How to read the complete poetry of whoever

you know who's a real fucker for this, whitman is.

Whitman with his constant revising is somewhat of a fucker for this, but at least his book is still broken into smaller books; Dickinson's Complete is just a ton of poems (1776, as I recall?) done chronologically. As if you should just read the whole thing.

I don't really like chronological complete works because I like reading books from the beginning, which they make kinda unrewarding for prolific poem-a-day sorts.

The Bary MacSweeney forces you to watch a man drink himself to death, it's the hardest read I've ever read. It's good, it's great, but fuck me it's horrible.

i found also, with williams, that though i had read some williams - the little selection published by i think dover?, and paterson - and felt it click more than most any poetry i had read, confronted with everything he wrote i started losing interest from poems too often not clicking for me. so it was nice to have them all in once place so i could flip through and find, say, similar-looking poems, which was a good way for me to branch out based on things i liked or understood, especially given williams' poetics (and, contrarily, because the similar-looking poems would end up not being so similar as i might have hoped, forcing me to become receptive to some new feature of his writing).

with dickinson - i'm still working on that yo - you could maybe follow johnson's advice and only read through the hot years, at first. or you could check out the selected from the library, read the ones a lot of other people will have read, and then use that as a foothold into the larger volume.

hearing about varying dash length and DASH SLANT (jesus) makes me worry that i'm missing a lot by reading normalized versions of her poems (even WITH the idosyncratic caps and dashes included).

In her hottest year Emily Dickinson wrote 365 poems. Both her most productive and her most famous-poem-creating year! Even that is, frankly, a lot. But then I am always more drawn to poets who left behind relatively little, or at least left it behind in coherent "books". I will be a bit sad when the truly Complete Jack Spicer is published and it's not just the one book of Collected Books of Jack Spicer.

still useful to buy 'imaginations' anyway if you'd like to be able to read 'kora in hell', not that it's all that straightforward a read (to me anyway).

the others i have i read randomly

As a result, I'm not certain if I've read any of these collections from cover to cover, but I have read over 80% of most of them - and I have read far, far more of their work than what anthologies present as the quasi-official face of the poet.

NB: I hate it when editors (most often the poets themselves in old age) tinker with the tried-and-true chronological method of earliest first and latest last. Reverse chronological order is especially irritating.

And there is only one approach to getting through the poetry that works for me: reading on the toilet.

Otherwise, you'll never manage to get through more than half a Whitman poem.

x-post or, uh, there's all that, yip

It's also perhaps good to keep a little Emily Dickinson on hand as a tonic, and because they are two poles of American mythos of "what a poet is".

here's another half-serious suggestion that i have not completely followed through on myself: buy a very small copy so that you can carry it around with you and read from it at random in idle moments. for some reason i have a hard time shaking the idea that i should read the later edition as a COMPLETE WORK ie in order and in a sustained way, which seems so far to have failed me. but poking here and there now and then has been rewarding.

you could try reading some secondary sources first! i think social-biographical history helps a lot with a poet like W. -i- don't know what the fuck the US was like during his lifetime, especially the lives of the proles like he likes so much.

josh: i kind of want that norton whitman except for how fugly norton editions are, especially on bookshelves. yr second-paragraph advice is something whitman suggests in one of the poems, although i think the carrying-it-around was meant to be more important than what you do with it in idle moments. also it was meant to be touching your skin and also there was some metaphorical weight with it i'm choosing to disregard right now i think.

This review, which I'm afraid I don't like, reminds me of a persistent problem in writing about poetry, especially writing about a poet for an audience of people who don't specialize in that poet. Namely, the tendency disproportionately to quote lines of poetry that say what the poet thinks about poetry or what the poetry is supposed to be doing.

Such lines can sometimes be interesting or compelling, but there is also something suspect about them as a resource. It's easy to say you're doing something, but that isn't really evidence that you're doing it, let alone doing it well.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n04/colin-burrow/rancorous-old-sod

or that you know (what it is) that you're doing, even if you are (doing it) (well)

no ideas but in things!!