A year of poems: Trembling on the edge of maybe, with the priests of the invisible

In one of the craziest year-end lists you’ll ever see, I’ve recorded all those poets’ names, below.

It was a daily ritual that, like others I have done, gave my day structure. No matter what happened, I knew I had a poem to read or return to. In years past I have written a letter or a postcard each day, and in 2013 I listened to no music but classical.

In 2015 I will listen to one record album each day all the way through our collection. That’s VINYL – and yes, we do own about 365 or so grooved such platters. (Any requests? Send them to kneumannrea@hoodrivernews.com. It will be interesting to see where collections overlap – but remember I am talking LPs only.)

And having enjoyed a daily poem so much, I will probably continue that as well. It was cleansing, uplifting, challenging. Most days it reminded me what real writing is all about.

“I have with me all that I do not know/I have lost none of it” (W.S. Merwin, “The Nomad Flute”)

“What does life mean but itself? Ask the sea. You’ll get a wet slap backhanded across your mouth. Ask the tiger. I dare you.” (Alice Firman, “How It is”)

I read usually in the morning, or before bed, for the poems created tent poles for my shaky days.

Some poems I did not like, nor understand, but nearly always felt challenged, or moved, and I kept a list of all 365 poems.

W.B. Yeats wrote, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric. We make put of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” I am not sure if he meant that as the writer of a poetry or if he applied it to the person reading it, but I believe, often, reading a poem does create an inner quarrel – and that’s a good thing.

I think most people feel a personal connection to some poem or other. I’ve always loved “Swans at Coole” by Yeats, and made a point of visiting that lovely Sligo pond while visiting Ireland in 1991.

“I read some poets multiple times -- Yeats for example. Most of the poets I had never read nor heard of, and many greats -- Donne, Plath, Whittier, Bukowski, Rimbaud, to name a few -- I did not read but did not mean to omit.

The single most beautiful line I read all year was by Joanne Diaz ("Violin"):

“For the bow's slip and slur, gliss of scree/Fine stones of sounds in each longhair.” I played the violin when I was young, and 40 years later I can tell you the senses those words evoke are real indeed.

Two of the most profound things I read this year in, or about, poetry:

Stanley Kunitz: "there's always a song lying under the surface of my poems. The struggle is between incantation and sense."

And while many poems are called songs, and songwriters are considered poets, I remain of two minds on whether musical lyrics can fully be considered poetry. That they cannot is the studied view of the British poet Glyn Maxwell.

But the strength of poems is in their timelessness, mystery, and even humor, best exemplified by Stuart Dybek: "Suppose the past could not be recalled, any more than we can foretell/the future, that in order to remember/you'd have to visit an oracle."

I read mostly men but I made a point of reading Emily Dickenson, Charlotte Bronte, Naomi Shabab Nye, Christina Rossetti and others. In 2014 I returned repeatedly to William Stafford, Robert Lowell, W.S. Merwin, Rainer Maria Rilke, and William Blake, and to Yeats.

I combed books we have at home (my wife’s Norton Anthology of Literature from college was a particular trove), chose some intentionally and randomly at the library, took them from newspapers and magazines. "Circles" by Carl Sandburg was used in my high school yearbook -- never read the poem before --and another was framed on a friend's wall. I stood and read it and then photographed it with my phone. Many days I turned to poetry.org, and poems.org, but I also read poems written by friends, and there is one by my father, “Ode to Iron Mountain”. And, no, not once this year did I WRITE a poem; why would you bring PB and J to a smorgasbord?

I write this on Dec. 31, and for the final day’s poem I selected “The Real Work,” by Roger Weaver, from a 1982 edition of the old Hood River literary magazine Dog River Review (Trout Creek Press, Parkdale). Like many examples it is meta, and it seemed a fitting conclusion:

“Who will do the work of poets,/will note the watching of the hen,/the chambered nautilus’ labor,/who will?/And who will tend/all the fires the human spirit blazes?/The world cooks by them,/contends. Who minds those pots/shapes tomorrow’s silences,/breaks the locks. Mark them.”

Below is the list, in order, of each poet I read in 2014: a total of 267 writer, with other powerful lines that grabbed me:

William Stafford

Yusuf Komunyakaa: "there's a ghost poised between free will and the gig"

David Spicer

Diane Dickinson: "I am half alive the rest is anticipation ..."

Christina Rosetti: "... and what do see we glancing back?"

Stephen Dunn: "now might be the right time to cultivate disbelief"

Michael McGriff

Glyn Maxwell

Rebecca Hoogs: "my beak keens for something to say"

Robert Pinsky

Hannah Stephenson

David Ferry: "where is the pleasure the poetry brings?"

Rustin Larson

Robert William Service

Donald Hall

Peter Mishler

Gary Snyder: "lay down these words/before your mind like rocks"

Robert Duncan: "Neither our vices nor our virtues further the poem. They came up and died just like they do every year on the rocks."

Richard Wilbur

Lia Perpuera

Galway Kinnell

Matthew Dickman

Gerald Green

Chuck Klosterman

Suzanne Cleary

Eileen G'Sell

Robert Frost

Theodore Roethke: "all finite things reveal infinitude"

Ruth Padel

Bronwyn Lea

Don Paterson

Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry": "I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide."

Yves Bonnefoy

Margaret Levine

Lisa Ampleman

Ronald Koertge

Robert Browning

Andrew Frisardi

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

William Blake

Jane Satterfield

e.e. cummings

Edward Arlington Robinson

Wallace Stevens: "the motive for metaphor ... when you yourself were never quite yourself/and did not want nor have to be..."

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Elizabeth Bishop

Chana Bloch

Nick Norwood

Patrick Bandon

Chris Morrison: "... Perfect stranger in my own life ..."

