In 2014 I read a poem each day.
One poem, sometimes more, and I would always re-read it, either back to back, or return to it later in the day.
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
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