Mohr turned us onto Kees, a wonderful poet and his collected poems is, what I’ve read, a solid collection, but with school’s reading, and then my own writing and trying to keep up a little, at least, with journals, simply no time. This was actually not an amazon spending spree. I thought about this one before I was at a computer.

…to be continued…