On Facebook I was tagged to name 20 books that inspired or influenced me to write poetry.
Can't.
I took this to mean poems from the beginning, that woke something up. That wounded me.
Books is too hard for me, but here's 20 poems I can remember lines from, poems I am sure called to inside me some calling:
--in no order, and with, I'm sure, severe omissions I will regret later--
1. "To Small Frogs Killed on a Highway" James Wright
2. "Carrion Comfort" Gerard Manley Hopkins
3. "Letter In November" Sylvia Plath
4. "Batter My Heart Three Person'd God" John Donne
5. "Death" Federico Garcia Lorca
6. "The Kid" Ai
7. "Lamium" Louise Gluck
8. "To the Black Madonna of Chartres" Jean Valentine
9. "Hamlet" William Shakespeare
10. "Legend" Hart Crane
11. "Les Stupa" Arthur Rimaud
12. "Elegy" David St. John
13. "Herbert White" Frank Bidart
14. "Letter" Larry Levis
15. "The White Fires of Venus" Denis Johnson
16. "The Window" Lynda Hull
17. "Aubade" Philip Larkin
18. "The Waking" Theodore Roethke
19. "Take Me To the Airport" Yehuda Amichai
20. "Desert Places" Robert Frost
I'll throw in the Book of Job as a floating poem, since I went to church first and memorized those poems first, and surely learned my duende there. . .
and three from my teachers:
"The Good Lunch of Oceans" by Alberto Rios
"The Funeral" by Norman Dubie (but I love "Hummingbirds" more. Shit just read The Springhouse Poems)
"Monsoon" by Beckian Fritz Goldberg
. . . . . .
1 comment:
A few of mine:
Song of a Man who Has Come Through, DH Lawrence
Ballad of the Moon, Moon, Lorca
Preciosa and the Wind, Lorca
Rebus, Jane Hirschfield
Bruce Owens: After the first rain/that falls under the flooded house (from A Passage Through Stone)
Relics, Charles Wright
Vespers, Louise Gluck
Carolina Ghost Woods, Judy Jordan
LOs Angeles, 1954, David St. John
These are two Tortured Lips/slipping into dagger sheaths, Bruce Owens
Curse, Meg Kearny
Glassblower, Rumi
xx, Your friend of the Digitalis
Post a Comment