What follows is part two of my pillaging The Pushcart Book of Poetry for new favorite poets, presses, and poems:
Poet | Poem | Press |
Marilyn Nelson | “Sequence” | New Virginia Review |
Li-Young Lee | “Furious Versions” | Ironwood |
Mary Karr | “Post-Larkin Triste” | Triquarterly |
Henri Cole | “Ascension on Fire Island” | Antaeus |
Gibbons Ruark | “A Vacant Lot” | Yarrow |
Donald W. Baker | “Dying in Massachusetts” | Barnwood Press |
Jean Valentine | “Seeing You” | American Poetry Review |
Larry Levis | “To a Wren on Calvary” | The Missouri Review |
William Matthews | “My Father’s Body” | The Gettysburg Review |
Stanley Plumly | “Reading with the Poets” | Antaeus |
Hayden Carruth | “Ray” | American Poetry Review |
William Matthews | “Note I Left for Gerald Stern in an Office I Borrowed, and He Would Next, at a Summer Writers’ Conference” | New England Review |
Philip Levine | “The Old Testament” | Hudson Review |
Tony Hoagland | “In the Land of the Lotus Eaters” | The Georgia Review |
Ralph Angel | “Twice Removed” | Volt |
Linda Gregerson | “Salt” | Colorado Review |
Brigit Pegeen Kelly | “Song” | The Southern Review |
Stephen Dunn | “Something Like Happiness” | Antaeus |
Lynn Emanuel | “Film Noir: Train Trip out of Metropolis” | Antioch Review |
Grace Schulman | “The Button Box” | Western Humanities Review |
Billy Collins | “Japan” | The Georgia Review |
Kim Addonizio | “Aliens” | Alaska Quarterly Review |
Richard Jackson | “No Turn on Red” | Marlboro Review |
Brigit Pegeen Kelly | “Blacklegs” | Tamaqua |
Marvin Bell | “The Book of the Dead Man #87” | Poetry |
Cathy Hong | “All the Aphrodisiacs” | Mudfish |
David Kirby | “My Dead Dad” | The Southern Review |
Charles Harper Webb | “Biblical Also-Rans” | University of Wisconsin Press |
James Tate | “The Workforce” | Harvard Review |
Lucille Clifton | “Jasper, Texas, 1998” | Kestrel and Ploughshares |
Kwame Dawes | “Inheritance” | The Caribbean Writer |
Steve Kowitt | “Beetles” | Heyday Books |
Jane Hirshfield | “Red Berries” | The Yale Review |
Rebecca Seiferle | “Autochthonic Song” | Copper Canyon Press |
Brigit Pegeen Kelly | “The Dragon” | New England Review |
Michael Waters | “Commerce” | The Gettysburg Review |
Lance Larsen | “Landscape with Hungry Gulls” | Grand Street |
Robert Wrigley | “Horseflies” | The Idaho Review |
Benjamin Scott Grossberg | “Beetle Orgy” | Western Humanities Review |
Again, many good poems in Antaeus, Poetry, and Ironwood, and also some poets with repeat hits for me such as Brigit Pegeen Kelly, William Matthews, Jane Hirshfield, and Stephen Dunn.
This exercise has put a different spin on the concept of reading like a writer. In addition to reading closely within a poem, noticing what I like on a macroscopic level helps me get in touch with new work uniquely nutritious to my writerly self, so that I may nourish my sensibilities in a more conscious way.