Puzzle routine...

 I will do crosswords around 9 p.m., the regular mini, midi, and full size NYT for Monday-Fri.  

I will do wordle and connections first thing. I will do pips, easy and medium, too. The difficult level is tedious and I will sometimes get to it later in the day, sometimes not. There is a very easy word search called strands that I will do quickly at some point in the day.  I will do the spelling bee, but I only look for words that use all seven letters (the pangram). I will stop after I find it, but will sometimes go back if there is more than one such word. Often, the word will jump out at me in a few seconds. I don't wanting to be finding 40 words and taking all day to do it. Finding many words makes it harder to find the one word that rules them all. If the word doesn't jump out at me, then I will try later in the day, but never stare at it for more than a minute. 

I won't do Sunday NYT puzzle, because it is tedious and fills too much of the screen. 

What I've read

 I used to read every novel by Philip Roth, John Updike, and Saul Bellow as they appeared. I would read entire books of poetry, not just poetry anthologies, in English when that was the only language I knew. I would read the collected poems, not the selected poems. When I was interested in a poet, or a particular author, I would read everything. 

I have read most of Galdós, something nobody does unless they are an expert on this author. I never finished the last series of the Episodios nacionales.  The summer before grad school, I read all the boom authors, GGM, Cortázar, Donoso... 

I would never just read what was assigned in classes. I would read all the novels of Henry Green, for example, though Henry Green was never assigned in any course where I went to school.  

At some point I lost my love of novels. I read them now to practice reading in foreign languages. I have read Elena Ferrante in Italian... I like to read Murakami in Catalan, etc... I can read in most romance languages.  

A lot of my "reading" is a practice of memorization. So it is a little different from reading prose fiction where you make linear progress but don't remember the words in your brain. I have read Basho in multiple translations and compared them. 

The sheer quantity and intensity of my reading practice explains a lot about me.  Of course, this is to be expected in a literature prof, but I still think I am not wholly typical. For example, I don't know anyone personally who has as much memorized as I do, or who reads as much in multiple languages.  

Library

 One's personal library is a significant scholarly resource. 

Accumulated over the course of six separate decades, in my case, from the 70s through the 20s. It consists of primary sources (books of Spanish poetry, mostly).  A significant collection of poetry of the New York School. I simply bought every book by Ashbery, Koch, O'Hara, Schuyler, and Guest as they came out, and actively searched for rarities. I also collect books by Creeley and Coolidge, and by William Bronk.   

Books of literary theory. A set of Diacritics. A shelf on which are my own books, journals with articles or poems by me, or contributions to edited collections. I have several editions of Frost and Yeats, Williams. 

Not much of my collection has any value or meaning to anyone other than myself, not even to friends and family.  I am donating some books to the public library, which resells them to raise money. Others I am leaving out for others in my department to pick through. One colleague wants one of my bookshelves, not the books themselves. 

What remains will be my New York School collection, my basic Spanish poetry and Lorca books (though I'm giving away some cheap or duplicate editions of Lorca as well.) And some other books that have some personal meaning to me in some way. 

A library will be in excess of what is actually used in scholarship, but also insufficient. One also needs access to a good university library and its electronic resources as well as its physical books.  

Retirement

 

What Arrangements?

 There was a review of one of Keith Jarrett's live trio albums of standards that said the arrangements were nice. In an interview, he said something like "What arrangements?" It was him improvising and the bass and drums playing along. 

On t.v. I saw a video of Chet Baker, playing trumpet and singing with a bass and a guitar, in a nightclub in Belgium. They play things like "Love for sale," standards like that. And at several junctures he gives credit to the arranger (Don Sebesky).  Yet this music does not seem any more "arranged" than Jarret's standard albums. Maybe even less so. 

So the lesson is?  

10 ranks of poet (7) (8)

 7) # 7 is the good poet in a particular style, like a Philip Levine or James Tate. Here we are getting to poets who are actually good, with no apologies. There will be some sense of musicality here, not like the novelist poets who aren't really giving us something to sing to. Of course, these two poets wrote a lot that was not up to the level of their best work.  But you can see why they are famous poets.  Maybe Barbara Guest falls here? I can like some of these more than others. 

8) The poet with a distinctive personality and voice, that makes you think differently about poetry itself. Here I am thinking of Koch, William Bronk, or Ammons. These poets are whole worlds unto themselves. Maybe Notley is in this category, though she might be better than most of these. This category is somewhat similar to 6, but you can easily see why Ammons is better than Brautigan.  

Levels 5 and 6 (out of 10)

 5) The local hero, the respectable mediocrity, the professional academic poet with some claim to fame, like a Celeste Turner Wright. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=100&issue=1&page=41. Maybe a poet working in an old, unoriginal style. Someone who never had an honest critique of their work, or who has very limited range, like a Billy Collins.  

6) The poet without any particular pretension to being great, but who manages to make a good poem or two out of very little (apparent) artifice. A Richard Brautigan, or Charles Bukowski.  You might wonder why it is a poem at all, yet it actually beats out the more respectable and earnest modes we have discussed so far. Sometimes a prose writer writing poems will achieve this level, like a Raymond Carver or like the two I've already mentioned. John Updike writing a poem can achieve a 5 level, maybe a 6. On the same level as a 6 might be a poet like Gilbert Sorrentino, who is brilliant in prose but only so-so in verse, despite his extreme degree of poetic culture. For this level, a poet would have to be have a distinctive personality as a writer, even if the poem itself doesn't come off.  I'm not sure why all the names I'm thinking of are also writers of prose?