Gary Snyder: A Natural Selection

When I was an undergraduate student, I began my college career as a chemistry major and math minor. Although during my high school years I had an equal interest and about as much aptitude in English and writing, I originally had been convinced my path to a profitable profession lay in the pursuit of these studies for which I had registered at freshman orientation. However, in my sophomore year when I entered an introductory creative writing class that I had chosen as an elective course, I discovered a renewed enthusiasm for literature and poetry writing, and I switched my major to English.

Indeed, I remember the first book assigned that semester by my teacher, poet and fiction writer Steve Katz, opened my eyes to an appreciation and understanding of contemporary poetry that I had not yet known. The volume, Gary Snyder’s Regarding Wave, seemed to reveal a relationship between language and the land, the spiritual and the physical, humans and nature, that proved aesthetically pleasing while accurately rendered. I remember admiring how the poet’s combination of concern for humans with an apparent affection for his environment—delivering to readers a celebration of the natural world—could be created in such a way by a blending of personal perspective (though never confessional or self-centered) and persuasive expression.

With his background as an individual who once worked as a merchant seaman or in logging camps, and who labored among the elements of nature he described, Snyder’s related experiences contributed to an authentic and convincing tone in his poetry. In addition, Snyder’s seeking to integrate into his writings an awareness of other beliefs (as in his devotion to Zen Buddhism) or behaviors witnessed in different cultures (such as Japanese, Chinese, or American Indian) offered a fresh approach one would not find elsewhere. In her book of criticism, Soul Says, Helen Vendler has stated: “Snyder is one of the many modernist poets to have brought English lyric into conjunction with Chinese and Japanese poetry. The long history of Western fascination with ‘the Chinese written character as a medium of poetry’ (Pound out of Fenollosa) has reached its apogee with Snyder, if only because Snyder (unlike Amy Lowell, Pound, Stevens, Williams, Rexroth, and others) really knows Japanese and Chinese.”

In fact, his biographical acquaintance with a diverse set of principles and his participation in a wide variety of activities seemed to add to the scope of his poetry. Perhaps for those reasons I often found it difficult to readily group Snyder among the Beat poets, as most critics appeared to do. Instead, for me Gary Snyder’s work remained unique, even though his connections to Jack Kerouac (who depicted Snyder as a fictional character in The Dharma Bums), Allen Ginsberg, and the other Beat writers were frequently cited—including Snyder’s reading with Ginsberg at the Six Gallery (in San Francisco in 1955, when “Howl” startled listeners) where, in the minds of some, the Beat movement may have been born.

In the decades since that crucial initial encounter with Gary Snyder’s poems, I have maintained my respect for the consistent characteristics evident in his consciousness of a fragile ecology, his display of a moral conscience, his explorations of self, and his continuing care for craft as exhibited in the fine writing. Shortly after my introduction to Snyder’s poetry, his next collection of poems, Turtle Island, which many may consider his most significant book, won the Pulitzer Prize. For a couple of decades, Snyder’s new poetry appeared sporadically (although a collection of selected poems, No Nature, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1992) and his reputation as a poet seemed to be solidified mostly by those earlier poetry volumes.

However, in 1996 Snyder published Mountains and Rivers Without End, a book-length poem uniting personal and universal themes that he’d begun forty years before in 1956. This work won a number of awards and garnered great praise upon its release. Additionally, its long and at times elevated explanation or interpretation of humans’ relationship with nature exposed Gary Snyder’s poetry to a new audience—including a number of my students, as I now recommended they read his work, just the way I had been advised to engage Snyder’s poetry when I was an undergraduate.

In 2004, for the first time in a couple of decades, Gary Snyder released a collection of completely new individual pieces of poetry within Danger on Peaks. And only a few weeks ago the Poetry Foundation announced Gary Snyder as the 2008 winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the lifetime achievement award that carries a $100,000 purse, which will be presented at a ceremony later this month. The choice of Gary Snyder for this recognition seems like a natural selection, logical and laudable.

In the press release noting the granting of this award to Snyder, the Poetry Foundation’s judges (Eavan Boland, Sandra M. Gilbert, and Christian Wiman) reported: “Gary Snyder is a true nature poet: there’s no sentimentalism to his work, and he never uses the natural world simply to celebrate his own sensibility. A deeply learned and meditative artist, an impassioned ecologist, and a poet of great scope as well as intense focus, Snyder has written poems that we will be reading for as long as we’ve been reading Robert Frost.” Wiman, editor of Poetry, remarked: “His poetry is a testament to the sacredness of the natural world and our relation to it, and a prophecy of what we stand to lose if we forget that relation.”

