From Alex, Robert Haas’s “Heroic Simile” (He is the 2008 Pulitzer winner)
Please share the poems (and stories and essays, of course) you come across during your writerly wanderings. How about compiling a collaborative list of must-reads for the summer?
Filed under: From bg, Poetry, reading | Tagged: haas, Poetry, reading, summer |
ENAM 170 2008: Introduction to Creative Writing 
I came across this person’s blog awhile back, and the entry I’ve listed below is a collection of several poems that have inspired her. They have inspired me in turn. They include: My first introduction to Neruda, to Kay Ryan, Meg Kearney, Kim Addonizio, etc. They span a length of time from Yeats/Eliot to present. The poems are not long, but they’ve done a lot to color my perception of what poetry is and does. So…
http://lightgetsin.livejournal.com/273641.html
Also, I was reading some of Heaney’s Nobel acceptance speech over the weekend…pretty cool stuff. Find it through Wikipedia.
Thanks, Chris. Great selection! Here’s the link to Heaney’s wonderful speech.
There are a few poems that I love and think everyone should read as an essential brilliance of poetic history, and even though they are not new, and are fairly canonical, if you haven’t read them, you should. Emily Dickinson’s “tell the truth but tell it slant” for the power of words to communicate interiority and power, Yeats’ both “Byzantium” and “Sailing to Byzantium” for beautiful narrative language, and Dylan Thomas’ “Do not go gentle into that good night” for fierce evocation of emotion through language.
Dickinson: http://nongae.gsnu.ac.kr/~songmu/Poetry/TellAllTheTruthButTEllItSlant.htm
Yeats: http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/
Thomas: http://www.bigeye.com/donotgo.htm
It may be a cop-out because Barbara lent it to me, but I’m currently reading “The View from the Seventh Layer” by Kevin Brockmeier, and it’s utterly amazing. You should all go out and buy it right now, and read the story “The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device,” which may be the best story ever. A warning though, you have to read through ALL of it, no exceptions, and if you follow the rules, when you get to the end you’ll understand.
I am off to watch a movie right now, but I will add to the list later.