PS Cottier

I suppose the idea for having a year of reading no prose came to me after listening to someone say ‘nobody reads poetry anymore.’ Apart from being a tad tactless, when the person addressed is a poet, this comment made me think about the comparative weight that the novel gets in society, as opposed to the art form that places language itself at its centre.

Why not see how it would be not to read fiction or non-fiction for a year? Will too much poetry drive me mad? Will that madness be sadly obsessive, or downright Byronic? Or just moronic?

My Year of Living Poetically (thank you Mr Featherstone, novellaist extraordinaire) begins today. Let me clarify; I don’t intend to give up on news or blogs or government forms. I will read articles about poetry.

The Japanese have a form of writing called the haibun, where prose is illuminated by a haiku. I intend to have a year of poetry, illuminated by the occasional book review. Or funding application.

But no novels, no history, no theology for a year. This is my New Year’s Resolution for 2013, amongst more mundane things about haunting the gym and being more tolerant. I’ll be blogging about my efforts and experiences here. In prose, mostly.

We’ll see how this experiment in poetry goes.

Happy New Year!