Lately, I have come to the conclusion that I am not reading enough. There are so many distractions and I am simply not immune to them – television, video games, and the very computer on which I now find myself.

In terms of getting actual work done, I have taken to bringing my laptop to Port City Java and nursing a small coffee while using their internet. This works because the power of shame keeps me from looking at youtube videos of kittens doing things in a place where other people can see me, so I am forced to actually focus on useful things.

But that doesn’t help me get some reading done.

Recently, during one of my numerically inadequate moments of reading, I was reading The Dragon and the Unicorn, a long poem by one of my favorite poets, Kenneth Rexroth. It definitely seems to be an attempt to pen a west coast answer to such lengthy works as Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems or Ezra Pounds’ Cantos or Louis Zukofsky’s A.

Then I got to thinking about Pound. I bought his Cantos a while back and have intermittently and unsystematically read from it. But that’s not the same as really sitting down and reading it.  Thoroughly and systematically, page by page.

So, I am going to read three to five pages a day, every day, and then I am going to write about what I read here (though the latter may not occur on a strictly daily basis).

Assuming that I take the occasional vacation from Pound and also assuming that, you know, stuff happens, this will take 6-12 months.