Gary Snyder was born on this date (May 8) in 1930. Today, as an acknowledgment of Gary Snyder’s birthday and as an indication of appreciation for his work, I extend the recommendation of his poetry—which I received as an undergraduate thirty-five years ago and that I now repeat to my students each semester—to all readers who wish to discover poems celebrating our regard for nature’s great beauty, or its correspondingly immense power, even while conscientiously confronting us with a complementary sense of personal and social responsibility.

Richard Hugo: "Death of the Kapowsin Tavern" (Contemporary Poetry Series)

In a past “One Poet’s Notes” article, “Rating Great Poets and Considering Contemporary Concerns,” explaining my views on that remarkable generation of poets born between the end of World War I and the end of World War II that may be credited with redirecting the course of poetry in the second half of the twentieth century, I listed those individuals of some significance and influence who contributed to the collective effect that group has had on American literature. In my article, I suggested: “Just as the modernists transformed poetry in the first half of the twentieth century, those poets born predominantly between the world wars shaped a transition toward today’s postmodern situation. Indeed, as individual volumes such as Eliot’s Waste Land and Stevens’s Harmonium impacted poetic direction in the country following the time of their publication, so too did particular collections by John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, W.D. Snodgrass, Mark Strand, James Wright, and others.”

I find an amazing array of figures on the roster of poets, including the following born between 1923 and 1943: A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, John Balaban, Marvin Bell, Robert Bly, Luicille Clifton, Alfred Corn, Robert Creeley, James Dickey, Alan Dugan, Stuart Dybek, B.H. Fairchild, Alvin Feinman, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Glück, Marilyn Hacker, Donald Hall, Michael S. Harper, Robert Hass, Richard Hugo, Donald Justice, Galway Kinnell, Carolyn Kizer, Kenneth Koch, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, John Logan, William Matthews, Walt McDonald, Sandra McPherson, James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, Frank O’Hara, Marge Piercy, Robert Pinsky, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Grace Schulman, Anne Sexton, Charles Simic, Louis Simpson, Dave Smith, W.D. Snodgrass, Gary Snyder, Gary Soto, Gerald Stern, Mark Strand, Lucien Stryk, C.K. Williams, Charles Wright, and James Wright. Additional significant poets—Gwendolyn Brooks, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Larry Levis, Robert Lowell, Howard Nemerov, and Richard Wilbur, among others—appear just outside the selected dates.

Consequently, I have decided to present a regular Contemporary Poetry Series on “One Poet’s Notes” exemplifying poetry by the individuals mentioned above, displaying a sample piece from each author as an introduction and an invitation for readers to seek further works by the poet featured. The chosen poems might not represent the most famous or most highly regarded pieces by every one of these poets, because many of those are already well known to readers or are too long for adequate presentation in this space; however, I hope the selections will offer a feel for one style of writing or concentration on subject matter readers might find characteristic in each poet’s collected work.

Today, I offer a poem by Richard Hugo.

DEATH OF THE KAPOWSIN TAVERN

I can’t ridge it back again from char.
Not one board left. Only ash a cat explores
and shattered glass smoked black and strung
about from the explosion I believe
in the reports. The white school up for sale
for years, most homes abandoned to the rocks
of passing boys—the fire, helped by wind
that blew the neon out six years before,
simply ended lots of ending.

A damn shame. Now, when the night chill
of the lake gets in a troller’s bones
where can the troller go for bad wine
washed down frantically with beer?
And when wise men are in style again
will one recount the two-mile glide of cranes
from dead pines or the nameless yellow
flowers thriving in the useless logs,
or dots of light all night about the far end
of the lake, the dawn arrival of the idiot
with catfish—most of all, above the lake
the temple and our sanctuary there?

Nothing dies as slowly as a scene.
The dusty jukebox cracking through
the cackle of a beered-up crone—
wagered wine—sudden need to dance—
these remain in the black debris.
Although I know in time the lake will send
wind black enough to blow it all away.


