Finished Winesburg, Ohio. I love that book.

Still reading Eleanor Cook's great book on Wallace Stevens (Wallace Stevens : Poetry, Word-Play and Word-War). On "The Man with the Blue Guitar", she quotes the final canto:

XXXIII

 
That generation's dream, aviled
In the mud, in Monday's dirty light,

 
That's it, the only dream they knew,
Time in its final block, not time

 
To come, a wrangling of two dreams.
Here is the bread of time to come,

 
Here is its actual stone. The bread 
Will be our bread, the stone will be

 
Our bed and we shall sleep by night.
We shall forget by day, except

 
The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.

"The imagined jay" - jumped out at me. I've been imagining J-jay in many a way, for a while.

First some reviews by William Logan, then the book of essays by D. Justice, have got me looking in new directions. Reading Geoffrey Hill now, another powerful writer I've passed over for a long time. Forces me to focus more closely on the issue of rhythm.

Justice has also got me reading Sherwood Anderson, too. I may be the only person in America who never read Winesburg, Ohio in high school. It's a treasure.