Deborah Ager's Blog, page 16

Day 34: Lisa Russ Spaar's Five Favorite Poetry Books

I am always falling in love with poetry. Right now my favorite poems are those by my MFA thesis students, the undergraduates in my two advanced poetry writing workshops and capstone class, the three books in manuscript sent to me by former students, and several newly written or published books by former students and colleagues. Being invited to name five favorite books of poems reminds me of the question my three children would ask me, sometimes alone, sometimes in each other's company: whom do you love the most? All of you, I'd respond, and truly mean it. I love you all the best.

But here are five books I turn to if not daily, then nearly every day, touchstones, texts that provide sustenance, inspiration, consolation. To this list I would add The Bible, King James Version, a collection of Tang Dynasty verses, and the unabridged edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language.

William Shakespeare, The Complete Plays. For me, Shakespeare's most breath-taking poetry is in the plays: Caliban, Ariel, Mad Tom ("Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt and the water; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cow-dung for sallets, swallows the old rat and the ditch-dog, drinks the green mantle of the standing pool"), Ophelia, Hamlet, Macbeth, Juliet, Othello – all offering those incomparable lyric speeches, forging self and truth through language.

Emily Dickinson. The Selected Letters, the Master Letters, the Poems. Who writes like Dickinson? That psychological intensity, word jones, the float of eroticism, despair, God-hunger, meta-poetic awareness, and salvific trust in language? She is infinitely challenging, infinitely illuminating, infinitely daunting: "The soul has moments of escape – / When bursting all the doors – / She dances like a Bomb, abroad, / And swings upon the Hours . . . ."

Gerard Manley Hopkins. Poems and Prose. I love the spiritual and linguistic difficulty of Hopkins's inimitable music. And the soul in crisis, the courage in the poems, especially the "dark sonnets," helps me to live: "Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; / Not untwist – slack they may be – these last strands of man / In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; / Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be."

Charles Wright. The World of the Ten Thousand Things. I can't pick a favorite Charles Wright book (his brand-new Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems is a stunner), but The World of the Ten Thousand Things contains work from four books Wright published from 1981 – 1990, and it includes his masterful series of "self-portrait" poems, the iconic homage (to Cezanne, Lorrain, Pavese), and those gorgeous journal poems, their cyclic engagements with skepticism and belief. "Lust of the tongue, lust of the eye, out of our own mouths we are sentenced. . . . ." Such metaphysical mojo.

John Keats. The Complete Poems & Letters. Could I live without Keats? The Odes burn with the romance of oblivion and ecstasy's vision, that conspiracy of mutability and the beauty of artifice, the "viewless wings of Poesy": "Ay, in the very temple of Delight / Veiled melancholy has her Sovran shrine, / Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue / Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine; / His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, / And be among her cloudy trophies hung."

BIO: LISA RUSS SPAAR is the author of Satin Cash: Poems (Persea Books, 2008), Blue Venus: Poems (Persea Books, 2004) and Glass Town: Poems (Red Hen Press, 1999), for which she received a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers in 2000. A new collection, Vanitas, Rough, is forthcoming from Persea Books in 2012. Her poems appear in numerous anthologies, most recently in Best American Poetry 2008 (Scribner, 2008). She is the author of two chapbooks of poems, Blind Boy on Skates (University of North Texas Press/Trilobite, 1988) and Cellar (Alderman Press, 1983), and is editor of Acquainted With the Night: Insomnia Poems (Columbia UP, 1999) and All That Mighty Heart: London Poems (University of Virginia Press, 2008). Her work has appeared in many literary quarterlies and journals, including Image, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Slate. Her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere. The recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Spaar directs the Area Program in Poetry Writing at the University of Virginia, where she is Professor of English, an Advising Fellow, and the winner of an All-University Teaching Award (2009), a Harrison Award for Undergraduate Advising, and a Mead Honored Faculty Award. She was awarded a 2010 Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia and a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2009-2010. She serves as poetry editor for the Arts & Academe feature of The Chronicle of Higher Education Review.