—Richard Hugo

Richard Hugo (1923-1982) served as a bombardier in Europe during World War II. After the war he studied with Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, then worked for more than a decade as a technical writer at Boeing. His first book of poems, Run of Jacks, appeared in 1961. Among his many later collections of poems, readers might find such fine examples as The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir (1973), What Thou Lovest Well Remains American (1975), 31 Letters and 13 Dreams (1977), and Death of the Kapowsin Tavern (1985),

Hugo began a new career teaching English and creative writing in the early 1960s at the University of Montana, where he remained for nearly two decades and developed a reputation as an extraordinary mentor for young poets. His poetry often reflects an appreciation for the Northwest region, especially those small-town locations or forgotten farmhouses that evoke a sense of loss or longing.

His teaching technique and his fondness for such settings combined in his production of The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing, a 1979 book containing practical advice for composing poetry that has influenced many authors in following generations. Indeed, in a previous piece about Richard Hugo on “One Poet’s Notes” I presented a section of his advice on triggering the imagination in which Hugo states: “I suspect that the true or valid triggering subject is one in which physical characteristics or details correspond to attitudes the poet has toward the world and himself. For me, a small town that has seen better days often works.”

Consequently, I select here “Death of the Kapowsin Tavern,” which appears a perfect example demonstrating such a type of Hugo’s work. In addition, as I was preparing today’s page, I recalled the evening in October of 1982, still in graduate school at the University of Utah, when whispered words shared the news of Richard Hugo’s death. My fellow poets and I were at our usual Friday night spot, a dark and dingy tavern named The Twilite Lounge, where we would drink bad watered-down beer, shoot pool with our bets on the table edge, punch numbers on the jukebox for the same songs over and over, and discuss writing, often quoting Hugo’s lines of poetry or tidbits of advice, until closing time in the early morning hours or we were too groggy to continue. That night the pitchers of warm beer were all bought for repeated toasts to Richard Hugo in honor of his vision of so many places much like the one in which we found ourselves.

In “Richard Hugo: Getting Right,” a lovely essay from Dave Smith’s Local Assays: On Contemporary American Poetry (University of Illinois Press, 1985), Smith writes about the individuals from Hugo’s poems frequently found in Western taverns or saloons: “These are survivors. They gather in bars and cantinas within the fellowship of shared vision and frontier virtues: courage, loyalty, self-reliance, tolerance, affection—what one expects from home. Bars become, as in 'Death of the Kapowsin Tavern,' recognizably home as well as 'the temple and our sanctuary.'”

[Readers also are invited to visit other posts about Richard Hugo: “Richard Hugo’s Letter to Charles Simic” and “An Elegant Epigraph: Richard Hugo on Triggering the Imagination.”]

Rating Great Poets and Considering Contemporary Concerns

Much has been made this weekend on writers’ individual blogs or email literary lists about the content and tenor of David Orr’s valuable and thought-provoking article in the New York Times, “The Great(ness) Game.” Some of the online commentary has focused upon questioning ambiguous definitions of “greatness” or the accuracy in Orr’s portrait of contemporary poetry, particularly his perceptions of college writing programs and a tendency toward careerism evident among those in the current community of authors. As with Orr’s essay, all of the opinions I have seen online so far have been interesting and insightful, have engendered discussion or debate, and have initiated some serious reflection.

At the same time, I have been thinking about my course on twentieth-century poetry that I again will be teaching in the fall. For the past few years I haven’t taught the class, since the university recently had instituted a new creative writing major and I was asked to concentrate on creative writing workshops during the first years of the major. Considering a return to teaching Twentieth-Century Poetry, I reexamined the course syllabus this week, wondering what additions or subtractions I might make, and pleasantly discovered once more an impressive depth of talent demonstrated by the chronicle of twentieth-century American poetry.

Moreover, after reading Orr’s article, especially his apparent suggestion that today’s poets are limited by producing works in the shadow of a generation of greatness—exemplified in Orr’s piece by John Ashbery, my own former teacher—and effectively diminishing their own output, I decided to isolate that chronological section of twentieth-century American poets to which Ashbery belongs. If one designs an admittedly artificial guideline for a generation as those born within a period of twenty years, and if everyone agrees for sake of the argument that modernism reached a pinnacle about 1923—upon publication of Waste Land by T.S. Eliot and the composition of early Cantos by Ezra Pound in 1922, as well as release of Spring and All by William Carlos Williams, Harmonium by Wallace Stevens, and a first edition of Selected Poems by Robert Frost in 1923—while sowing the seeds for the beginning of post-modernism may have coincided with the World War II years, then an arbitrary but convenient two-decade stretch of time to study might be 1923-1943.

