A couple weeks ago, I wrote about another long-term project I’ve enjoyed in 2024, slowly reading through the 584 pages of Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning. Another book I started reading on New Year’s Day? Ruth Padel’s 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem.

Occasionally I forget a week, and then catch up. Actually, right now I can see my marker is stuck in week thirty and my calendar says we’re in week thirty-three! But that’s okay, because the project has served its purpose: I’ve already read as many collections this year as I read all through 2023.

I’m reminded that one can make one’s own relationship with poetry and it can work on its own terms. That doesn’t always mean I understand the relationship. Padel is a poet of no solutions: she exposes what’s there but stands back to allow you to make something of it.

She says, at one point: “You have to make up your own mind. Either the poem persuades you or it doesn’t. But first you have to go with, and try and understand, the flow and movement of its images.”

Elsewhere this year, I ran into this bit from Louise Glück: “There are always two people working on a poem, the writer and the reader.” Gluck landed in my stacks because of a novel: Jon Kalman Steffanson’s Your Absence is Darkness (which I discussed here briefly and also reviewed).

Ironically, when I added this book into my project list for this year, inspired by the idea that long-ago abandoned reading projects could be resumed and possibly completed on another go-‘round, I thought I’d left the project unfinished in an earlier year. But I learned, later, from notes made, that I did finish reading it a long time ago.

Did it simply not stick? Maybe I still lacked confidence. One of the many characters in JKS’s novel muses: “I wish I knew how to read poetry. I’m so stuck in prose.” Which is how I’ve felt for much of my life. Sometimes, I still feel that way.

Certainly the slant towards prose, which doesn’t feel as though I’m stuck…until I think about emerging from that swell of narrative. And there’s that deep-seated sense of not knowing, not understanding, which might be—as Padel suggests—simply a reluctance to “go with” it, to allow for a space where persuasion can occur (but, also, might not occur).

In Feeney’s How to Build a Boat (a novel which I fell hard into, many months ago, for its twinned voices, its acceptance of a quiet kind of chaos and determinedly quiet epiphanies) young Jamie reaches the limit with poetry. “Frustrating? Yes. Trying to figure out the feelings of the poet, and if he’s the speaker, and if they are the same person. And there are some clues, but no real answers Not really.”

But sometimes I feel like I see all the clues (as with Jo Gatford’s poems). I’ve also been really enjoying the ongoing project of reading the newest anthology in Biblioasis’ most-excellent series; I’ve just been on a hunt for Lisa Richter’s poems, thanks to “Whatever It Takes” which I’ve reread so many times now, that I’ve considered just memorizing it. So, on those other occasions, as with a recent reread of Ondaatje’s Handwriting, it becomes less pressing when I feel as though it’s all just flowing past me, beautiful and inscrutable.

So it turned out that my slow-reading project (my make-good-on-my-own-promises-to-myself project) was actually a reread. And it turns out that I could stand to reread some books annually, or pretty nearly so.

When you imagine looking back at 2024 from the end of December, what do you hope stands out in this reading year?

Is there a project or plan that you have been very successfully….ignoring?