Day 33: Andrea Hollander Budy's Five Favorite Contemporary Poetry Collections

Babylon in a Jar by Andrew Hudgins: I have read this powerful and stirring collection numerous times. Most unforgettable are the two poems titled "Ashes," which begin in humor and end close to the bone. Hudgins's poems grab at something inside us that is both vital and elusive, and they don't let go.

Song and Dance by Alan Shapiro: This beautifully wrought collection of poetry is pure elegy, and yet Shapiro takes us with him on this personal journey of loss and grief, and reminds us that the language of elegy can inhabit us not only with solace but with beauty.

Vinculum by Alice Friman: If you haven't read a book by one of our most articulate contemporary poets, this marvelous new collection is a good place to begin. Friman understands the fragility of nature, the human body, and our often fractured spirit, and her sense of humor is winning.

Late Wife by Claudia Emerson: In this Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Emerson maps the terrain of the often encumbered human heart. The book is beautifully organized and emotionally resonant. Emerson is a poet who matters.

Then, A Thousand Crows by Keith Ratzlaff: This is one of my favorite books by one of my favorite contemporary poets who deserves much more recognition. Ratzlaff brings together disparate threads and weaves them together deservingly and surprisingly, always with the alarmingly powerful results.

BIO: Andrea Hollander Budy (pronounced BEW-dee) is the editor of When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women (Autumn House Press, 2009) and the author of three poetry collections: Woman in the Painting (Autumn House Press, 2006), The Other Life (Story Line Press, 2001), and House Without a Dreamer (Story Line Press, 1993), which won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Her other honors include the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize for prose memoir, the Runes Poetry Award, the Ellipsis Poetry Prize, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two from the Arkansas Arts Council. Budy splits her time between Portland, Oregon, and Mountain View, Arkansas. Since 1991 she has worked as the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she was awarded the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Her website is www.andreahollanderbudy.com.

Kathleen Winter: An Interview With Serena M. Agusto-Cox

Poet Kathleen Winter

1. How would you introduce yourself to a crowded room eager to hang on your every word? Are you just a poet, what else should people know about you?

I love living in the country, being outdoors. After growing up in Texas, I shipped out to Massachusetts after college, then to California and lately to Arizona to get an MFA at Arizona State University. My favorite job ever was night-shift in a Brookline bookstore, working with lots of other writers. I love the Pacific. I'm not religious; yoga is about as spiritual as I get. I've worked as a baker, tech editor, lawyer and writing teacher. I'm a sloooow reader. The last time I had a TV was in 1989–can't take that stuff. Also, I'm looking for a teaching job! Within two hours drive of Glen Ellen, California.

2. Do you see spoken word, performance, or written poetry as more powerful or powerful in different ways and why? Also, do you believe that writing can be an equalizer to help humanity become more tolerant or collaborative? Why or why not?

Poems can bring us into other people's brains, so poetry can help enhance our empathy, tolerance, interest and understanding by helping us realize how much we have in common with the strangers who surround us. Also, reading poems can connect us to writers from the past, giving us a sense how they were similar mentally, although they lived hundreds or thousands of years before us and probably on different continents. That realization can make us more aware of ourselves as part of the project of the species, and the species and life on Earth as a continuum, and therefore, with any luck, make us more interested in acting in ways that will help folks in the future.

As far as modes of delivering poetry, what I'm most familiar with and practice is the written version, or the written version read aloud in a fairly non-performative way. But I heard Patricia Smith recite her poems in a performative style a few years ago and she was terrific, so maybe I need to get out more. I just heard singer and guitarist Michael Zapruder (Matthew's brother) this month at Gulf Coast's off-site AWP event, performing poems by some of the Wave Books poets, and I loved that show.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

I'm obsessed with swimming, dogs, reading and writing. Also with trying to find, enhance, extend, maintain, and understand fluidity and human interconnections. Also, with getting rid of every single billboard in California, starting first with the ones on highways. (We'll start there and then move east across the country.) Also, frozen yogurt and Tarkovsky movies.

4. Most writers will read inspirational/how-to manuals, take workshops, or belong to writing groups. Did you subscribe to any of these aids and if so which did you find most helpful? Please feel free to name any "writing" books you enjoyed most (i.e. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott).

