Robert Peake

When I was writing technical articles regularly, my blog was an invaluable tool. I could float ideas to a global audience and get great feedback that would help shape my thoughts before my writing went to press and international distribution. Given I have enjoyed dialog with a number of readers and writers whose poetic sensibilities seem similar to my own (Nick, Pearl, Michael, Collin, Carol and Jenni just to name a few), and given Pandora For Poetry doesn’t exist yet, I thought I might likewise solicit feedback on part of my reading list for my upcoming semester at Pacific. Here’s what I have so far:

• B.H. Fairchild, Early Occult Memory Systems…
  
• Robert Wrigley, In The Bank Of Beautiful Sins
  
• Gregory Orr, Concerning the Book that is the Body…
  
• Renate Wood, The Patience Of Ice
  
• Li-Young Lee, The Winged Seed
  
• Louise Glück, Ararat
  
• Dorianne Laux, What We Carry
  
• Joseph Millar, Fortune
  
• Joan Aleshire, This Far
  

As well as a number of books (at least one each) from faculty members with whose work I am less familiar. I strongly suspect I will really like those books as well, but the ones above are an even stronger suspicion based on previous experience with the author.

So, given that list, what else would you recommend? Or do you think some other book by one of the above authors is stronger, or more in line with the rest? Or, if you’ve been following my blog for awhile and think you know what I like, what else might you recommend that has nothing to do with the above list, but still is something you think would inform my study of poetry? Or what do you like, that doesn’t have anything to do with what I might like, that you still think I just have to read?

I received a letter last night from Shelley Washburn, director of the MFA in Writing Program at Pacific University, accepting me into the program starting in January. Over the next two years, in addition to twenty-five hours per week of study independently and via correspondence, I will also attend one ten-day intensive in Oregon each semester and one at the end of the degree (five total). I’m really looking forward to studying with some poets whose work and approach I resonate with, and committing to my writing in this greater way.