When I review my course syllabus for this segment of the past century, I find an amazing array of figures on the roster of poets, including the following born between 1923 and 1943: A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, John Balaban, Marvin Bell, Robert Bly, Luicille Clifton, Robert Creeley, James Dickey, Alan Dugan, Stuart Dybek, B.H. Fairchild, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Glück, Donald Hall, Michael S. Harper, Robert Hass, Richard Hugo, Donald Justice, Galway Kinnell, Carolyn Kizer, Kenneth Koch, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, John Logan, William Matthews, Walt McDonald, James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, Frank O’Hara, Marge Piercy, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Charles Simic, Louis Simpson, Dave Smith, W.D. Snodgrass, Gary Snyder, Gerald Stern, Mark Strand, Lucien Stryk, C.K. Williams, Charles Wright, and James Wright. Additional significant poets—Gwendolyn Brooks, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Larry Levis, Robert Lowell, and Richard Wilbur, among others—appear just outside the selected dates.

If my math skill has not eluded me, this compilation of poets comes to fifty individuals. Readers could disagree about the greatness of any single poet listed above. Even talk about Orr’s example of Ashbery would create contentious conversation among some. However, looking back upon their record of accomplishments from the present position, the collective greatness of this generation’s poetry most likely would be indisputable in the minds of today’s readers.

Obviously, many would legitimately offer that the greatest generation of American poetry to arrive since Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson earlier fostered the art in the nineteenth century occurred during a wave of poets born in the 1870s and 1880s who swept into prominence in a period at the start of the twentieth century—the Ezra Pound (born in 1885) era that also included T.S. Eliot (1888), Robert Frost (1874), Wallace Stevens (1879), and William Carlos Williams (1883). Nevertheless, it would be difficult to argue against the 1923-1943 combined group above as a pool of poets that represents a great generation of poetry.

Just as the modernists transformed poetry in the first half of the twentieth century, those poets born predominantly between the world wars shaped a transition toward today’s postmodern situation. Indeed, as individual volumes such as Eliot’s Waste Land and Stevens’s Harmonium impacted poetic direction in the country following the time of their publication, so too did particular collections by John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, W.D. Snodgrass, Mark Strand, James Wright, and others. Indeed, as David Orr indicates, the strong influence of these poets still lingers into this premier decade of the twenty-first century.

David Orr also contends contemporary poets continually swayed by the writing styles of these previous figures have not yet developed their own sense of greatness. Therefore, Orr wonders whether, “for the first time since the early 19th century, American poetry may be about to run out of greatness.” A portion of Orr’s intriguing explanation makes a certain amount of sense, especially coming just one week after the annual AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) conference, perhaps resembling a typical business convention more and more each year, again drew thousands of poets to its venue in the Chicago Hilton:

Greatness isn’t simply a matter of potentially confusing concepts; it’s also a practical question about who gets to decide what about whom. Our assumptions about poetic greatness are therefore linked to the reputation-making structures of the poetry world—and changes in those structures can have peculiar effects on our thinking. For most of the 20th century, the poetry world resembled a country club. One had to know the right people; one had to study with the right mentors. The system began to change after the G.I. Bill was introduced (making a university-level poetic education possible for more people), and that change accelerated in the 1970s, as creative writing programs began to flourish. In 1975, there were 80 such programs; by 1992, there were more than 500, and the accumulated weight of all these credentialed poets began to put increasing pressure on poetry’s old system of personal relationships and behind-the-scenes logrolling. It would be a mistake to call today’s poetry world a transparent democracy (that whirring you hear is the sound of logs still busily being rolled), but it’s more democratic than it used to be—and far more middle class. It’s more of a guild now than a country club. This change has brought with it certain virtues, like greater professionalism and courtesy. One could argue that it also made the poetry world more receptive to writers like Bishop, whose style is less hoity-toity than, say, Eliot’s. But the poetry world has also acquired new vices, most notably a tedious careerism that encourages poets to publish early and often (the Donald Hall essay I mentioned earlier is largely a criticism of this very tendency). Consequently, it’s not hard to feel nostalgic for the way things used to be; or at least, the way we imagine they used to be. And this nostalgia often manifests as a preference for a particular kind of “greatness.”