I'm a junkie for school, so I've loved being in an MFA program, and all the workshops, classes, readings, conversations that involves. Before going back to school I was in several workshops with poets in Sonoma County, Calif.,  and at Esalen Institute at Big Sur. Those experiences helped keep poetry at the forefront while I was working as a lawyer.

The essays in Stephen Dobyns' collection "Best Words Best Order" and Jane Hirshfield's "Nine Gates" have helped me to better understand what I want to accomplish technically, and how to go after it. Maybe more importantly, I find that reading good non-fiction can inspire me to immediately want to write. Donald Hall's anthology of essays by poets, "Claims for Poetry" is useful but frustrating, because Hall includes far too few women poets and far too few poets of color.

5. Poetry is often considered elitist or inaccessible by mainstream readers. Do poets have an obligation to dispel that myth and how do you think it could be accomplished?

Since poetry is joy, knowledge, power, beauty, news (and entertainment), I think helping more people find poetry–either to make it themselves and/or to enjoy reading and hearing poems–is an important mission for poets. But that doesn't mean we have to or should write in any certain way. I guess volunteering is the means. Making yourself available in communities where poetry doesn't abound yet.

6. When writing poetry, prose, essays, and other works do you listen to music, do you have a particular playlist for each genre you work in or does the playlist stay the same? What are the top 5 songs on that playlist? If you don't listen to music while writing, do you have any other routines or habits?

I can't listen to music while I write or edit poems–it interferes with my ability to compose and to hear the rhythms, sound qualities of the words. If I'm reading, I prefer music without words, especially jazz, baroque, or ambient music. Favorites are the Impulse recording of Duke Ellington & John Coltrane, the "Passages" CD by Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass, and anything connected with Jordi Saval.

7. In terms of friendships, have your friendships changed since you began focusing on writing? Are there more writers among your friends or have your relationships remained the same?

Many more writers now. ! Halleluja !

8. How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

I swim, walk a dog, and try to eat green things in between the tortillas.

9. Do you have any favorite foods or foods that you find keep you inspired? What are the ways in which you pump yourself up to keep writing and overcome writer's block?

I write when I'm seized by the energy of inspiration. For me, "inspiration" generally means intriguing words, sounds or phrases that came to mind (lots of times this happens when I'm trying to go to sleep, or have woken up in the middle of the night, or first thing in the morning). So I think I start lots of times with the music of language. A bit less frequently, an image or idea or possible "subject matter" will occur to me and get me started. Sometimes running or swimming will kick me into the writing zone. Food usually doesn't work (too distracting!)

I'm not so great about overcoming writer's block . . . I guess I just wait it out, in hope and faith that the poems will start again. I've noticed over years of writing that my periods of writing are very cyclical: weeks or months of intense creativity, followed by a fallow time. So far, thankfully, the words have always come back, eventually.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

Now, while I'm finishing up the last semester of the MFA program in Tempe, I write in a rented room in a house that's two states to the east of the house in California where my partner and dog live. So the ideal writing space is back in Glen Ellen with Finnegan lounging next to me in the ratty dog bed. My desk right now is two filing cabinets with a board across them; I'm looking at drywall. Back home I often write in bed, and look out through the windows at douglas firs, toyon, and madrone trees.

11. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

I'm trying to publish my first full book manuscript, "Nostalgia for the Criminal Past," which is free verse lyrics with a few prose poems mixed in, and maybe four or five poems (loosely) written in form. The second book I'm working on now has a double crown of sonnets and then a lot of experimental (at least for me) style poems, so I'm trying to figure out if all these poems can live together in one book.

Thanks to Kathleen for answering my questions. Please check out her sample poem:

Wrong Sonnet:  Multiplicity

My husband asks Why don't you write a poem

about why you like Virginia Woolf when

nobody else does.

The excruciating detail of a marriage

is what I like, I say, the drifting

in and out of Clarissa's mind and into Peter's,

how they notice the flow of London traffic

as a living animal, how they feel

themselves distributed in sub-atomic

bits into each other and over the city's squares

and towers, out into the hedgerows, the waves.

But Clarissa wasn't married to Peter

he would say, if he'd read it, she was

married to Richard. And I'd say

maybe she was, maybe she was.

