I've been reading some John Ashbery, lately, and, more recently, Elizabeth Bishop, whose work I find very dichotomous in style. She is somewhat known for her attention to detail and her descriptive, objective writings, but her poetry is rarely about her personal life. Not confessional, by any means, but quite detailed from a distance. I may have found this subject matter boring, at one point, but reading her work (and perhaps trying to write poetry of a similar style) teaches you how hard it really is to give a very detailed but objective viewpoint on something, to get really close to something, without developing too much feeling for it. I'm enjoying her work though, if only because it stands as an example of achieving success in writing without too much self exposure.
My reading material has exclusively gone down the "poetry" fork in the road, as of late, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but just the thought of reading fiction now seems unappealing and even overwhelming. I can definitely see myself getting back into some nonfiction, though, namely the newish Richard Brautigan biography. There's also Richard Dowden's Africa, which I never finished and would like to get back into. And, of course, the Dostoyevsky biography continues to stare me down.
Writing front is pretty tame, at the moment. I have a new batch of poems that is turning from a small batch into a big batch (I enjoy using the word "batch" for poems, I think, because I have no talent in the kitchen and therefore take the opportunity to steal that word from the kitchen and use it to my liking elsewhere). They need a lot of editing before I do anything with them, individually or otherwise, so I've been trying to scout out any large chunks of time I can get in the near future to work on that. Submissions have slowed down, since all this new stuff isn't ready. I have an itty-bitty group of poems called This Is Not A Well that I don't know what to do with...they might get folded into the larger thing. There is one really good poem in there that I will find a home for, somehow, as I'm very proud of it.
It should be evident that organization does not exist in my projects, at the moment, which is probably why I'm not a millionaire poet already. Obviously.
Thanks again to everyone who's bought Moon Law. If you haven't jumped on the bandwagon yet, you may do so here.