Based upon Orr’s description and his observation about a perceived lack of greatness or unique ambition in particular younger poets, some might suggest a pessimistic outlook for American poetry. However, just as I believe the profile of American poetry may have shifted in the last century from a focus on the greatness of individual figures to an additional and equally important glimpse at the greatness of a collective generation of contributors, I view the new model of American poetry in the future as one that will prove even more inclusive and democratic, concentrated not only in the powerful works of a few individuals, but also in the strength of the whole production of poetry by the nation’s poets. As a larger number of folks write accomplished or well-crafted poetry, whether due to studies in university programs or the increased access to online writing communities and publications, maybe a new paradigm of greatness will present itself, though the word “greatness” suddenly may seem somewhat inappropriate.

As Daisy Fried states in a forum discussion, “Ambition and Greatness,” that appeared in the March 2005 issue of Poetry and is cited by David Orr in his article: “One of the delights of contemporary poetry is that there are as many ways of being great as there are of being ambitious. I’m not arguing against making distinctions. I like saying what I like and loathe. I’ll say why I think any poet is good or bad. I’m not particularly interested in persuading anyone to agree with me; it’s hard enough getting people to like my own poems. When I read I don’t ask myself, ‘Is this great?’ I look to see if something interesting is going on, hopefully something I don’t quite understand, something I need to figure out. Is that looking for ambition?”

In the same discussion, Jeredith Merrin adds: “This isn’t merely a matter of vocabulary: dramatic changes in our understanding of physical reality mean shifts in our ethical and emotional relationships to the world. Ambitious new work need not be ‘about’ physics, of course; and the juice of poetry remains in the homely details—Williams’s woman munching her plums. But writers stuck in Romantic or even twentieth-century assumptions can’t do the present job. Poetry (to allude to Frost) stays vital, necessary, ‘great,’ by giving accurate accounts of the altering weather—both ‘inner’ and ‘outer.’”

Perhaps Adam Kirsch rightly hinted at one problem with considering greatness in contemporary poetry: “If we look at poets of our day who seem likely to earn and sustain the name of great—I would think right away of Derek Walcott and the late Czeslaw Milosz—it is obvious that even the great poets are no longer interested in greatness, at least not in the sense that Milton or Keats were. After the world wars, communism, and fascism, there is a drastic mistrust in all intellectual fields of naive, triumphal humanism, of universal claims that disguise personal interests and assumptions. For a poet like Milosz, greatness consists not in self-assertion but in self-abnegation, not in mastery but in witnessing. This is a more modest and self-suspicious ideal, which may recoil from the very name of greatness, even as it retains the old ambition that defines the word—in Milton's formula, to create something that time will not willingly let die.”

One can blend the three comments by Fried, Merrin, and Kirsch to create a more complete understanding about the concerns contemporary poets and critics sometimes have with the use of certain terms, the uneasy relationship a number of them recognize between concepts of greatness or ambition and the current distrust by some for such labels, at least as they have been seen employed in the past. As the image above of an ancient muse reading words on a scroll might remind us, today’s readers also ought to consider it a bit risky to regard greatness in any specific contemporary poet since, as we all know, such a judgment is tenuous at best until tested by the passage of time and critically attested by forthcoming generations of readers as worthy of acclaim. Already, I look forward to “making distinctions,” as Daisy Fried phrased it, and exploring further all these issues about greatness with the students in my Twentieth-Century Poetry course next semester, fall 2009, when we will be able at least to claim we have distanced ourselves a decade from the end of the previous century.

John Ashbery: "Forties Flick" (Contemporary Poetry Series)

In a past “One Poet’s Notes” article, “Rating Great Poets and Considering Contemporary Concerns,” explaining my views on that remarkable generation of poets born between the end of World War I and the end of World War II that may be credited with redirecting the course of poetry in the second half of the twentieth century, I listed 50 individuals of some significance and influence who contributed to the collective effect that group has had on American literature. In my article, I suggested: “Just as the modernists transformed poetry in the first half of the twentieth century, those poets born predominantly between the world wars shaped a transition toward today’s postmodern situation. Indeed, as individual volumes such as Eliot’s Waste Land and Stevens’s Harmonium impacted poetic direction in the country following the time of their publication, so too did particular collections by John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, W.D. Snodgrass, Mark Strand, James Wright, and others.” At the time, I wrote:

I find an amazing array of figures on the roster of poets, including the following born between 1923 and 1943: A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, John Balaban, Marvin Bell, Robert Bly, Luicille Clifton, Robert Creeley, James Dickey, Alan Dugan, Stuart Dybek, B.H. Fairchild, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Glück, Donald Hall, Michael S. Harper, Robert Hass, Richard Hugo, Donald Justice, Galway Kinnell, Carolyn Kizer, Kenneth Koch, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, John Logan, William Matthews, Walt McDonald, James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, Frank O’Hara, Marge Piercy, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Charles Simic, Louis Simpson, Dave Smith, W.D. Snodgrass, Gary Snyder, Gerald Stern, Mark Strand, Lucien Stryk, C.K. Williams, Charles Wright, and James Wright. Additional significant poets—Gwendolyn Brooks, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Larry Levis, Robert Lowell, and Richard Wilbur, among others—appear just outside the selected dates.

Consequently, I have decided to present a regular series on “One Poet’s Notes” exemplifying poetry by the 50 individuals mentioned above. Over the course of time I intend to display a sample piece from each author as an introduction and an invitation for readers to seek further works by the poet featured. For lack of a better title, the series simply will be known as the Contemporary Poetry Series. The poems I will choose may not represent the most famous or most highly regarded pieces by every one of these poets, because many of those might already be well-known poems to readers or too long for adequate presentation in this space; however, I hope the selections will offer a feel for one style of writing or concentration on subject matter readers might find characteristic in each poet’s collected work.

Since the article that began my compilation was initiated somewhat by a discussion about John Ashbery, I will begin with him and his poem, “Forties Flick,” the first sample work proposed for consideration in the “One Poet’s Notes” Contemporary Poetry Series:

FORTIES FLICK

The shadow of the Venetian blind on the painted wall,
Shadows of the snake-plant and cacti, the plaster animals,
Focus on the tragic melancholy of the bright stare
Into nowhere, a hole like the black holes in space.
‘In bra and panties she sidles to the window:
Zip! Up with the blind. A fragile street scene offers itself,
With wafer-thin pedestrians who know where they are going.
The blind comes down slowly, the slats are slowly titled up.

Why must it always end this way?
A dais with woman reading, with the ruckus of her hair
And all that is unsaid about her pulling us back to her, with her
Into the silence that night alone can’t explain.
Silence of the library, of the telephone with its pad,
But we didn’t have to reinvent these either:
They had gone away into the plot of a story,
The “art” part—knowing what important details to leave out
And the way character is developed. Things too real
To be of much concern, hence artificial, yet now all over the page,
The indoors with the outside becoming part of you
As you find you had never left off laughing at death,
The background, dark vine at the edge of the porch.

—John Ashbery

Readers are urged to listen to John Ashbery reading “Forties Flick.”

John Ashbery is the author of nearly two-dozen books of poetry, the latest release being the Library of America publication, John Ashbery: Collected Poems 1956-1987 (2008). Other recent volumes by Ashbery include Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (2007), A Worldly Country (2007); Where Shall I Wander (2005); Chinese Whispers (2002); Your Name Here (2000); Girls on the Run: A Poem (1999); Wakefulness (1998); Can You Hear, Bird (1995); And the Stars Were Shining (1994); Hotel Lautrémont (1992); Flow Chart (1991); and April Galleons (1987).

Over the years John Ashbery has won almost all the major American awards offered for poetry. A Wave (1984) was honored with the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Some Trees (1956) was selected as a winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. He also has been awarded the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets; the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America; the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from Poetry, the Modern Poetry Association, and the American Council for the Arts; the Bollingen Prize for Poetry from Yale University Library; the Harvard Arts Medal from Harvard University; and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Among a number of awards offered by other countries, such as France and Belgium, last year John Ashbery was the International Prize winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize in Canada.

Additional articles concerning John Ashbery on “One Poet’s Notes” may be found at the following: “John Ashbery, Pierre Martory, and Jackson Pollock,” “John Ashbery and Fairfield Porter,” “John Ashbery: 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,'” “Poet of the Year: John Ashbery,” “John Ashbery: 'My Philosophy of Life,'” and “Poetry, Painting, and Economy: Rothko, Warhol, and Ashbery.”

