(no subject)

Take off your glasses. There - look at the tree:
Just rippled by eye-native petri motes
Each light bursts an identical bouquet,
That stamp that the observator denotes.
(In heaven it's how people sign their votes.)
The wall behind, a stable smoke of gray
At several distances, you now can see
Must be a syrup of such stampospheres
Interimposed past easy recognition.
How many symbols slip past eyes and ears
By virtue of ubiquitous position?
Though on her own toys every daughter dotes,
What is about things is what isn't ours.
Unreading us from it is what empowers.

(no subject)

57. The Sound and the Fury (2nd)
58. The Book of the Duchess
59. Mrs. Dalloway (2nd)
60. Emerson by John Jay Chapman
61. Antigonick
62. The Dead (3rd?)
63. The Ruined Cottage/The Brothers/Michael (Nth)
64. Red Cavalry
65. I Am - Selected Poems of John Clare
66. Selected Poems of Charlotte Smith
67. Worldly Hopes
68. Things Fall Apart
69. Holderlin's Odes and Elegies, tr. Hoff
70. The Cherry Orchard, tr. Mamet

Antigonick is the first book of Carson's I didn't particularly like.

Things Fall Apart did what I assumed it would but much better than I'd have imagined.

The book new to me I most enjoyed this year was Great Expectations, though My Antonia was stiff competition. Among shorter works I loved Bishop's prose things, especially those tying in with her verse. The evolution of Clare's nest poems was pretty fascinating, too, as were some of the Red Cavalry stories (which Johnson admits he ripped off when writing Jesus' Son - in retrospect I do see it). Best reread was probably The Dead, after that some bits of Blake and Holderlin. Also Shakespeare, The Jew of Malta, Stevens, Bishop, the early books of The Prelude etc.

(no subject)

"[A]fter his wife's death in 1847 he drank heavily and died mysteriously in Baltimore."

Makes it seem as though dying is a repeated, habitual action like the drinking. Which I guess in Poe it kind of is.