–Previously published in The New Republic.

Day 32: Caki Wilkinson | Favorite Poetry Books

Maurice Manning, Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions (2001)

I just adore this book. Manning achieves a near-perfect balance of all the hard-to-balance qualities: humor and pathos, high and low diction, invention and convention. And I am a little in love with Lawrence Booth.

James Merrill, Divine Comedies (1976)

Here, Merrill hits his stride, managing, somehow, to make personal material epic and epic material personal. Divine Comedies contains some wonderful single poems ("Lost in Translation," for instance), but for me the standout is The Book of Ephraim. With the genesis of Ephraim and the other spirits of the Ouija board, Merrill set in motion the 500+ page epic that would occupy him for the rest of his life.

Marianne Moore, What are Years (1941)

A mid-career book, this is Moore at her best, from the title poem to "He 'Digesteth Harde Yron" to the "The Paper Nautilus." The poems are strange and dense, but there's a palpable sadness, too.

Wallace Stevens, Harmonium (1923)

Of all the poetry published in the boom of the early twenties, this is the book I don't get tired of, home to maybe my all-time favorite poem, "The Emperor of Ice Cream."

Mark Strand, Blizzard of One (1998)

A short book, every piece is in its proper place, Blizzard of One opens with one of my favorite poems (by Strand or anyone else), "Untitled," which I first read in the New Yorker when I was in high school. (I clipped it and left it thumbtacked to the cork board in my bedroom for years.) Also, who can resist "Five Dogs," a series spoken by, that's right, five dogs?

BIO: Caki Wilkinson is the author of the poetry collection Circles Where the Head Should Be, which won the 2010 Vassar Miller Prize. She was the recipient of a 2008 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, Southwest Review, 32 Poems, Yale Review and other journals.

On Attention: A Poet Party Recap

At the Poet Party tonight, we discussed attention.

I thank Karen Maezen Miller for the inspiration behind this idea. "Attention" seems to be disappearing at an alarming rate. Have you been asked to "multitask" lately? The brain can't pay attention to multiple things. It may seem you are—that your brain is—yet it isn't. We all suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder, and I do not mean the kind of you read about in the papers. We're suffering from a deficit of attention directed at us, at our work, at our writing, at whatever we care about.

In case you were not able to join us at the Poet Party tonight on Twitter— or even if you were and like to read the transcript—here's what we discussed tonight.

The Poet Party, by the way, takes place on Twitter. Use the hashtag #poetparty to follow the conversation at 9 pm ET on Sundays. Collin Kelley is my fellow host.

Once the introductions were completed and the Great Poetry Giveaway Winners Announced, I asked what people paid attention to today. Sundays always seem so good for paying attention.

QUESTION 1: What did you pay attention to today?

People paid attention to a dead snake, the wind, a boyfriend, Celebrity Apprentice, roller skating, a weeping willow tree, and Salt Hill Magazine to name a few. Here's what else people gave their attention to today:

ericqweinstein

A1.2 I also paid attention to the new issue of Salt Hill: http://bit.ly/ePjOtG #poetparty

»

Tina Nguyen

A1 #poetparty I paid attention to my daughter's fever rising and falling today. And the poetry I heard as we napped together.

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Julie Carter

A1:I paid attention to nature upon seeing a dead snake. Also, I heard a lot of people giving compliments today.All great material! #poetparty

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Collin Kelley

A1.5 Sadly, I'm having to pay attention to Celebrity Apprentice to recap for the magazine I edit. Sigh. #poetparty

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ek_anderson E. Kristin Anderson

A1 I paid attention to the boyfriend, Law & Order reruns, and small press submissions. #poetparty

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fullofstars

A1: Jellyfish, #leverage & a sestina. Two of those are related. #poetparty

1 hour ago

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alotus_poetry

I paid attention to the strength of the wind today as I walked around my church. I had a rolled-out-of-bed look! #poetparty

1 hour ago

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hosking

A1 – Art over at VASA my daughter was entered in the middle school category. Cyndy Carstens was guest speaker. #poetparty

1 hour ago

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brooke_farmer @32poems A1 Small victories #poetparty