Twentieth Century American Poetry Reading List: 100 Plus

As I was preparing for the start of the fall term, which begins with my Twentieth Century American Poetry class this afternoon, I considered what works to include in the syllabus this semester. Admittedly, I always feel limited in the amount of coverage possible during the number of class periods between now and December. Indeed, I am frequently frustrated by the need to omit some poets while shaping the syllabus for about fourteen weeks of meetings. Therefore, I decided to create an additional tool for my students, an extended reading list of poets that includes many who will not fit into the class discussions.

Over the summer I encountered in print publications and online sites various “top 100” lists of books, films, recordings, etc. provided for enlightenment, entertainment, discussion, and debate. Consequently, I thought I’d attempt a list of 100 books that might present appropriate coverage of poets whose contributions represent a collective sampling of twentieth century American poetry.

As I developed the list, I adhered to some restrictions. I chose only one book from any American poet, which was simpler for those figures whose works can be found in a volume of “collected” or “selected” poetry. Still, for some poets I had to make a difficult choice between anthologies of “earlier” poems or “later” poems. Ideally, almost all the poems should have been written and originally published in the twentieth century. Some poets of the nineteenth century, who influenced twentieth century American poetry, and other younger poets, whose primary impact results from poems published after 2000, were not included.

In addition, the artificial cutoff of 100 for myself necessitated painful decisions as a number of poets (more than a dozen) whose works I enjoy very much had to be left out. In fact, some of those poets are favorites of mine much more than others that were included; however, I reminded myself this is not meant merely to be a list of my personal preferences. Moreover, to be honest, I must acknowledge that I would recommend to my students that some of the lengthy books included could be read selectively, browsing for specific significant examples by the poet, while other volumes should be more closely examined from cover to cover.

In any case, I concluded this list—valuable or not for students and readers of poetry as more than just another literary parlor game—easily could be expanded. Since I composed the following fairly quickly and spontaneously in between the fashioning of pages for my course syllabus, I am sure I will be dismayed to learn I inadvertently overlooked some worthy candidates. To avoid any further complications and questions, visitors will note the poets appear alphabetically rather than ranked in any manner. Indeed, I know such lists still often reveal themselves to contain what might seem to some as arbitrary or subjective entries.

Therefore, since I acknowledge this list is incomplete, I request readers recommend additional poets for my students and others interested, and I welcome all suggestions that might supplement this roster or offer alternate editions for the poets chosen. Thus, the “100 plus” title above refers to my invitation for added names of individuals you might provide as qualifying for inclusion on this list.

