I considered many topics for this last post.

What can you tell about a person from the poetry she selects?: I like poems about sex, about God (especially if bitter or twisted or odd in some way), about writing, about language, about memory and about history. I like poems that use and reuse mythological motifs, especially Icarus. I like poems with a strong sense of place, and interesting takes on mental illness. I like poems about bodies and about loneliness and about the intangible things which pass down through families. And I like silly wordplay.

Would I recommend the practice of daily poetry posting?: That depends. Do you like lists, and repetitious behaviour? Are you plagued by the feeling that mere reading is meaningless without some output? Are you willing to be bored by poetry?

Would I do it again? Certainly not next year!

Am I Well Read yet? No, no I am not.

Any new favourite poets? Lesbia Harford, I suppose, although my fondness for her is as much historical as it is related to the quality of her work. I don't think I've found a cache of work by a hitherto unknown-to-me author, not yet. I have expanded my familiarity with some - especially Jack Gilbert, Billy Collins, Audre Lorde and Margaret Atwood - but the authors I keep drifting back to (aside from medieval lit) remain Yeats, Banjo Patterson, Jack Gilbert and Adrienne J. Odasso.

1. Borrow liberally from other people who post a poem a day. I follow poetry and exceptindreams, and have recently added poetrysince1912.tumblr.com. Probably 2/3 of the poems I post come from those three sources! Aside from laziness, following a small handful of blogs actually ensures a greater variety of styles and authors than I would necessarily find on my own.

Since one of my aims here is academic snobbery, (and conscious that when I produced a major work in poetry in senior high I was let down in marks by my limited access to or interested in professionally published poetry, relying instead on amateur peers), I limit my reading to poems which have at some point been Professionally Published. I do acknowledge that isn't the gold standard of worth, though, and there are some straight-to-online poems out there I really enjoy but don't post (for instance, the work of Clementine von Radics).

2. Read anthologies. I've tried both single-author and country/period anthologies, and liked the latter better. Thus far this year I've read cover-to-cover the Oxford Book of Australian Women's Verse, and Victorian Women Poet's: An Annotated Anthology (both plucked on a whim from the shelves at the University of Sydney main library), and have started on The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (on a whim from the University of Geneva English Library). I also read the complete (barring one or two poems, the homoerotic ones, which I found in the Oxford Book of Australian Women's Verse) works of Lesbia Harford, and Jack Gilbert's Monolithos. Both of these I liked tremendously. On the other hand, I found the complete works of Audre Lourde too much to wade through - I would have enjoyed them more as single chapbooks, I think.

My preference for multi-author anthologies suits my inner historian, my tendency to interact with literature as a primary source. If find the editorial choices as interesting as the individual poems, and my goodreads review of The Oxford Book of Australian Women's Verse offers some thoughts on the relationship between poetry and history, especially when it comes to racist poetry.

3. Read poetry journals. I'm trying to resurrect the online poetry journal reading habit I had a few years ago. I typically gravitate to fantasy/speculative poetry and short freeverse forms. Lately I've been enjoying Goblin Fruit and Inkscrawl, but I suspect there are more out there I'd enjoy. (Back in '09, Goblin Fruit executed an editor-swap with another journal... anyone remember what it was called?)

And lastly, especially when running short of interesting new poems,

4. Revisit Childhood. For the most part, that means the works of Banjo Patterson and Henry Lawson, which were standard reading in my house when growing up. Occasional attacks of Ogden Nash have also broken out. And Yeats, who was the poet I studied in the last year of high school (and my angsty, hyper-intellectual poetic boyfriend. You can keep your Lord Byron, my inner sixteen year old is sailing to Byzantium with W.B. Yeats). My intention in including these poems among my current reading isn't just a stopgap, ran-out-of-poems measure: it's partly a counter to the intellectual snobbery impulse. Bballads may not be high literary style, but damn, Mulga Bill's Bicycle is FUN.