Books++

This afternoon, I bought stuff. Mainly books. Stopped by Barnes and Nobles and had a list of things that I was interested in tracking down.

I got a cookbook. Mainly because I can’t cook very well. I know how to make a handful of things, but not much beyond that. You would think, with a family in the restaurant business, that I would have learned to cook well. But I did just about every other job, except work in the kitchen. I’m not sure if this was by intent, or by happenstance. I can easily see, though, my father not wanting me to cook for fear I’d stay in the restaurant business.

I also got two books that I heard of via Neil Gaiman, author of the Sandman comic series. Side note – I can’t say enough good things about Sandman. If you don’t know this series, do yourself a favor and go find a volume. The storylines are smart and complex, the characters are rich… every six months or so, I find myself going through all of the volumes again. And each time, there’s something surprising or new that I’ve missed.

In "The Sandman Companion" by Hy Bender, there are a few book titles that are mentioned when he interviews Gaiman. Two of them ("Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" and "A Dictionary of Angels") I managed to find. Should be interesting stuff.

And finally, I decided I needed some new poetry to read. Matt and I were talking late last night, and bemoaning how little poetry we read nowadays (as compared to when we were in school). Even then, at least for me, I always read fiction much more than poetry, despite the fact that I was concentrating on writing poems. In an odd way, I’m drawn to fiction more as a reader, it feels like. I can name a ton of novels/ or short story collections that I genuinely like, cover to cover. But with poems, it’s usually a little poem here, a little sonnet there. It’s never full collections that awe me – it’s always the singular piece.

At any rate, I felt that I needed to branch out beyond my current books. I have this habit of falling into routines, and books are no exception. I’ve gone back over the same books of poetry for a long while, and I want something else.

And how terrible is this? I got "good woman" by Lucille Clifton. I knew some of her work through the Poulin anthology (Contemporary American Poetry), and liked the poems I read. But the main reason I chose her over others?

The poems were short.

My attention span is crap, and I’ve always favored shorter poems. One pagers, mostly. Two I can usually handle. But the lengthy epics, the four part poems that sprawl across double digits… I could never fully get excited by. Perhaps this is a flaw with younger poets; perhaps it’s just me. And I know page length is an arbitrary measurement. But I like my poems compact. Succinct. I have no love for endless trains of adjectives and ornamentation.

I could give a shit about the change in seasons. I don’t care how lush the grove looks, or how the trees sway in the wind. Give me a single lemon.

Let me chew.