Abridged: The Grand Inquisitor by Dostoyevsky
“I am in the wrong city/speaking the wrong language”: The Italian Professor’s Wife by Ann Pedone
This must have been what Amichai was talking about when he crafted the image of translators’ fleeing a conference where their desks had been set on fire: 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (with more ways) by Eliot Weinberger, + all of Octavio Paz’s interventions within the book + Russel Maeth’s Para leer “Nineteen Ways…”.
Reading the kind of poetry I’d aspire to write one day: Leadbelly by Tyehimba Jess, Blackacre by Monica Youn, Darwin by Ruth Padel; Pictures from Breughel and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams
Learning the craft: The Art of Daring, by Carl Phillips
The Seamus Heaney Syllabus: All of it.
But then I also met Jack Spicer, posthumously: After Lorca, The Holy Grail, Golem.
The Sealey Challenge (not all completed in August): Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems; John Ashbery, Houseboat Days; John Ashbery, Some Trees; Sylvia Plath, The Colossus and Other Poems; Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note; James Tate, The Lost Pilot; Jorie Graham, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts; Sharon Olds, Satan Says; James Schuyler, The Morning of the Poem; Kenneth Koch, Selected Poems; Tracy K. Smith, The Body’s Question ; Richard Siken, Crush; Ada Limón, Lucky Wreck; Shane McCrae, Mule; Eavan Boland, The Historians; Barbara Guest, The Location of Things; Alice Notely, Selected Poems; Chris Abani, Smoking the Bible; Ezequiel Zaidenwerg, Lyric Poetry is Dead; Achy Obejas, Bumerán/Boomerang; Rachel Kaufman, Many to Remember; Molly McCully Brown, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded; Eileen Myles, I Must Be Living Twice; Bernadette Mayer, A Bernadette Mayer Reader; Leonard Cohen, Let Us Compare Mythologies; Lisa Richter, Nautilus and Bone; Nathaniel Perry, The Long Rules; Ilya Kaminsky, Dancing in Odessa; Solmaz Sharif, Look; Diane Seuss, frank: sonnets; Jessica Greenbaum, Inventing Difficulty
Other Brooklyn Poets’ miscellany: Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Discomfitingly timely: Where the Jews Aren’t by Masha Gessen
Saw the ad for the TV series, wasn’t super interested in watching but did want to read the book it was based on: Tokyo Vice by Josh Adelstein
Kept falling asleep in the middle of chapter five: Silverview by John LeCarré
Surprisingly, as bad as the internet said it was, DNF: The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbreith
Keep going back to him: A Nest of Vipers by Andrea Camilleri
I know I’ve said it before, but what I like about my current book project is the way it blurs the lines between what I read for pleasure and what I read for work: The Moor’s Last Sigh (for about the sixth time) by Salman Rushdie; The Last Anglo-Jewish Gentleman by Todd Endelmann.
Philologists behaving badly: The Latinist by Mark Prins, Babel by Rebecca Kuang