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A combination of factors, most notably my own lassitude, caused the great poetry project to fall into abeyance in recent times. My reading continued during this fallow period, but was limited to work by poets I’d already written about here – the lesson being to only buy slim volumes, so that I don’t spend weeks on end waiting to finish a poet, before I can move on to write about a new one.
I alluded, in a comment on my post below on Langston Hughes, to the minor political row which was prompted by John Kerry quoting him a few times in his speeches. Hughes was a commie for a while, you see, so John Kerry must be one too (though to follow this logic any further, one would have to conclude that Kerry is also a dead black poet).
Poetry is harder work than prose. Certainly its harder to write, but it takes more out of the reader too, being distilled and concentrated with meaning in a way that most prose is not. For example, I'm currently working my way through Shakespeare's Sonnets at a rate of only five or six per evening.
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