Now what I am reading

There was enough interest in my last "what I'm reading" post to encourage me to offer another. First, a set of books I am re-reading that I first read over fifty years ago:

This nine-volume history of philosophy, in my opinion the clearest, fairest and most balanced, was written in the 1950s and reprinted ever since. I started reading it as an undergraduate after taking my first philosophy course, but only got as far as the volume on Kant. I just hit a wall! Now I am re-reading this volume with the British empiricists because I am rethinking the problems of the relationship between consciousness and the material world.

I just read John Ciardi's excellent translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. I enjoyed the Inferno, but the Purgatorio less and less and stopped before the Paradiso. I am following it with possibly the most striking and unique book of poetry I have ever encountered:

Knit Ink contains two books of poetry, Slate Petals and Stray Arts and two shorter "chapbook epilogues." The first thing to note about those odd titles is that they are all palindromes! We know of palindromes from phrases like "Able was I ere I saw Elba" something Napoleon never said. A palindrome reads the same forward and backward. Bach did some in music. I even did a song as a palindrome. But palindromes in literature are much harder than in music where the cancrizans or "crab" canons are quite common. Anthony Etherin in this compendium takes the palindrome to heights never before seen. The very simplest example is a haiku in palindrome form. I have been trying for days to write one, but, good lord, it is nearly impossible. Here is an example from the book:

Slam ice, dynamic.

A bad loch: Cold abaci.

Many decimals....

Try it! I first read a few of the opening poems and failed to notice any of these structural constraints. Then I discovered that after each book the author explains how each poem is structured. But he does more than just construct nearly impossible palindromes. Here is the description of the poem Colourscape:

An ottava rima (ABABABCC) in iambic pentameter, intersected by a Shakespearean sonnet in iambic monometer--such that the third metrical foot of each line of the ottava rima belongs also to the sonnet. It is preceded by an anagram-poem.

AGH! Since I suspect you don't believe this was possible, here it is:

There are a hundred other structural innovations including experiments with triolets, ottava rima, villanelles and a host of things there are no names for. This is poetry as pure structure and the miracle is that they are also aesthetically fascinating even though meaning is sacrificed.

And I just started this book today, though I first read it thirty-some years ago:

Certainly the best work of literary criticism I know of though disperaged by current English departments.