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CollinKelley

A1. I paid attention to the corrections and rewrites on my second novel. #poetparty

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rmfenwick

A1 The 5 poems I'm submitting to @robertleebrewer for the #aprpad. Sharpening up the month's worth of poetry, too. #poetparty

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briankspears

A1: I paid attention to the tightness in my chest from stress, and then to the Book Club chat with Dean Young I moderated #poetparty

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spiderdreamz Victor Perrotti

the inside of the VA Beach Lighthouse #poetpart

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Eric Weinstein

Game of Thrones; a new poem I'm working on; Call of Duty: Black Ops; the weather; the temperature in my apartment; and #poetparty.

1 hour ago

Throughout the conversation, people shared their views of attention and how it played into their poetry.

Attention can be affected by mood:

Mr. Enlightenment

kilowattpoet Mr. Enlightenment

your mood will dictate your poetry even when you dont want it to #poetparty

1 hour ago

Attention is editing:

E. Kristin Anderson

ek_anderson E. Kristin Anderson

Attention is editing, y'all. Paying attention to the first draft. Paying attention to word choice and line breaks. #poetparty

Attention can be reflection:

@AMYCHAMP Yes! We're living in a world where things move too fast. Attention is a way for us to stop & reflect. #poetparty

Attention can be love:

32poems

QUESTION 3: Someone said "attention is love." What are your questions about attention and poetry? #poetparty

AMYCHAMP

attention is the foundation of solid spiritual practice, and so it goes with writing. there are levels of attention… yes? #poetparty

Attention can take the form of professional eavesdropping:

brooke_farmer

@hosking I think of myself as a professional eavesdropper for this very reason. #poetparty

I have the same experience as Mr. Enlightenment:

Mr. Enlightenment

kilowattpoet

most of my ideas come when poetry is not my main point of attention #poetparty

»

32poems

A2: Attention plays into my work by coming up in odd ways…I can't control what happens. #poetparty

Attention must happen to get beyond accuracy to the TRUTH.

Brian Spears

A2 Cont# I have to pay attention if I'm going to get beyond accuracy to truth. #poetparty

Brook Farmer wrote that the answer to paying attention in poetry is self evident. I agree and think that it can still be hard to get the point of attention in the first place. Many failed poems failed due to lack of attention.

brooke_farmer

@32poems A2 I feel like the answer is self evident almost. Can't effectively write about something you aren't paying attention to #poetparty

Attention affects writing:

hosking

A2paying attention to conversations can create some great jumping points for writing. You never know where great material will be #poetparty

»

Collin Kelley

A2. Listening to music I enjoy while I'm writing and editing makes me more relaxed and helps me focus my attention. #poetparty

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TinaNguyen

A2 #poetparty If I don't pay attention, there's no poetry. Paying attention is the foundation.

»

ericqweinstein

A2: I try to attend to two things at once in my poems. I like the complexity it offers (in terms of emotions, images, &c). #poetparty

Richard points out how April poetry prompts helped him focus. I think the challenge of writing a poem a day encourages us to think more about what we'll write next. Then, we start to see the world in a way that helps us make the human experience visible in words.

rmfenwick Richard Fenwick

A2 – Surprised: the poetry prompts for April really focused my attention extremely well. I was surprised. #poetparty

We thank @thethepoetry for the link to Donald Revell's essay, "The Art of Attention." http://j.mp/mq9uFe

Poetry Giveaway Winners Are…

The Great Poetry Giveaway has come to a close. Thank you to the 87 or so people who dropped their name into the virtual hat to win a free poetry book.

Michael Ceraso wins Mortal Geography by Alexandra Teague. This book is one of my favorite contemporary collections. Although I will be sad to part with it, I am happy to send it to a new and good home.

Randall Weiss, frequent Poet Party participant, is the second winner. He wins my book Midnight Voices.

Congratulations!

