Ten Books piled at my doorstep

The title of this post is not an undiscovered work by Ezra Pound, but the reality of what I found waiting for me when I arrived home last night. I had ordered quite a few books from different suppliers (all via Amazon), and for some reason nearly all of them arrived on the same day.

I had picked up Dylan from school, and Sunyoung and Bridget were in the East Mountains for tutotring with Christine, and when we opened the door there they all were. Dylan and I opened them all together in the floor of the living room, with the swamp cooler full blast (still having record heat in the 100s).

The books were: Pound: Poems and Translations edited by Richard Sieburth, The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats edited by Richard J. Finneran, The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes edited by Arnold Rampersad, W.H. Auden Collected Poems edited Edward Mendelson, Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, Henry James’s The Ambassadors, and The Playwright as Thinker by Eric Bentley.

I’ve got lots of stuff to read on the Novel (in terms of Critical sources), and have read most of the Novels on the department reading list for Modern British and American, but poetry is an area I’ve not touched for many years, so I think I need to emphasize it.

I read in the Pericles Lewis Intro to Modernism up to the discussion of Modern poetry, which focuses on the wasteland, and I will drop that book for now, and dive into reading poems from the list, with as much critical support as I can find for each author. I will probably approach it in the following way:

1)   a reading journal aside from this blog

2)   working through one author’s work at a time

3)   finding critical sources online and from the library

I would like to focus on poetry for the next month, so that by mid-July I can move to drama. There is less drama on the list, and I will probably spend from mid-July to the end of July on the Drama. I have three novels on the list and I will begin reading those in August, hopefully finished with the reading and note taking by the time family returns from Korean near the end of August. The Novels, I think, will be Absalom, Absalom (Faulkner), The Ambassador (Henry James), and To the Light House(Virginia Woolf). Depending on time I will also read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Gertrude Stein), and House of Mirth (Edith Wharton)….We’ll see. Also, as I read some of this may change, as I make connections, and decide to focus on works of some writers more than others.

It’s important to make thematic connections across authors, nations, and genres. That’s the plan for now. Well , I ‘d better stop writing and start reading!!!