"Okay, FB poets, here are my top ten favorite American poets in order: Whitman, Dickinson, Roethke, Stevens, James Wright, Langston Hughes, Mary Oliver, W.S. Merwin, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Naomi Shihab Nye. What are yours?" --Michael Simms on Fb
Lists like this are good mainly as an incitement, & of course to glean new authors to read; my first thought is, as in similar lists of musicians: there are poets who inspire me by one book or one poem they wrote, others i have read all of, & finally there are those who i like in general, without being able to point to a specific work.
Single poems: Phelps Putnam- "Hasbrouck and the Rose", Robert Service- "The Cremation of Sam McGee" [two of my all-time favorite poems]
Single Books: Adrienne Rich- Homage to Ghalib, Berryman's Sonnets, Merwin- The Lice, Millay's sonnets (often collected as a separate book), Ron Silliman- Ketjak, Armand Schwerner- The Tablets, Galway Kinnell- Book of Nightmares, Clark Coolidge- The Crystal Text
Poets i like virtually everything by: Sylvia Plath, Kenneth Fearing, Robinson Jeffers, Laura Riding, Wallace Stevens
Poets who only wrote a little bit (in some of these cases, their main work was novels), but that little bit is precious: Malcolm Lowry, Adelaide Crapsey, Sara Teasdale, Clark Ashton Smith, Ishmael Reed, Elinor Wylie, Weldon Kees
Poets whose practice inspires me, more than individual poems: Robert Duncan, Bill Knott, Mina Loy, Jack Spicer, Walt Whitman, Diane di Prima, Edwin Arlington Robinson
And finally (& this is a practice i think every serious poet should do, at least once), i did make my own anthology, once upon a time:
--One thing that is noticeable about this selection, is that it doesn't have that many American poets, & lots of these aren't even in English originally (a topic for another day!).
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