“You just go on your nerve.”

Dorianne Laux took a pin to our significant, pastoral, first-person confessional, lyrical, serious, West-coast bubble with a great talk on Frank O’Hara. She read several of his poems and traced the influence of finding universality in absurdity through to such contemporary poets as Tony Hoagland and Charles Simic. The progression from the whimsical to the profound, through a conversational, person-to-person address, has had a significant influence on contemporary poetry. More importantly, it refreshes the language and encourages us writers to begin with a vital aspect of the creative process: not taking ourselves so seriously. It reminds me of the liberated-yet-practical turn of mind expressed by Marvin Bell, that, “on the one hand, it’s poetry! On the other, it’s just poetry.” Thanks heavens for the iconoclast.

• 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?