Rebecca Henderson

I’ve never been much of one for New Year’s resolutions, though during my years in Asia I had a tendency to spend time around Chinese New Year looking back and looking ahead.  Sometimes this meant setting goals, sometimes it meant trying to gain clearer focus on the work I was doing at the time, sometimes it meant celebrating that I’d made it another year.

I don’t even know when Chinese New Year is this year, for the first time in a decade.  Just haven’t gotten around to googling it.  So I must be fully back on a Western schedule, for better or worse.

Before I came back to the States at the end of last March, I ordered several books I wanted to read and had them waiting for me when I arrived.  Old habit.  Order ahead so that everything’s ready on arrival, even though this time I wouldn’t be heading back overseas any time soon.

Among those books, three are by Wendell Berry, a recommendation that came from several places at once, a sure sign that I needed to start reading him soon.  But the books have sat on my to-read shelf for close to a year now, pushed aside for all the writing books and young adult novels that marked my reading in 2010.

So I’ve decided that 2011 will be my year of poetry.  Or my first year of poetry, it’s hard to tell yet.  I cannot push Wendell Berry aside any longer, and I’m starting with A Timbered Choir: the Sabbath Poems 1979-1997.  I want to read a poem each day in 2011.  A Timbered Choir should take me through March or April.

After that, I may start on the collected poems of Emily Dickinson.  I picked up a hardcover copy last spring at Larry McMurtry’s bookstore in Archer City, on my way to see Willie Nelson in Wichita Falls.  There’s a combination for you — Larry McMurtry, Willie Nelson, and Emily Dickinson.  I felt a need to buy something, anything, at McMurtry’s store, and that book of poems for $5 is what I found after four buildings worth of rummaging.

After I spend a while with Miss Dickinson, I’m not sure where I’ll turn next.  Probably someone not from the eastern part of the States, or maybe not from the States at all.  Any suggestions?  I have 365 days of poems to fill.