Poetry Follow-up

A day or two after that last post on poetry, I realized that I had heard one other relatively famous poet: Gwendolyn Brooks.  She was giving a reading in Evanston in 1996, though I'm not entirely sure what she was promoting.  Possibly a new printing of her collected poems, Blacks.  I actually managed to get her to sign my copy of Blacks, so I am a bit chagrined I forget her the other day.

I was definitely more attuned to poetry through my twenties and even early 30s.  While I am definitely doing more play-writing than poetry-writing these days, I still prefer reading poetry to reading published plays.  At any rate, as I mentioned, poetry is generally not available in the various e-book collections, though Archive.org has a fair number of obscure volumes available for 2 week loans.  (I have to admit that Archive.org plays fast and loose with copyright laws, but they do seem to be the only game in town for poets like Paul Blackburn and Maxine Kumin for example.  And there is something a bit unfair about these poetry books (particularly the long out-of-print ones) only being available to readers in large cities or those that have access to a really good university library.)

While I don't really have a lot of spare time for reading, I am going to try to dive into some of my favourite poets over the next few months.  While this list changes constantly,* right now I'd say my top 10 poets are:

• Paul Blackburn
• Anne Sexton
• Frank O'Hara
• Philip Levine
• Adrienne Rich
• Charles Simic
• August Kleinzhaler
• Ted Berrigan
• Audre Lorde
• Sharon Olds neck-and-neck with John Berryman for the last slot

My favourite Canadian poets are George Bowering and Robert Kroetsch, though I like Atwood's poetry as well (and I recently reminded myself that Dennis Lee is not to be overlooked either).

While generally I prefer getting the Collected Works for these various poets, it can be a real challenge for those poets still living, and it generally means that they put out updated Selected Poems from time to time.  In a few cases, it can actually be worth having a Collected Poetry and then a very good focused work.  I'm thinking of Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems or Paul Blackburn's The Cities, both of which are often much easier to get into than their collected works.  Here's a short appreciation of Blackburn's The Cities.  I was actually about half an hour away from buying a copy of Blackburn's The Cities, even though I own a copy of his Collected Poems, when I came across it in a box of books downstairs (I had been digging around looking for Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth incidentally, which I did eventually turn up).  That would have been most embarrassing to have two copies of it, though I would have tried to get the spare copy into a deserving library.

I probably will not be able to pull it off, but I hoping that next week I finish reviewing this Chinese urbanism workbook and then wrap up four half written reviews for the Canadian challenge.  That would leave me with 4 more to go to get up to magic number 13.  The only way I could possible do that is if I focus on Canadian poetry exclusively, perhaps sticking with the books I actually ordered in the Brick Books sale.  But most likely I won't have the energy, since I am stretched pretty thin these days between work and stressing over coronavirus.

* Perhaps I should be a bit more embarrassed that Faye Kicknosway isn't a bit higher in the mix, though I think my biggest issue is that her poetic output is on the slim side (5 or 6 chapbooks, 1 slightly longer collection and then 2 selected poetry volumes).  I do have quite a few books by Maxine Kumin and Gary Snyder, but they are much more poets of the wilderness/countryside, and I am thoroughly an urban reader.  Other urban poets that didn't quite make the cut are David Ignatow, Alan Dugan, Aaron Kramer, Charles Reznikoff, Eileen Myles and Jim Carroll.