What Tony is reading

In my continuing attempt to recognize when I am experiencing intuition (I am not only learning how to be a person, I am also learning how to be me), this morning I suddenly realized I had been reading enough about French on the subway while commuting to work for now and that I was starved for poetry--partly the reading of it and partly the writing of it. So, as of this morning, I am reading The Poem's Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody, by Alfred Corn. It's only 142 pp, which means I will probably get back to brushing up my French by the end of the week--unless some other intuition taps me on the shoulder.

At home I am now reading The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. The book is about the Battle of Gettysburg. I'm not a Civil War buff or a war novel buff, but I am finding this a powerful book. Shaara's descriptive language is simple and uncluttered and very effective--and I envy an author who can set up an entire battlefield, including who these men are, as convincingly and vividly and as efficiently as Shaara does early in the book.