April 11-12, 2020: Crowd-sourced Poets We Should All Read

[April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate I’ve highlighted a handful of poets, past and present, we should all be reading. Leading up to this crowd-sourced post chock full o’ even more poets to read—add yours in comments, please!]

First, I should note that I didn’t get to highlight my own favorite American poet, Sarah Piatt, in this week’s series. So, well, consider her highlighted!

Or my favorite contemporary poet, Jericho Brown!

I also can’t end a series like this without highlighting the amazing poetry of my FSU colleague and friend DeMisty D. Bellinger!

For a lot more National Poetry Month goodness, check out the International Poetry Circle community organized by the wonderful poet Tara Skurtu!

Other poets and poems we should all read:

Bill Waddell follows up Thursday’s Li-Young Lee post, writing, “The Lee poem that lives most warmly inside my head is ‘Persimmons,’ also from Rose. That is an extraordinary book—deservedly still in print and popular thirty years on.”

Rob LeBlanc nominates Philip Freneau; Charles Reznikoff; Anne Waldman; Ron Koertge; and Diane di Prima.

Anne Holub writes, “So I keep coming back to my wee copy of Meditations in an Emergency lately. Frank O’Hara was a doctor, ya know.” She also shares this great conversation with Montana poets about their own recommendations.

Jeff Renye goes with Etheridge Knight’s “It Was a Funky Deal.” He adds, “Stephen Crane, Black Riders and Other Lines; William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; and T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets.” Rob Velella seconds the Crane love.

Kent Rose writes, “Though he's best-known as a musician, Dave Alvin’s Any Rough Times Are Now Behind You is an excellent book of poetry.

Seferine Baez nominates “Faudet and Leav—who show a modern romance between writers in their not-so-subtle odes to one another, every volume showing a new side to their relationship, which feels very conversational almost like they’re writing letters to a lover they can’t quite let go of.”

Ian Murray writes that [our former FSU colleague] “Ian Williams comes to mind.”

Michael Greenwood nominates Langston Hughes.

Kylee Acevedo writes, “Anything by miss Ada Limón... But I own Bright Dead Things & adore it.”

Olivia Lucier highlights “Pablo Neruda. His odes to, literally anything, are amazing!”

Andrew DaSilva seconds Neruda and adds, “Walllace Stevens and his “Sunday Morning” or “The Snow Man”; Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Panther”; D.H Lawrence’s “Whales Weep Not”; Frank O'Hara and his “To the Harbormaster”; Hart Crane's White Buildings; “The Diver” by Robert Hayden; Marsden Hartley's “Warblers”; “Take Me Under Your Wing” by Hayyim Bialik; anything by Theodore Roethke; “Mandalay” by Kipling; and lastly if ya wanna spice things up a bit and raise a few eyebrows you can add Radovan Karadzic, although a convicted war criminal he is an award-winning and outstanding poet.”

Vince Kling writes, “Since I'm a translator, I recommend above all James Merrill's magnificent ‘Lost in Translation,’ a poem ‘about’ translation as a way of understanding everything life tosses at us. Passionate, elegant, witty, poignant. That said, I'll put in a plug for translators now sneered and jeered at by later translators who can't hold a candle to the older ones. I'm thinking of Scott Moncrieff's rendering of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. All subsequent ‘improvements’ are unable to get away from his masterful version, responsive to every nuance of irony and rhythm in language. And any translation from Russian by the now supposedly discredited Constance Garnett is better than anything that came after. I've got a little list, but just one more—Dante's Divine Comedy in the Dorothy L. Sayers translation.”

Shayne Simahk writes, “Shara McCallum is amazing!”

Heidi Kim nominates Jennifer Chang and Gabrielle Calvocoressi.

Kelly Stowell highlights James Nicola's "Curtailed Sonnet."

Vicki Ziegler, curator of the wonderful #TodaysPoem community on Twitter, shares, “Abigail Chabitnoy's How to Dress a Fish and Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s Lima :: Limón are freshly Griffin Prize shortlisted—really getting into their collections and think they would be good additions.”

Also on Twitter, Jeanne Harris shares this reading of A Knight’s Trail by Wayne Arthur Harris.

Finally, the poets Paul Brookes, Meg Kearney, Amy King, Melisa Malvin, Adrian Neibauer, Tom Ratt, and Ron Tobey were kind enough to engage with my Tweets on the week’s series, so I have to return the favor!

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other poets you’d highlight?