Day 31: Erika Meitner | Favorite Poetry Books

A bunch of Poets have already named many of the books that were on my first version of this list–Arielle beat me to three of my favorites: Museum of Accidents by Rachel Zucker, Deepstep Come Shining by C.D. Wright, and Fort Red Border by Kiki Petrosino. Eric Pankey listed Sightseer by Cynthia Marie Hoffman, which is a luminous first book, and J.J. Penna has my all-time favorite book on his list: The Incognito Lounge by Denis Johnson–and clearly J.J. and I are poetry twins separated at birth, because I also adore Nick Flynn's Some Ether and Larry Levis's Elegy. So on to some other books I'm digging right at this very minute:

Nox by Anne Carson—an exquisite art-book-in-a-box elegy for her brother, a collection that's so beautifully constructed of fragments of letters and poems and textual objects that when you open it you'll feel like you're unfolding a one-of-a-kind sculptural experience that will make even the most diehard kindle fan believe again in the tactile power of the book.

String Light by C.D. Wright—this book is out of print, but all of the poems from the original book other than two of them are in Steal Away: Selected and New Poems. From String Light, I've learned about the sheer range of poetic forms and styles one book can hold. Plus it's really fun to read.

Two books I'm anxiously awaiting: Clean by Kate Northrop (due out any day now from Persea Books) and Quan Barry's Water Puppets (due out from U of Pittsburgh Press). Both women are formidable poets, and I go back and read their earlier books often (Northrop's Back Through Interruption and Things Are Disappearing Here, and Barry's Asylum and Controvertibles).

Book that's currently on my nightstand: Bringing the Shovel Down by Ross Gay – I can't wait to dig into it!

BIO: Erika Meitner is the author, most recently, of Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls (Anhinga Press, 2011), and Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Her poems have appeared most recently in VQR, Tin House, Indiana Review, The New Republic, APR, and on Slate.com. She is currently an assistant professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she teaches in the MFA program.

Day 30: Rachel Zucker | Favorite Poetry Books

These are the books of poetry that have been most useful to me since last April . Some of them are also the books I've enjoyed reading the most. Some of them are the books I think are the "best" of the year. But if I'd made those other lists: best of, most enjoyable, funniest, saddest, most important, most surprising–there would have been other books that might have knocked these down to 6th or 7th place. But, this is my list of "MOST USEFUL TO ME" books. And, they're also great books.

1. From Old Notebooks by Evan Lavender-Smith (BlazeVOX Books)

I kept reading FON thinking, why does this work? This shouldn't work! Meanwhile I was laughing out loud and loving it. When I finished it I thought, well, if he can do that, I can do any damn thing I want in poetry. TREMENDOUS PERMISSION.



2. Pleasure by Brian Teare (Ahsahta Press)

I read this book in manuscript form when Brian asked me to write a blurb and I cried (not teared up, cried) when I read it. I read it again when it came out. I taught it in a graduate workshop and loved watching the students love it. When reading it again I kept seeing myself in the poems, feeling, "this is what I'm doing." It was perplexing to me how Brian Teare, whose experience is so different from mine in many ways, felt so similar to me. Working through the question of how and why I saw myself in a gay man's elegiac poems was very helpful.

3. Grave Of Light by Alice Notley (Wesleyan)

I'm not generally a fan of big collected editions, and I think I own every single Alice Notley single volume. So, why I am suggesting this one? Because it's awesome. I assign it when I teach "Lines and Lineage: Contemporary American Poetry by Women" because I want my students to be brought to their KNEES by the breadth and depth and POWER of ALICE NOTLEY. And they are and every time I open the book, I am too.

4. Destroyer and Preserver by Matthew Rohrer (Wave Books)

I just posted a love-fest blog about Rohrer's book on the poetry foundation's blog, Harriet, but I'll reiterate. I really enjoyed reading this book. It felt important but also easy, pleasurable, human, friendly in a way that my own work doesn't (to me). I read it while at Virginia Colony of the Creative Arts for a glorious week and this book catapulted me into putting together a new collection. Again, permission.

5. Winter: aphorisms by Sarah Vap (not published yet)

Sorry to gloat but it is one of the great pleasures of life to see a manuscript in progress from a poet I adore. This year for National Poetry month I posed a question to poets, "Is it more important to you that your work be timely or timeless and why?" People wrote back all sorts of smart responses and Sarah, well, she sent me her new manuscript as an email attachment. It answered that question for me (you'll have to wait and read it for yourself to know) and answered all these other questions I didn't even know I had. I read the whole thing without moving and the poems have stayed with me for days and days. It's amazing.

