Thursday, November 06, 2008

List of some of my favorite poets and their books




I know I've left out some key poets and poems, but that is the problem with lists!

William Blake - Songs of Innocence and Experience; America, A Prophecy; Jerusalem; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

James Dickey - Falling and other poems; Selected Poems; Buckdancer's Choice

Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass


Poetry is the shadow
cast by our streetlight
imagination
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti


Christopher Smart - Jubilate Agno

Lord Byron - Don Juan

Lawrence Ferlinghetti - A Coney Island of the Mind; Populist Manifesto; The secret meaning of things; Northwest ecolog; Starting from San Francisco

Mark Strand - Darker, Reasons for Moving, Stories of our Lives

Charles Bukowski - Screams from the Balcony; Crucifix in a deathhand; Burning in water, drowning in flame; The days run away like wild horses

Pablo Neruda - Selected poems; 20 love poems; Book of questions; Residence on earth

John Ashberry - Collected poems (1956-87); Note from the air

Elizabeth Bishop - The Collected Poems; Geography III

William Shakespeare - The Sonnets

William Butler Yeats - Collected Poems. I am partial to his later poems, but he didn't write many bad ones.

Allen Ginsberg -Howl; Kaddish; The Fall of America; Reality Sandwiches

John Berryman - The Dream Songs

Anne Sexton - The Awful Rowing Toward God; Transformations; To Bedlam And Partway Back; Collected Poems

William Wordsworth - Lyrical Ballads; Recollections of Early Childhood; The Prelude

Frank O'Hara - Selected Poems; Meditations in an emergency; Lunch Poems

Ted Berrigan - The Sonnets; Selected Poems; Many Happy Returns

Sylvia Plath - Ariel; The Colossus; Crossing The Water; Collected Poems

James Wright - The Branch Will Not Break; Shall we gather at the river; Collected poems; Saint Judas

Carl Sandburg - The people, yes; Chicago Poems; Slabs of the sunburnt west;

T.S. Eliot - Collected Poems (as long as they include The Waste Land, J. Alfred Prufrock, Four Quartets, and Burnt Norton)

Robert Lowell - Life studies; For the union dead; The Notebook; Lord Weary's Castle; Collected Poems

Ezra Pound - The Cantos

Arthur Rimbaud - Illuminations; A season in hell

Garcia Federico Lorca - Poet in New York; Selected poems

Nikos Kazantzakis - The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel. I'd always liked this work, but renewed by acquaintance after last summer, when I was in Greece, and had a poetry reading in a bookstore and they had me read several long passages from this book--because they wanted to hear what it sounded like in English. They liked it.

Emily Dickinson - Collected Poems. In my booklet, she was the first great American poet, and right at the top of the rockpile for all time.

e.e. cummings - Selected or Collected Poems.

Wallace Stevens - Collected Poems; The Emperor of Ice Cream; Harmonium. Who'd have thought an insurance executive could write such beautiful, moving, dense, lyrical poems?

William Carlos Williams - Collected Shorter Poems; Paterson; Imaginations; Pictures from Breughel and other poems; Asphodel: That Greeny Flower and Other Love Poems

Theodore Roethke - Collected Poems.

Robert Hershon - The German Lunatic; Into a punchline; The Public Hug: New and Selected Poems

Gregory Corso - The Vestal Lady on Brattle; Gasoline; Elegiac Feelings American

Kenneth Koch - Collected Poems

Jack Kerouac - Scattered Poems; Book of Blues; Mexico City Blues

Richard Hugo - Collected Poems; The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir
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See also, A List Of Lists On All This Is that
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