A long time gone

I haven't been here in a bit, but that's okay.  I would rather do that than blather some nonsense every day.  I've been reading poetry, mostly.  I found a book by David Berman, "Actual Air" that has a lot of good lines in it.  I mentioned before that I really like good lines, and this one has a bunch of them.  It was a really good exercise, because after a bit I realized that the good lines where the best part of the poetry.  The rest left something.  I wish I knew what it was.  With Mark Strand, the good lines are in service of the poem.  For David, not so much.  The good lines in his book were almost self-congratulatory.  I liked his stuff, but not as much as Mark's. 

Then I started reading X=, by Stephen Berg.  I picked it up at the library and flipped through it, thinking it was pretty readable.  After I got into it a bit, I realized that every line of every poem in the book starts with "he".  For some reason, that really put me off.  I couldn't read the rest of the book once I realized that.  I wonder what he got from referring to the third person like that?  I think part of the reason it put me off was that I lived in a dissociated state until I was 29.  I never referred to myself in the first person.  It was always in the third person.  Nothing every happened to me, it happened to "him."  Oh well.  No poems this time.  I have a couple I'm working on, but they're not ready yet.  I hope all of you have a good New Years, and that the coming year is better than the last one.