95 Books In 2006, George W. Bush read 95 books. We will do better.

Tenney Nathanson is an American poet suggested to me by my friend Jen Currin — whom we’ll be bringing up to Vancouver to read in March if we ever get each other on the phone, but that’s another issue.

This book got me thinking about American poetics, and Canadian poetics, and what differences exist between the two, if we can indeed qualify them in that way. And I’m not sure that we can. Though this book, evocative of Whitman, is and could only be an American long poem. HOTR is broken into 108 stanzas which have been written out of a variety of other texts by such biggies as Melville, deLillo, Burroughs, Beecher Stowe, Stein, Benjamin, Mailer, Joyce, Poe, Tolstoy, D.H. Lawrence, Marx, and a variety of writers on Zen doctrine. Whew.

What makes narrative. How to read narrative. How to write narrative. On the back, David Shapiro says “Don’t call him difficult; it’s all pleasure.” Yes.