What We Are Reading: Poetry & Drama

Discovering Dickinson? Memorizing Moliere? This is the place for you!

I'm 3/4 through Othello and really hoping that Iago gets what's coming to him.

I am going to try to read more poetry in 2013. An easy goal- last year I read hardly any! Right now, I am working on The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry an anthology which I am really liking.

I also want to re-read Adrienne Rich's Dream of a Common Language which is mentioned in Cheryl Strayed's Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. However, my bookshelves are quite a mess, and when I went to look for it, I found two copies of Diving into the Wreck but no Common Language!

Thanks for directing me here drneutron. I've started the year with
Holler by Alice Burdick
Crossing the Water by Sylvia Plath
Sumptuary Laws by Nyla Matuk
The New Measures by A.F. Moritz

I'm also going to order Sharon Olds' Stag's Leap, for which she just won the T.S. Eliot prize. I loved The Father.

I'm currently in rehearsal for P.J. Barry's The Octette Bridge Club, so I'm reading that particular play every day.

Next up on my pleasure reading list is Maple and Vine, which looks fascinating.

I'm reading Please Take Photographs by Sindiwe Magona, and while it has its moments, so far, her poetry isn't nearly standing up to her fiction. For now, I'm disappointed in the poems.

I've just started The Merchant of Venice.

I'm reading Breaking the Code.

I've just started The Comedy of Errors.

I've read several more plays since I last posted. I've read Wendy Wasserstein's Old Money and Isn't It Romantic. I actually preferred Old Money which is rather unusual for work in that the men's roles were quite good!

I also have read Karen Zacarias' unpublished (though several times produced) "Legacy of Light." I'm in a local university production of it, so I am getting very, very familiar with it.

Next up are Clybourne Park, Pygmalion and The Nerd.

I just finished Poem of Ahead Places by Charles Hansmann, which was a chapbook from Kattywompus Press consisting of a single long sequence (review posted if you're interested). I've also just started The Violence: New Series 11 by Ethan Paquin--it's another collection of poems, the eleventh put out in the New Series of Poetry. The title doesn't come up with touchstones unless you put in the series, so I included it, but the collection stands alone. Interesting so far, but a bit more experimental than I'd expected...

I really enjoyed both Clybourne Park and my reread of Pygmalion. Clybourne Park is gut wrenching in places - even unpleasant. I've got to see it onstage.

I loaned out my copy of Larry Shue's The Nerd to someone who needed to read it for an audition, so I'll get to it later. Up this week is The Laramie Project.