Ive been hiding out from the 10 big books in my life challenge because I couldnt restrict myself to 10. But Javier Velasco tagged me so I must do so restricted posting but substituting authors for single titles: Theodor Seuss Geisel aka Dr. Seuss was the first author for which I searched out every one of his books in print. I was never disappointed even by his later overly self-conscious less zany work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Seuss Nasreddin Hodja (or Mullah). His tales are mostly oral and occasionally written by various collector like Idries Shah (through whose books I first met the Mullah). Hes claimed by almost every country from Afghanistan to the Balkans but Anatolia has the most solid claim to his active storied life and to many of the additions to his canon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasreddin Pablo Neruda -- and not just because Javier is Chilean -- perhaps the Poet of Americas even in his terrible political poems which are much over-shadowed by his wonderful 100 Love Sonnets and my other favorites Odes to Common Things and Odes to Opposites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Neruda Czeslaw Milosz deserved the Nobel (which Neruda was also awarded) for his prose as much as for his poetry. He, like Neruda, covered every style and invented new ones. The political opposite of Neruda, his Captive Mind should be required reading for understanding Stalinism and its variants. His poems in The World made me rethink how I read poetry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czes%C5%82aw_Mi%C5%82osz Thomas Treherne isnt a name many people know. This 17th century Anglican reads like a pre-Blakean but is more readable. His meditations in The Centuries are masterful and his poems capture a world not known to poets of his time. The mechanics of his verse, the rhythms and rhymes, are delightful. One poem worth reading is Wonder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Traherne Philip Larkin may be only a Silver poet of the late 20th century, but to me his small catalogue is deep poem for poem. Anyone who can begin a poem I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. then have it turn to the best meditation on death in modern verse has my vote (Aubade is the poem) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Larkin Dafydd ap Gwilym was the greatest European poet of the Middle Ages, a near contemporary of Chaucer. He changed Welsh verse and has been a great influence even to the present. His wonderful self-effacing humor in the face of failed love, his rattly cywydd forms are so powerful yet so teasing. I loved the time I spent working on a version of his Y Gal which ended up in Best American Erotic Poems. dafyddapgwilym.net/ Emily Dickinson. If you havent memorized at least one of her short poems, you should do so immediately. No further note needed. William Butler Yeats. Like Dickinson, he needs no long description. He was tradition, then he was mysticism, then he was modernism. From his early collection of folk tales to his The Circus Animals Desertion, he was literature for his lifetime and beyond. UNC alumni and former Daily Tar Heel sports reporter, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (known then as Larry Ferling) published Coney Island of the Mind at exactly the right time for me to fall in love with the Beat Movement Poetry (it did sit on the bookstore shelves waiting for me for a few years.) I had no idea of his Carolina connection, only that his book was just right for a young man ready to get drunk on poetry. His long running City Lights Bookstore was long my imagined poetry Mecca and any book from his press -- especially the Pocket Poet Series -- was required reading even between computer programming assignments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Ferlinghetti I tag, hoping they havent already been taken, Andie Miller, Lynwood Shiva Sawyer, Peter Vankevich, Jean Hartley Sidden, David Lombard Harrison, and Evan Carroll
Posted on: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 03:48:01 +0000
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