On his blog about 10 days back, Javier Huerta floated this idea: List “20 poetry books (if there are twenty) that made you fall in love with poetry, the books that made you think: I want to do this, I need to do this. What are the books that kept you going? Don’t put down the books that you think you’re ‘supposed,’ to like, but list the core ones, the ones that opened all of this up for you.” (Yesterday I saw that Ron Silliman calls this a “meme,” but I’m only offering it as a revealing exercise.) So here’s my list, which I simply couldn’t hold to 20; the first flush of excitement about poetry sent me off in many directions at once, and I read like a fiend day and night. I’ve tried to put the titles in the order I encountered them (all between 1966 and 1972, when I decided to enter the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of British Columbia), but have kept multiple titles by the same authors together, which is why (for example) I list Snyder’s The Back Country before his earlier Myths & Texts, which I read a few months later.
Laurence Perrine, Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry (2nd Edition)
Robert Frost, The Complete Poems (1949)
T. S. Eliot, Selected Poems
François Villon (tr. John Heron Lepper), The Testaments of François Villon
George F. Whicher (editor/translator), The Goliard Poets: Medieval Latin Songs and Satires
Ezra Pound, Translations
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind
Donald M. Allen (ed.), The New American Poetry
Gary Snyder, The Back Country
Gary Snyder, Myths & Texts
Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems
Allen Ginsberg, Reality Sandwiches
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (the old Signet edition)
Robert Creeley, For Love
Robert Creeley, Words
Robert Duncan, Bending the Bow
Robert Duncan, Roots and Branches
Denise Levertov, The Sorrow Dance
Paul Carroll, The Poem in Its Skin
Robert Bly, The Light Around the Body
Robert Bly, Silence in the Snowy Fields
Robert Bly, The Seventies
Tomas Tranströmer, 20 Poems (tr. Robert Bly)
James Wright, The Branch Will Not Break
Bill Knott (writing as Saint Geraud), The Naomi Poems, Book One: Corpse and Beans
Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems (tr. C. F. MacIntyre)
Wallace Stevens, Selected Poems (ed. Samuel French Morse)
William Carlos Williams, Selected Poems (ed. Randall Jarrell)
W. B. Yeats, Selected Poems and Two Plays (ed. M. L. Rosenthal)
W. S. Merwin, The Lice
Hayden Carruth, The Voice that Is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century
Hayden Carruth, For You
A. R. Ammons, Selected Poems (1968)
Michael Hamburger, Modern German Poetry: An Anthology with Verse Translations
Georg Trakl, Selected Poems (ed. Christopher Middleton)
Serge Gavronsky, Poems & Texts: An Anthology of French Poems, Translations and Interviews
George Seferis, Poems (tr. Rex Warner)
George Seferis, Three Secret Poems (tr. Walter Kaiser)
What intrigues me about this list is the fact that I fairly early wandered into translations of medieval writers, especially Lepper’s awful versions of Villon, because (as I recall) I’d read an essay on Eliot that linked him to Villon and the Goliard poets, and it was through them that I discovered Pound’s Translations. This lead me to Pound’s Selected Poems, which I didn’t understand and didn’t like (as opposed to “The Waste Land,” which I liked but didn’t understand). There are numerous instances of this kind of thing. I stepped beyond the widely anthologized “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (which I didn’t care for) to finally read Leaves of Grass only because Ginsberg saw the old guy in a California Supermarket. Don Allen’s anthology led me to Paul Blackburn’s The Cities, which didn’t impress me, but his troubadour translations in the Divers Press edition of Proensa, which I stumbled upon in The Denver Public Library (!), bowled me over. I also read Olson and Ashbery in Allen’s anthology, but wasn’t inspired to read them in depth until almost a decade later; I still give Olson a try every once in awhile, though he generally bores the pants off me, and I keep up with Ashbery in a desultory way, if only out of respect for the memory of “These Lacustrine Cities” lifting the hairs on my neck and the drifty illuminations brought on by “The New Spirit” and the later “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” In some ways, I think, reading becomes an addiction, and one reads each new book in search of the original high.
The other thing I notice is that I early on was reading in and out and around Silliman’s so-called “counter-tradition,” yet never felt a need to choose one tradition over another. In fact, as I’ve said before, the notion that there are only two traditions is reductive and useless. Ron Silliman and his fellow Manicheans can play with their ones and zeroes all they like, but it can’t describe my experience as a reader or a writer—and I doubt it describes most people’s experience, if yesterday’s Plumbline post by Joseph Duemer is any indication. It certainly makes me wonder why anyone would choose to live in a universe of such limited possibilities.
Not strange or silly at all. Either that or we’re both nuts. Which is fine too. What you say about voices was also, and still remains, part of my reading experience. And I’ve made a lot of nice discoveries in anthologies over the years. One voice, one poem, one poet — even one brilliant passage or line — makes the book worthwhile.
It occurred to me that you both (William and Baj) articulate a turn of mine quite different from mine. Of course I was struck by individual poems, but I was more (if this doesn’t seem silly) susceptible to "voices" early on: Poe enthralled me at a time when I barely understood what was happening in his stories, much less grasped their meaning. The same with poems. I always tended to fall for the
For me it was words first at a very young age; then came the exhilarating, intoxicating mind-body relationship with books; then poems, then poets. But to me, all writers were poets. And prose was poetry. I could never remember or list them all.
You make an interesting point about "poems" vs. "books." The exercise (thanks, Javier!) focused on books but could as easily focus on individual poems, which might be even more interesting.<BR/><BR/>You first. I suspect you’re about to launch another meme.
I’m trying to avoid this exercise for these reasons:<BR/>1. I didn’t keep track.<BR/>2. For me it was poems more than books that mattered.<BR/>3. For the most part I found those poems in anthologies.<BR/>4. I’ve given away or sold some, and don’t remember all the titles.<BR/><BR/><BR/>I’ll think on it.<BR/>If I decide to attempt it, <BR/>I will post the results on K H.
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