I was reading one of the many summer reading articles that appear every year - What to Read at the Beach, or: Get Your Red-Hot Summer Trash Right Here! on NYTimes.com and wondered if there are any poetry titles that you would take to the beach.
The summer book list is often filled with guilty pleasures - books that we want to read but are more fiction than literature - and for some authors, making a beach book list might be an insult.
I have reread Moby-Dick several times over a summer, but I don't think it makes the beach list for many people, even though it has lots of ocean in it.
The idea of poetry beach reading came up last month in a conversation I had with poet Maria Mazziotti Gillan. She had given me an advance copy of her newest collection of poems, The Place I Call Home
to take on a trip to Aruba.I said, "This isn't really beach reading" but Maria insisted it was, and that I could read it "right through, like a novel."
I tend to read books of poetry poem by poem, not in order, and sometimes choosing ones to read by titles. Reading the book all the way through seems to me like eating a whole bag of chips. "I eat a whole bag of chips," Maria told me.
So, I did. I read her book cover to cover in one beach day. And it worked. I suspect that I was the only person reading a book of poetry on that beach.
How do you read books of poetry?
Are there any books of poetry that you would put on a summer reading list or take to the pool or beach?
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