Ever since I have known John, since we were graduate students in English Literature way back in 1982, I have been impressed with how Catholic his reading tastes are. In reading habits he seems to be a Renaissance man in the truest sense of the word.

Alas, I can make no such claim. I love to go into bookstores, but I almost always go first to the back, to the dusty corners where the poetry sections inevitibly are, and I stay in that little world until the people I am with pull me out of it by force. I love to muck about, pulling first one title down, reading or glancing at a few poems, and then pull another title down and do the same thing, etc. Sometimes there are books I'm on the look out for, such as the Collected Poems of James Wright, but I mostly search for those titles in used bookstores. Now, within poetry I'm very catholic - I pick about the old masters and the young Turks with equal aplomb - but I'm afraid I stay all too often within the confines of poetry.

However, I must say that within the past two years I've been looking more at non-poetry books that I need be aware of in the courses that I teach. Lately, that has often been in either criticism or children's literature. And I've also been trying to do more "non-professional" reading. Thus, I've just finished THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE by Paul Auster, I'm currently reading BELOVED by Toni Morrison, and next on the list is a non-fiction book about Captain Kidd the pirate.

So, there you have it -- the confessions of a . . . poetry junkie.