Wednesday, May 02, 2007

14 Poets

Jeff Newberry posted a list of 13 poets as a proposed answer to this: Say someone asked me, "I kind of like poetry, but I don't know anything about contemporary poetry. Who should I read?"

I spontaneously came up with this list of 14 (which I have put in alphabetical order), throwing in some German and French poets:

Duden, Anne
Grünbein, Durs
Heaney, Seamus
Hicok, Bob
Levine, Philip
Longley, Michael
Maxwell, Glyn
Paterson, Don
Réda, Jacques
Stallings, A. E.
Wilbur, Richard
Young, C. Dale

Levine is the only one on Jeff's list and mine.

Tomorrow, of course, I would come up with a somewhat different list.

3 comments:

SarahJane said...

can you recommend a book of Durs Grünbein's, preferably bilingual? Or an anthology including a good selection of his work?

Donald Brown said...

Pretty good.

I can't think of 14 living poets I read. I mean, I'm sure I've read work by more than that, but very few have become "names" I could list like that.

But here goes: people I mean to read more of, sometime:
W. S. Merwin, Mark Ford, Louise Gluck, Kay Ryan, Anne Carson, Maurice Manning, Frank Bidart, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, Geoffrey Hill, A. E. Stallings, John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein...

Andrew Shields said...

10 years ago, Merwin would have been on my list still, but I burned out on his work.

Ann Carson is on my second list (see the post after this one).

Geoffrey Hill should have been on my list, too!

Of the ones you list, the only one I have been completely unable to click with is Frank Bidart.