But last year was a pandemic year, and I thought I might be able to pull it off. And I did. Not only did I read a volume of poems a day, but I took a picture of the book in some kind of setting that was meant to evoke some aspect of the book, and I posted the picture to social media. I had a lot of fun thinking about the photo, and that might have been my favorite part. My reading goal for 2020 was to read 100 books, and I doubt I would have made that goal without the Sealey Challenge.
So as August 2021 approached, I decided I would try again. I knew that I didn't have the kind of swaths of time that I had last year: at the beginning of the month, we would move to our rental condo, and then we'd spend the rest of the month getting the house ready to go on the market, and the month would end with seminary classes starting. But I knew that if I attempted the Challenge, I'd read more books of poems than I would if I didn't attempt it.
I ended up reading about 25 books. Unlike last year, this year, my books were unpacked, so I could revisit old favorites.
Early on in the month, I reread Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977. I took it with me to the FAPSC conference, and I read a poem here and there as I waited for panels to start or ducked out of boring panels. There was a moment when I thought I would need to go to the bathroom to weep. No, not because of the power of the poetry, although the powerful poems do hold up well. No, I flipped to the front and read the inscription written by my best friend who gave me the book as a birthday present. The inscription offered the hope of realizing the dream among others, and I felt my chest cave in. My friend died a terrible death of esophageal cancer in 2015, after a grueling battle through much of 2014. How can she be gone so soon?
I also read volumes published in the past year, like Diane Suess' Frank: Sonnets and Natalie Diaz's Post-Colonial Love Poems. I got them from the public library, which makes me amazed at the quality of our public library. When I get my property tax report, I always imagine that all that money is going to public libraries and public schools.
I decided to end the month with a special treat for myself. I read Sarah J. Sloat's Hotel Almighty earlier this year, and I loved the way she created the text: taking Stephen King's Misery and doing a series of erasures and collages. As I was packing, I decided to do something similar when I came across John Naisbitt's Megatrends, a book I read in my first year of college shortly after it was released in 1982. Yesterday I knew we would likely be without technology at work for the first part of the day, so I decided to see what would happen if I brought the book to work with me. I read Hotel Almighty again, and then I flipped through Megatrends.
I had planned to use the actual book, to--gasp--rip pages out of it, but I just couldn't. There were my notes, like messages from 18 year old Kristin. The yellow highlighting has lasted all these decades. Perhaps I'll write more on that later. So, I chose a page and photocopied it. The segment entitled "The Information Economy is Real" had potential. I also had a tub of old magazines in my office from a vision board station I set up in the student lounge, back when we didn't have a global pandemic, and I could plan these kinds of things. I chose a December issue of Oprah and found some images that went with the collage/poem.
I'll write more about the whole thing when I'm finished, but here's the work in progress:
So, it's been a good month, full of challenges of both the delightful kind and the frustrating kind, and if I'm being honest, I've been feeling more frustration than delight this month. I'm grateful for the Sealey Challenge, which brought me delight. I'm happy to turn the page to this new month of September.
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