1. A.R. Ammons: Collected Poems 1951-1971 (1971)
2. Rae Armantrout: Veil: New and Selected Poems (2001)
3. John Ashbery: Selected Poems (1985)
4. John Berryman: Collected Poems 1937-1971 (1988)
5. Linda Bierds: Flight: New and Selected Poems (2008)
6. Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems, 1929-1979 (1983)
7. Robert Bly: Selected Poems (1986)
8. Louise Bogan: The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968 (1968)
9. David Bottoms: Armored Hearts: Selected and New Poems (1995)
10. Gwendolyn Brooks: Selected Poems (1999)
11. Amy Clampett: The Collected Poems (1993)
12. Lucille Clifton: Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000 (2000)
13. Billy Collins: Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001)
14. Hart Crane: The Poems of Hart Crane (1986)
15. Robert Creeley: Selected Poems (1991)
16. E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems: 1913-1962 (1972)
17. J.V. Cunningham: The Poems of J.V. Cunningham (1997)
18. James Dickey: The Whole Motion: Collected Poems, 1945-1992 (1992)
19. Mark Doty: Atlantis (1995)
20. Rita Dove: Selected Poems (1993)
21. Robert Duncan: Selected Poems (1997)
22. Stephen Dunn: New & Selected Poems: 1974-1994 (1994)
23. Richard Eberhart: Collected Poems, 1930-1986 (1988)
24. T.S. Eliot: Complete Poems and Plays (1952)
25. B.H. Fairchild: The Art of the Lathe (1998)
26. Lawrence Ferlinghetti: These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems, 1955-1993 (1993)
27. Edward Field: New and Selected Poems from the Book of My Life (1987)
28. Carolyn Forché: The Country Between Us (1981)
29. Robert Frost: Complete Poems of Robert Frost (1968)
30. Alice Fulton: Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems (2005)
31. Allen Ginsberg: Collected Poems: 1947-85 (1995)
32. Louise Glück: The First Four Books of Poems (1995)
33. Jorie Graham: The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 (1995)
34. Barbara Guest: Selected Poems (1995)
35. R.S. Gwynn: No Word of Farewell: Poems 1970-2000 (2001)
36. H.D. [Hilda Doolittle]: Collected Poems, 1912-1944 (1983)
37. John Haines: The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer: Collected Poems (1993)
38. Joy Harjo: How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975-2001 (2002)
39. Robert Hass: Field Guide (1973)
40. Robert Hayden: Collected Poems (1985)
41. Anthony Hecht: Collected Earlier Poems (1992)
42. Richard Hugo: Making Certain It Goes On: The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo (1984)
43. Mark Jarman: Unholy Sonnets (2000)
44. Randall Jarrell: Complete Poems (1968)
45. Donald Justice: New and Selected Poems (1995)
46. Weldon Kees: The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (1975)
47. Galway Kinnell: A New Selected Poems (2000)
48. Carolyn Kizer: Cool, Calm and Collected: Poems 1960-2000 (2001)
49. Etheridge Knight: Born of a Woman: New and Selected Poems (1980)
50. Yusef Komunyakaa: Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems (2001)
51. Maxin Kumin: Selected Poems 1960-1990 (1997)
52. Denise Levertov: Selected Poems (2002)
53. Philip Levine: New Selected Poems (1992)
54. Larry Levis: The Selected Levis (2000)
55. Vachel Lindsay: Selected Poems of Vachel Lindsay (1963)
56. Audre Lorde: The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (1997)
57. Amy Lowell: Complete Poetical Works (1955)
58. Robert Lowell: Collected Poems (2002)
59. Edgar Lee Masters: Spoon River Anthology (1916)
60. Walter McDonald: Blessings the Body Gave (1998)
61. Claude McKay: Selected Poems (1953)
62. James Merrill: Collected Poems (2001)
63. Thomas Merton: The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (1979)
64. W.S. Merwin: Selected Poems (1988)
65. Edna St. Vincent Millay: The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay (2001)
66. Marianne Moore: The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (1981)
67. Howard Nemerov: Trying Conclusions: New and Selected Poems, 1961-1991 (1991)
68. Frank O’Hara: The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (1995)
69. Sharon Olds: Strike Sparks: Selected Poems (2004)
70. Mary Oliver: New and Selected Poems (1992)
71. Charles Olson: The Collected Poems of Charles Olson (1987)
72. Robert Pinsky: The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996)
73. Sylvia Plath: The Collected Poems (1981)
74. Ezra Pound: The Cantos of Ezra Pound (1996)
75. John Crowe Ransom: Selected Poems (1945)
76. Kenneth Rexroth: The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (2002)
77. Adrienne Rich: The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984 (1984)
78. Edwin Arlington Robinson: Collected Poems (1937)
79. Theodore Roethke: Collected Poems (1966)
80. Muriel Rukeyser: Collected Poems (1978)
81. Carl Sandburg: Complete Poems (1970)
82. Anne Sexton: Selected Poems of Anne Sexton (1988)
83. Charles Simic: Selected Poems 1963-2003 (2004)
84. Louis Simpson: Collected Poems (1988)
85. Dave Smith: The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000 (2000)
86. W.D. Snodgrass: Selected Poems, 1957-1987 (1987)
87. Gary Snyder: No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1992)
88. William Stafford: The Darkness Around Us Is Deep: Selected Poems of William Stafford (1993)
89. Gertrude Stein: Tender Buttons (1914)
90. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose (1997)
91. Mark Strand: Selected Poems (1990)
92. May Swenson: Nature: Poems Old and New (1994)
93. Allen Tate: Collected Poems, 1919-1976 (1977)
94. Mona Van Duyn: Selected Poems (2002)
95. Robert Penn Warren: The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren (1998)
96. Richard Wilbur: Collected Poems 1943-2004 (2004)
97. C.K. Williams: Selected Poems (1994)
98. William Carlos Williams: Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams (1986)
99. Charles Wright: Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems (2000)
100. James Wright: Above the River: The Complete Poems (1992)

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