How neurotic is this? I have stacks of books that I’m in the middle of reading pretty much everywhere. I keep one group in my bedroom, a second by my desk, a third by the front door. The group in that third pile are those books that I read when sitting out in the sunshine on my front porch or, less often, at the table in the patio on the back side of the house. In one bathroom I have a couple of non-fiction books I’ve been in the middle of forever – they replaced a history of Philadelphia that took me over six years to read. In another, I have a rack with magazines that I’m going through, everything The Nation & The American Prospect to the Poetry Project Newsletter, Harvard Business Review & Information Week. I can be just a quirky about how I read a publication as well: I sometimes think that the only reason to read Networking Magazine is Steve Steinke’s editorial column. & I’m still plugging away at Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book on my Palm Pilot.

 

Spring is starting to show up hereabouts – fitfully (it’s cold again today after two days with temperatures in the high seventies) – after what feels like the longest winter ever. The first snow storm came early, the first week of November, while the last (or what I hope was the last) was just about 12 days ago. So it’s been five months, give or take, since I’ve taken that “outdoor” stack outside to give it a read. During that time, some of the books that were in mid-read when the snows arrived were shuffled into some of the other stacks. Three that weren’t, because it felt like it would be a violation in some deep way of my own private reading experience, were Lyn Hejinian’s A Border Comedy, Edwin Torres’ The All-Union Day of the Shock Worker & David Bromige’s As in T as in Tether. In Hejinian’s case, the determining factor may have been that each of its “books,” as individual sections are called, are the perfect length for a satisfying single-sitting read. 

 

To which my plan is to add back one book that was in the stack last fall & came inside next to the desk for winter, Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ Drafts 1-38, Toll, and George Stanley’s At Andy’s, plus maybe three new books. There’s a lot of the latter to choose from – I have a bookcase full of nothing but unread books upstairs, plus several stacks (some as much as four feet high) of others for which I lack the shelf space. After much shuffling & hemming & hawing, I think I know the three I’ll start with:

 

§         Jack Collum’s Red Car Goes By: Selected Poems 1955-2000; Collum is someone whose work I’ve liked in magazines for years & years, without ever having read a book, so I’m way overdue

§         Chris Tysh’s Continuity Girl; Tysh is a Detroit poet whose earlier books Pornē and Coat of Arms totally persuaded me that she’s a major writer

§         Dick Gallup’s Shiny Pencils at the Edge of Things, a book I bought after reading David Shapiro’s interview with Joanna Fuhrman in which he sites Gallup as an example of a poet whom the language poets “disappeared”* 

 

I still have to sort through stacks of chapbooks & pick out 4 or 5 to mix into this outdoor stack. Probably won’t get to that until this weekend. There is a rhythm to working through a group of books like this, even as slowly as I do, and the distribution of shorter texts through the batch – the Collum volume is over 500 pages long – seems integral to the process, creating a kind of syncopated punctuation. Given how long it takes me to read a book in this fashion, I get a sort of giddy kick when I complete something, anything – the chapbook as a form is perfect for such psychic rewards.

 

 

 

* I’ve commented on that charge before.