I find myself halfway through the fifth book in the series, the Fires of Heaven. I certainly hadn’t planned on getting wrapped up in an epic, twelve volume plus fantasy. But these things happen. Granted, they happen to me more than most people.

While perusing the West Wing of the National Gallery of Art with my father over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, I noted that my taste in visual art – paintings and the like – ran to two extremes. I love post-war, avant-garde art and I love dull, boring 18th and 19th century Italianate landscapes – the kind with crumbling Roman ruins and a shepherd in it.

My literary tastes seem to run in similarly divergent directions. I love poetry (though not always the most avant-garde poetics, i.e., Language and Conceptual Poetry) and dense, critical and philosophical tomes. But I also love me some paperback fantasy and science fiction.

I stumbled across the Wheel of Time series in a New Jersey bathroom.

Let me explain: I was managing some political races in South Jersey and was sharing an apartment with my field director who kept a hardback copy of the second book, The Great Hunt, in the bathroom. I read a couple of pages before getting my own place.

I won’t say I was instantly hooked. More that, having started, I felt the need to see how it ended. So I picked up the first book and things escalated and now I’m on the fifth.

I will be the first to admit they are not great literature. The author, Robert Jordan, took a little while to find a voice beyond just that of a second-rate Tolkien hack. Once he’d done so, he found himself falling into the sprawling cast of characters, plot gone out of control trap (which is almost inevitable if you go over ten volumes, I would guess). And he has even less of a sense of humor than Tolkien. But, I keep on reading. And that must mean something.

I should also note that Jordan passed away, lest we be tempted to speak too ill of him.

One day, I will be finished with them and can move on to something else.

I opted to pick up a copy of T.S. Eliot’s late poetry cycle, Four Quartets the other day. A line from the first poem in the cycle, Burnt Norton, provided the title to one of my favorite British television mysteries, Wire in the Blood (I love the first three seasons – but stopped watching after Hermione Norris left the show). The book was just sitting there, waiting for me, at Capitol Hill Books. How could I not pick it up?

Now, I feel deeply torn. Should I admit? Should I say it? I read these poems years ago, and while I knew then that they were not as good as, say Prufrock or the Wasteland, that was like criticizing a novel for not being as good as Ulysses. It’s too high of a bar to fairly set.

But now, when I read the Quartets, it is like reading some young kid’s effort to write like Eliot. It’s a parody of the high modernist style of his earlier works – that youthful student, in the full flush of first encountering writers like Eliot, Sartre, and Marx and then proceeds to tell his elders all about them (I admit – I was that student in my youth). I try to hammer through it, but I cannot shake the nagging sensation that this is bad writing.

But it’s by Eliot? How can that be?

Maybe I need to set aside a little longer and come back to it in ten or twenty years and see if more experience will not favorably color my views.

Adam Roberts titled his second piece on the state of American poetry, published in The Atlantic, “What Makes a Poem Worth Reading?” But the title (perhaps not even chosen by Roberts, but by a copy editor at the magazine) is misleading. The piece is, in fact, about an ongoing battle within poetry. Ron Silliman refers to it as a struggle between quietists and the post-avant garde. Roberts formulates the same division as “mainstream” versus “experimental” – but in both cases, they are essentially talking about the poets about emerged out of the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry tradition and, well, pretty much everyone else.

Roberts seems to come down, if only slightly, on the side of  the experimentalists. Though he also seems to be calling for a new experimentalism – one that is more accessible to the average reader (though he also tries – and fails – to grapple with what it means for a poem to be accessible; in his defense, I am quite sure I could not have done any better).

He ends by saying he will talk in future installments about two movements – flarf and slow poetry – which he seems to feel have potential for bridging the “accessibility” gap in experimental poetry.