What I'm Reading #2/3 - The Lightning Round

I'm a bit busier than I'd expected this semester (isn't that always the case?) and this little project keeps getting bumped to the bottom of the list. I still think keeping an annotated bibliography is a good idea, I'm just not sure how good. So today, I'm setting a timer for 10 minutes. Whatever I can do in that amount of time, great. Here goes:

For Class:

Fried, Michael. The Next Bend in the Road. University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Fried is a poet and an art historian, and (as expected) many of his poems are ekphrastic. While I think these poems do what they set out to do, it's not a project I'm terribly interested in pursuing. I do wonder, though, how Fried defines "prose poem," as many of his read more like museum plaques than poems.

Kleinzahler, August. The Strange Hours Travelers Keep. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

If you followed my link the other day, you would have found Kleinzahler's interview at bookslut. I linked it because I think it's amusing, but also because his irreverence is one of my favorite qualities of his poetry. I imagine Kleinzahler to be the middle-aged guy at the party who drinks too much scotch, hits on 25 year old women, and tells stories about French hookers while smoking a giant, nasty-smelling cigar. And usually, I love that guy (although yes, sometimes he can be creepy). At any rate, I liked the book.

*

Uh-oh. Ten minutes are up. I don't get many points for that performance.

Here's what I didn't have time to mention:
David Shipler, The Working Poor (the primary text for my freshman comp classes)
Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook
Miscellaneous texts on rhetoric/rhetorical theory