Benny Anderson: "the last poem in the world ... clinging to every word until I knew it by heart ..."

Stephen Ackerman

Daisy Fried

Rusty Morrison

Dan Peterson

Edgar Allen Poe

Gwendolyn Brooks

Robert Duncan

W.B. Yeats

Elton Glaser

Katha Pollitt

Robin Becker

Padraic Colum

Thomas More

A.R. Ammons

C. Dale Young

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Chad Davidson

Robinson Jeffers

Billy Collins

John Keats

Maureen N. McLean

Mitchell Gonzalez

Pablo Neruda: "Don't go far off, not even for a day, because -- because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep."

Dylan Thomas

W.S. Merwin

John Skoyles

AJM Smith

Edwin Brock

Judith Jedamus

Archibald MacLeish: "a poem should be motionless in time ... A poem should not mean but be ..."

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Carl Dennis

John Hodgen

John Boyle O'Reilly

Wystawa Szymborska

Lisa Williams

Walter Malone: "... each night I burn the records of the day; At sunrise every soul is born again ..."

Alan Feldman

Sarah Lindsey

Lord Byron

H.N. Fifer

Jeffrey Harrison

Anonymous, "My Life is but a Weaving"

Henry Rago

R.T. Smith

Tom Wayman

Karen Knapp Johnson: "my withness, my here"

Mary Oliver

Ruth L. Schwartz

A.E. Housman

Paul Blackburn

Stephen Berg

Steve Kowit

Bob Hicok

Vijay Seshardi

Julie Lechevsky

Doug Dorph

Dana Gioia

Margaret Levine

Jon Agee

Kim Stafford

Martin Espada

Rumi: "this being human is a guest house/every morning a new arrival ..."

Martha Solano: "The Poet Is The Priest of the Invisible"

Jane Mead

Elton Glaser

Ryokan

Ted Loder: "Move with us now/in our time of beginnings,/when the air is rain and snow-washed/and the world seems fresh and full of possibilities,/and we feel ready and full/We tremble on the edge of a maybe..."

William Carlos Williams

Maya Angelou

David Orr

Juliana Waters

Ted Kooser

Don Rea

Elise Paschen

Julie Lechowsky

Denise Levertov

Yves Bonnefoy

Eaven Boylan

David Lehman

Michael Chilwood

Major Jackson

A.E. Housman

Charles Simic

Carol Snow

Howard Nemerov

William Matthews

Kay Ryan

Connie Wanek

Harold Johnson

AJM Smith

Albert Goldbarth

Mary Oliver

Stanley Kunitz: "oh, I have made myself a tribe of my true affections ..."

Franz Wright

Tom Wayman

Dorianne Laux

Phillis Levin,

Robert Francis

Liesl Mueller

Denver Butson

Alexander MacDonald

John Milton

Robinson Jeffers

Irish author unknown

Giolla Brighde MacCommidhe

Tony Wallace

Robert Bly

Daniel Hoffman

Ralph Waldo Emerson

John Woods

Wendell Berry: "for a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."

Matthew Sweeney

Naomi Shibab Nye

Mark Strand

Susan Ludvigson

Claudia Emerson

John Ashbery

William Shakespeare

Wilfred Owen

James Lasdun

Julie Sheehan

Mary Tall Mountain

Richard Wilbur

Wallace Stevens

B.H. Fairchild

Robert Frost

Robert Lowell

Alison Fell

Wilfred Noyce

Susan Mitchell

Jack Gilbert

Seamus Heaney

Carl Sandburg

Peter Meinke

Robert Watson

Olav Hauge

Alberto Rios

William Wordsworth

Ron Padgett

Charles Wright

Richard Wilbur

Sandra Lim

Mark Halliday

Christian Wiman: "I have no illusion that some fusion of force and form will save me."

Charlotte Bronte

Verne Bright

Conrad Hilberry

Amit Majmudar

Robert Hayden

Ada Limon

David Whyte

Thomas Moore

Lucie Brock-Broido, “Moon River”: "What exactly do you mean when you call me your 'huckleberry friend'?"

Kofi Awoonor

James Mangan

HC Wallace

Alice Firman

Florence Fogelin

Amy MacLennan

Robert Lunday

Sara Wallace

Jack Prelusky

Gwendolyn Brooks

Elizabeth Bishop: "lose something every day/Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent/The art of losing isn't hard to master."

Robert Duncan

Harold Schweizer

Author unknown

CS Lewis

Carol Frost

Bill Coyle: "lost continents and present discontents"

Ezra Pound

Elinor Wylie: "poets make pets of pretty, docile words; ... I like words opalescent, cool, and pearly... Gilded and sticky, with a little sting."

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Archibald MacLeish: "A poem should not mean but be."

Mercedes Lawry

Galway Kinnell

Debra Kang Dean

Billy Collins

Lawson Inada

Floyd Skloot: "first the sheen, then the shock of all we have seen comes clear."

Frannie Lindsay

Helen Hunt Jackson

Jean Pedrick: "just keep walking and I'll presently be where you are."

Marge Piercy

Harold Notice

Vern Rutsala

Herman Melville: "audacity -- reverence. These must mate."

Randall Jarrell

William Cowper

James Thomson

Thomas Parnell

Ted James

Eugenio Montale

F Scott Fitzgerald

Aaron Ballance

Edgar Lee Masters: "Deities!/Inexorable revealers,/Give me strength to endure/The gifts of the Muse …”

Fanny Howe

Richard Robbins

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Robert Burns

Jennifer Rondeau

Steve Langhorst

Thomas James

Stuart Dybek

Aaron Fagan

Robert Service

Herman Hesse

Jonathon Cupp

John Dryden

Michael Bruce

Rainer Maria Rilke

Allen Ginsburg

Rabindrath Tagore

T.S. Eliot

Roger Weaver