Poetry is important to me. My collection is small but each volume is loved, read, dipped into, used constantly as references.
Six Centuries of Great Poetry: A Stunning Collection of Classic British Poems from Chaucer to Yeats
, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine, is, in general, a crappy book with no notes, a one-page foreword, and no biographical information. HOWEVER, it’s very good for reference. You can find most of these poems online but I need to read them in books. I find it’s easier to read poetry in books. There’s a meditative space that happens, with the text kind of floating on the page, and … maybe it’s not having to have your finger on a Scroll button or something … that releases you from the present-day. Poetry for me is transportive. I have to be in the mood, that’s for sure. But it can also move me from one mood to the next. Books are way better for that.
I’ve had Aristotle’s Poetics
since Freshman year in college. It’s how actors, at least actors who get BFAs, first learn about “stories,” and story structure. Important for any writer, I think, even if you are determined to break his rules. You might as well know what the rules are.
I have the collected works of three favorites – W.H. Auden
, William Blake
and Gerard Manley Hopkins
. No matter what I do, Gerard Manley Hopkins reminds me of this guy, no matter how I’ve tried to extricate them. This is why I caution everyone against love-at-first-sight.
Ted Hughes’ breathtaking and intimate collection Birthday Letters: Poems
: all except two are addressed to his dead wife Sylvia Plath. The publication of this book was a seismic EVENT in the world of Plath lovers (and Hughes lovers, of which I am also one.). These are extraordinary and heartbreaking poems, published near his death, but he had been writing them over the decades.
Carl Dennis is a contemporary fave, and his Practical Gods
is wonderful.
Irish poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill only writes in the Irish language. She has said that she can’t think poetically in English, the words do not come. I saw her read at the Ireland House on the NYU campus (wrote about her here) and fell in love with her. Unfortunately, due to the fact that her poems are all in Irish, many are not widely-available due to the lack of translations (she has spoken and written eloquently about this problem). You have to just hope that translations will come out. The Water Horse
is a wonderful volume with each poem printed in both Irish and English, on facing pages.
