Short(?) Post on Poetry

It's possible that I already put up a picture of my "poetry shelf," but I've done a bit of rearranging, and it's as good a time as any to show off a little.

Now in fact these are not all the poetry books in my collection by a long stretch.  What this is is essentially all of the poetry collections that I own published by Brick Books (up through early 2023), the individual Gary Snyder collections (displaced from the downstairs shelves when I picked up the LOA edition of his Collected Poems), Ralph Gustafson (with the 3 volume set of his Collected Poems off to the right with a spare copy of Vol. 1), several books by Lynn Lifshin (2 signed, I believe), P.K. Page's work (also signed) and several chapbooks by rob mcclennan.  Mostly the poetry I have picked up since 2018 or so.  I have a treasured copy of Margaret Atwood's Selected Poems I and II, signed by her at a reading, but they are out of frame in a different book case...  That's the same story with a thick Jim Harrison collection (not signed sadly).

Now the more established poets (at least in my personal canon) are on the downstairs shelves (to the right in the photo below).

So that would be Frank O'Hara, Ted Berrigan, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Charles Simic, Faye Kicknosway, August Kleinzahler, Paul Blackburn, Philip Levin, Wallace Stevens, Dickinson, Merwin, Creeley, Berryman, Eliot, Lowell, Neruda, Lorca, Paz, etc.

Now I was starting to clean up downstairs, and pulled together a large pile of poetry books not on any shelf.  These are mostly books I picked up at the Strand on a trip to NYC in 2023, or at the Trinity or U Vic book sales this past fall, or books from Brick Books in the second half of 2023.

Sissman's Hello Darkness is indeed at the bottom of the stack, along with Delmore Schwartz, whom I thought I had in my collection but apparently not, so it was fortuitous indeed that I picked this up at the Strand.

I honestly don't quite know where they should go.  I'm not quite ready to start deaccessioning books just yet, so they'll probably just go upstairs for a while until I have a chance to read them.  I do want to start with Jan Conn's Peony Vertigo which has a stunning cover.  Anyway, I'm more likely to try to read them (and maybe restart this poetry project I was working on) now that they are in one place.

I was inspired to post this for two reasons.  First, it is subscription renewal season at Brick Books, and I am likely to reup.  Second, I saw the announcement about the Griffin Poetry Prize award ceremony held on June 5.  Sadly, this time around I hadn't heard of any of them (aside from Ben Lerner, whom I know as a novelist not a poet), so I am going to pass this year.  I did go last year, however, and managed to get signed copies of books by Ada Limón, Fanny Howe and the winning book, Best Barbarian by Roger Reeves.  (He dedicated this book to my son actually, and I am storing the book until he can claim it post-university...)  So I may well go again in the future but not this year.  Or probably not.  Curiosity may get the best of me, but I'm feeling a bit over-subscribed at the moment.