This is obviously not a comprehensive list. I just wanted to list 100 books which at one point or another had totally ravished me. Shook the shit out of me. Said "Fuck You, I'm sorry but I'm a steamroller, so movebitchgetouttadaway or end up being one of those cartoon people cartoons peel up off the asphalt."
Yeah, that sort of book.
I'm sure I could continue and list another 100. But I just wanted to list 100. 100 titles worth having in any serious poetry library.
It's tricky because some great poets I only have in Selected or Collected volumes, and I wanted to stick to poetry collections proper, because I'm reminded of that ancient Roman poem (Martial I think) where the poet says anybody can throw a bunch of poems together but "to make a book is hard."
That speaks to the gestalt thing. This occurs when a poet isn't just throwing a bunch of poems together like snapshots in a shoebox, but creating an organon or whatever you want to call a successful collection that works qua collection.
I'm avoiding epics and huge poetic works with one or two exceptions I couldn't resist mentioning (because each book in the building body of work is stellar).
Here's 100 that will fight on long after we're all gone.
These are 20th century authors. Will I find any 21st century books? Hmmm let me see.
Oh, no order here.
(Everytime I make a list like this, it just brings home to me how trapped I am in my own culture and its "feeder cultures" despite my best efforts to escape that. I mean, like how many lifelong poets can intelligently discuss a single Japanese poetry collection they have studied in detail. We all know them from anthologies right, and not that well. Only a handful of them. Or Indian poetry, apart from godawful Tagore and the Mahabharata. Or Swedish poets. Or poets from this or that African country. Sure, Jerome Rothenberg and a handful of his caliber. But seriously. I know it's the language thing, and the absence of a market which means minimal translator interest. It's just sad is all. That's all I'm saying.)
1. Ariel. Sylvia Plath.
2. The Sonnets. Ted Berrigan.
3. Lunch Poems. Frank O'Hara.
4. The Descent of Alette. Alice Notley
5. The Will to Change. Adrienne Rich.
6. 77 Dream Songs. John Berryman.
7. Fair Realism. Barbara Guest.
8. Poet in New York. Lorca.
9. Howl. Allen Ginsberg
10. Dictee. Teresa Cha.
11. Duino Elegies. Rilke.
12. For Love. Robert Creeley.
13. The Beauty of the Husband. Anne Carson.
14. Fully Empowered. Pablo Neruda.
15. Le parti pris des choses. Francis Ponge
16. Transparence du monde. Jean Follain.
17. Calligrammes. Guillaume Apollinaire.
18. L'Homme approximatif. Tristan Tzara.
19. The Poet Assassinated. Marinetti.
20. Tender Buttons. Gertrude Stein.
21. A New Path to the Waterfall. Raymond Carver.
22. Sonnets. Bernadette Mayer.
23. Baby Camels of the Sky. Elena Guro.
24. The Orangery. Gilbert Sorrentino.
25. Rough Trades. Charles Bernstein.
26. Confessions of a Hooligan. Sergei Esenin.
27. Empathy. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge.
28. Maxfield Parrish. Eileen Myles.
29. Xenia. Eugenio Montale.
30. Pell Mell. Robin Blaser.
31. On Bear's Head. Philip Whalen.
32. Lunar Baedeker. Mina Loy.
33. Made to Seem. Rae Armantrout.
34. Patterson. William Carlos Williams.
35. Drafts (take your pick). Rachel Blau DuPlessis.
36. Harmonium. Wallace Stevens.
37. The Walls Do Not Fall. H.D.
38. Spring and All. William Carlos Williams.
39. New Goose. Lorine Niedecker.
40. Die Niemandsrose. Paul Celan.
41. Mountains in Berlin. Elke Erb.
42. i gathered my ear from the green field. Celestine Frost.
43. Loop. John Taggart.
44. The Cloud in Trousers. Vladimir Mayakovsky.
45. The Dead Lecturer. Amiri Baraka.
46. The Morning of the Poem. James Schuyler.
47. All: the collected shorter poems. Louis Zukofsky.
48. Crowd and not evening or light. Leslie Scalapino.
49. The Materials. George Oppen.
50. the marytryology (take your pick of book). bpNichol.
51. Solution Passage. Clark Coolidge.
52. Waters / Places / A Time. Larry Eigner.
53. I Remember. Joe Brainard.
54. The Big Something. Ron Padgett.
55. The Cell. Lyn Hejinian.
56. A Day at the Beach. Robert Grenier.
57. Defenestration of Prague. Susan Howe.
58. O'Clock. Fanny Howe.
59. Asymmetries 1-260. Jackson Mac Low.
60. Testimony. Charles Reznikoff.
61. Voices Cast Out to Talk us In. Ed Roberson.
62. The Tapestry and the Web. Joanne Kyger.
63. The Reproduction of Profiles. Rosmarie Waldrop.
64. Casting Sequences. Marjorie Welish.
65. The Hotel Wentley Poems. John Wieners.
66. Under Words. Robert Kelly.
67. Vita Nova. Louise Gluck.
68. Middle Earth. Henri Cole.
69. View with a Grain of Sand. Wislawa Szymborska. (sorry only way I can include her. I realize it's a Selected).
70. The Bridge. Hart Crane.
71. Claire de terre. Andre Breton.
72. Flaques de verre. Pierre Reverdy.
73. Borrowed Love Poems. John Yau.
74. Into Distances. Aaron Shurin.
75. Language. Jack Spicer.
76. Powerless. Tim Dlugos.
77. Poems. Alan Dugan. (lol take your pick.)
78. The Opening of the Field. Robert Duncan.
79. Something by Russell Edson from the year 1976.
80. Symmetry. Laura Moriarty.
81. Notes Preceding Trust. Kathleen Fraser.
82. Boudica. Paol Keineg.
83. The Peacock Emperor Moth. Marcel Cohen.
84. Cold Pluto. Mary Ruefle.
85. Paroles. Jacques Prevert.
86. Notes for Echo Lake. Michael Palmer.
87. The Blue Stairs. Barbara Guest.
88. The Heat Bird. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge.
89. Nest. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge.
90. SCRAM or the transformation of the concept of Cities. Allen Fisher
91. Alcools. Guillaume Apollinaire.
92. Not a Balancing Act. Claire Needell.
93. Not Me. Eileen Myles.
94. Columbarium. Susan Stewart.
95. The Beforelife. Franz Wright.
96. State of Mind. Martha Ronk.
97. River through Rivertown. Merrill Gilfillan.
98. Sleeping with the Dictionary. Harryette Mullen
99. How to Do Things with Words. Joan Retallack.
100. Transformations. Anne Sexton.
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