I know it's National Poetry Month and that is the occasion for this lovely list making project, but I have to say that my poems are often equally if not more than equally in informed by (inspired, formed from) novels, non-fiction and non-literary sources. I have to include a few of these:

1. Bring Down the Little Birds by Carmen Gimenez Smith: voice, scope, pathos, language, form.

2. The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff: structure.

3. Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas: everything (this is a gem).

4. Free podcast of Dharma Talk on "The Myth of Freedom" by Pema Chodron, recommended to me by my brilliant friend, Arielle Greenberg: life changing.

BIO: Rachel Zucker is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Museum of Accidents. With Arielle Greenberg she co-wrote Home/Birth: a poemic, a hybrid genre book about birth, feminism and friendship. Zucker teaches at NYU and the 92nd Street Y. Visit her website for more information or her new blog for very little to no information.

Day 29: Erin Elizabeth Smith | Five Favorite Poetry Books

We hope you've enjoyed the previous 28 days of poetry book recommendations from more than 30 poets. For National Poetry Month, we're pleased to have brought you roughly 175 poetry book recommendations from 35 poets in 30 days. Here are five more from Erin Elizabeth Smith:

From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger by Lorna Dee Cervantes

A friend once referred to the books she carries with her as her teddy bear books, and if any book functioned in that way for me, it's this collection, which somehow manages to resonate whenever things gnaw at me the most.

Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts by Jorie Graham

This brilliant first collection is shockingly beautiful in its reflections on an American landscape that seems almost rife with philosophy and desire.

Donkey Gospel by Tony Hoagland

A book that is funny, heart-breaking, and ragingly honest. It's also a "must-teach" every semester for me, in that it's probably the most successful texts to break down young writers of their notions of what poetry is.

The Fact of a Doorframe by Adrienne Rich

I would argue Rich is one of the most talented writers not just of our generation, but of any. In her collected works, it's easy to remember why she's a living legend still.

I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl by Karyna McGlynn

I was left haunted by this book, a film noir in verse, for days afterward. The play with time, voice, language, and ambiance is unparalleled in any contemporary work I've read to date.

BIO: Erin Elizabeth Smith is the author of two poetry collections — The Naming of Strays and The Fear of Being Found. Her work has previously appeared in 32 Poems, Water~Stone, Crab Orchard, New Delta, and Yalobusha. She serves as the managing editor of Stirring and The Best of the Net Anthology and teaches in the English department at the University of Tennessee.

Day 29: Joshua Gray's Fabulous Five Poetry Books

Today's recommendations of favorite poetry books comes to us from Maryland poet Joshua Gray.

Shame on me. Seriously. What a wonderful little assignment from 32 Poems — list your favorite five single-author poetry books for National Poetry Month. I definitely have my five favorites, that's not the problem. The problem is when it comes to contemporary poetry, I'm the bastard child of a lost cause. I read many more anthologies and collections than single-author full-length books, and of those I do read, for this particular assignment it helps if the poets weren't dead. If part of the point is to list OPPs so that there is a bit of juice coming the poet's way, I should be ashamed of myself. After scanning my bookshelf, I can only ask, do I even have five I can list as favorites?

The short answer is yes and no.

The other short answer is I have to group them first.

After grouping them into categories, I have come up with five fabulous books. Fabulous because calling them favorites implies they are better than a whole slew of others. They are better than one or two similar books, but favorite can be stretching it.

They are:

1. Ants on the Melon, Virginia Hamilton Adair. Category: poetry book I've re-read the most

2. Midnight Voices, Deborah Ager. Category: Favorite book by local poet

3. Niagara River, Kay Ryan. Category: book by a poet with a poet-household name.

4. After Oz, Michael J Bugeja. Category: poetry book by a teacher-poet.

5. Beowulf, by Seamus Heaney. Category: ancient text with a translation by a contemporary poet.

Adair has indeed passed away, but I had to include her, because this book really does top the list of my favorites.