In one month’s time, I will be nearing the end of the fourth residency of the Pacific University MFA, preparing to head in to my fourth and final semester of correspondence work. I feel as though I blinked, and suddenly have reached the three-quarters-done mark. And, although I have given close reading to well over sixty works so far, I also feel as though I have just begun to chip away at the tip of the iceberg that is poetry. I am thinking about reading mostly heavy-hitting Modern poets in the coming semester, in an effort to fill in some gaps in my experience of their work. Here is my list so far:
- Yehuda Amichai, Love Poems
- John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Poems
- John Berryman, 77 Dream Songs: Poems
- Robert Bly, Silence In The Snowy Fields
- James Dickey, Drowning With Others
- Richard Hugo, The Lady In Kicking Horse Reservoir
- Rolf Jacobsen, The Silence Afterwards: Selected Poems
- Randall Jarrell, The Lost World
- Paul Mariani, The Great Wheel
- Thomas Merton, In the Dark Before Dawn: New Selected Poems
- W.S. Merwin, The Lice
- Frank O’Hara, Meditations In An Emergency
- Marianne Moore, Complete Poems
- Ezra Pound, Selected Poems
- Adrienne Rich, Diving Into The Wreck
- Jon Silkin, New and Selected Poems
- W.D. Snodgrass, Heart’s Needle
- Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
- Thomas Tranströmer, The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems
- Richard Wilbur, Love Calls Us To The Things Of This World
- William Carlos Williams, Spring And All
- William Carlos Williams, Imaginations
That’s more than the recommended twenty works (and notice I have deliberately not added any books about poetry)–so, I will have to trim and tinker.
Any suggestions, anyone?
Similar Articles:
Liked this? Receive new ones in your inbox.
(You can unsubscribe any time.)
