Sturgeon's Law

This is spooky -- three of your ten would be in my top ten as well. Can you guess which ones?
 

This is a brilliant exercise, and one which should easily produce the outline of a beginners' poetry workshop, besides. I'll get mine posted this weekend. Thanks for the outstanding idea.
 

Hi Steven:
Here's my "mixed tape." Hopefully there is a progression or narrative arc or evolution of sorts in the selections.

Chaucer, “Prologue, Canterbury Tales”
Dante, Inferno, “Canto V”
Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Yeats, “The Second Coming”
Plath, “Edge”
Ginsberg, “Howl”
Rich, “Diving Into the Wreck”
Forche, “Ourselves or Nothing”
Gluck, “Mock Orange”
Wright, “The Southern Cross”
Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas”
 

If they don't dig poems, i don't dig them!

ok. so i'll be nice...hm...

if they'd never read poetry, i'd play it cool. ya know, nothing that would scare them off. no wallace stevens, if they get the taste for poetry they'll get there soon enough. i'd pick...

The Thinker
--William Carlos Williams


My wife's new pink slippers
have gay pom-poms.
There is not a spot or a stain
on their satin toes or their sides.
All night they lie together
under her bed's edge.
Shivering I catch sight of them
and smile, in the morning.
Later I watch them
descending the stair,
hurrying through the doors
and round the table,
moving stiffly
with a shake of their gay pom-poms!
And I talk to them
in my secret mind
out of pure happiness.


Morning song
--Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

and this is one of my all time favorite poems, so i would have to include it:

Ask Me
--William Stafford

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
 

Steve:

I'm going to guess "A Blessing," "Those Winter Sundays," and, I dunno, "The Panther." The only one I feel confident guessing is "A Blessing." :)

David:

I'll look forward to your answers.

Peter:

Cool varied list, there's definitely a progression in it.

Jenni:

Thanks for posting those poems. I especially like the Stafford (he's one of my favorites anyway).
 

"A Blessing", "The Panther" and "Traveling Through the Dark".

I'll have to think about the rest of the list, but it would include "The Heaven of Animals".
 

I like the idea of a list, or mix tape, like this. Here's mine, in no particular order:

Kenneth Rexroth, "When We With Sappho"
Etheridge Knight, "The Idea of Ancestry"
Sharon Doubiago, "Appalachian Song"
Thomas McGrath, "Something Is Dying Here"
Tomas Transtromer, "After Someone's Death"
Federico Garcia Lorca, "Gacela of the Unforeseen Love"
Tu Fu, "Moon Festival" (in Rexroth's 100 Poems from the Chinese)
Adrienne Rich, "The Observer"
Anuradha Mahapatra, "The Burning Ground"
Miroslav Holub, "Ode to Joy"
 

T.R. Hummer "Where You Go When She Sleeps"

Frank Stanford "Inventory"

Miller Williams "The Caterpillar"

Tess Gallagher "Under Stars"

Sylvia Plath "Mirror"

Cleopatra Mathis "Getting Out"

David Bottoms "The Desk"

Jack Heflin "Cat Scan"

William Pitt Root "Sometimes Heaven is a Mean Machine"
 

Steven —

just posted a mix tape at the Sonnetarium.