Poetry. What to keep; what to throw.

I am clearing my shop gradually as I work to the closing date in 3 weeks time.

Today I sorted the poetry. I'm not a poet, as anyone who looks at the poems in my submission list would realise. 'The Garderobe' is a fair example to my output.

I can appreciate other people's poetry. I prefer to see poems following a classical structure and having metre and rhyme - that's just my view.

The problem is:

What poetry do I keep? What poetry do I throw (give away to a charity for them to sell)?

So far I am keeping:

Pam Ayres (1st editions)
Blake
Burns
Eliza Cook (1st edition of complete works)
D H Lawrence
McGonagal
Tennyson (1st editions)

and a few rare items by obscure poets that are first editions.

All the rest, about 300 volumes, is on the out heap because if I want them they are available in anthologies or at the library.

What would you keep?

What poet can't you live without?

Are there any poets you HAVE to have?

Answers, with reasons, appreciated.

Og

PS. For Perdita: Of course I've kept Shakespeare's poetry in his complete works.

It would be tough to throw any of them out.

I don't read poetry like I read other stuff though. It's too rich. One or two at a time is plenty.

No, I can't think of any I'd throw out. Maybe that person who wrote "The boy stood on the burning deck..."

---dr.M.

Dylan Thomas. My absolute personal favorite. He and Robert Frost were two of my early 20th century influences. Coleridge, Burns, Donne are also shapers of my thinking on poetry, as are some surprising influences such as Jim Morrisson.

Ogg, I have lots of poetry. They're all small books so I don't think I'd throw any out. I couldn't do without Keats, Byron, Shelley, Yeats, Beckett (love his poems), some Wordsworth. Plath and Anne Sexton I reread often and learn from. Many Latin-American poets: Vallejo, Mistral, Neruda, Juana Inez de la Cruz especially. Frank O'Hara is my fave U.S. male poet, great humour and play. Oh, and I needs have Emily Dickensen. Russian: Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova and Pushkin I reread regularly (in translation so I have many versions of each).

Other classics I must have near: Dante, Homer, Chaucer and Shakespeare.

For any poetry I love it's simply due to the language, beauty and profundity that's captured in a line or two. Sometimes I will love a poem for just a particular word or two.

Perdita

I have a fondness for Gary Snyder, who understands the woods and work in it. He's also a mystic. Between the two things, I have always returned to him. His Myths and Texts, while not poetry, is also fascinating, and a very short book.

I've gone seventy miles to hear Snyder read and speak. I've seen X.J. Kennedy and some others, too. Kennedy died the same year, and so did Duncan, not long after I'd heard them, which was spooky. I was at the Maine concert which was very nearly the last performance by Stevie Ray Vaughn, too. Hmmm.

Snyder lived on for some time, so perhaps the spell was broken.

After Snyder and the Elizabethans, Ted Hughes's Crow. I read that and was blown out of the water. None of his other stuff except a little one about a jaguar ever grabbed me, though. Ted lost it when they gave him the laurels, I guess.

Auden. Yeats. Beaudelaire. William C. Williams. Ferlinghetti, some of it.

A great English translation of Les Fleurs du mal is the one by Millay and George Dillon. Millay can be pithy and good, herself. But for Baudelaire in translation, accept no less than the Millay version.

e.e. cummings!

Yipe. I guess I could pare it down to one case.

I am with Perdita, I was going to say Yeats, but then she had soooo many good others that I don't have in my library yet. Good Lord, I sure pity you. I had to clear out some of my dearest friends a while back after the movers tried to refuse to move sixteen boxes of books, and I am still crying my heart out over it.

If you want you can just ship them all to me and I'll keep them loved for you.

I'm afraid I'm a poetry ignoramus. Maybe you should pass them all to me so that I can learn? I'm trying, though. I have to write a sonnet as an assignment shortly. I like the form, and I love the feel of iambic pentameter on the tongue.

Alex

I'm with you Alex.... I have no idea.

I have my two faves on here.. one is in my sig

Thank you for the responses.

I should have made it clearer that it is my shop's stock I'm culling, not my personal library. My favourite poets are in our library which we have reduced to about 2,000 books (from 7,000).

All those I decide to cull will be sold in aid of the National Trust for projects at their White Cliffs site in Dover. So far they have raised several thousand pounds from my rejects and they have a back stock of 2 tons of books, soon to be 3 tons.

Og

On the modern side, C.K. Williams and Mark Strand.

Literature this weekend

OK, I've culled the poetry.

By Sunday evening I have to have reduced the English Literature to a dozen or so books.

That is easier than poetry because most works are available in cheap paperbacks.

Dickens is already packed. I've kept the 19th century Chapman and Hall editions and the volumes of All The Year Round and Household Words published while Dickens was the editor. Anything Dickens published in the 20th century is on the out heap.

Any suggestions for what I should keep?

Og

PS. I have Bernard Shaw, my mother's complete edition that she bought in her teens and twenties, affording one book a month.

PPS. I'm keeping my shop reference library. That includes 25 different baby name books - useful for character naming; 10 quotation books, the full Oxford English Dictionary, Concise 3 volume Dictionary of National Biography, guides, companions, digests of English Literature, etc.

It's sad to think of the shop dying, Og. I shall forever picture you in it.

I see it as a diminution. Good luck in the future, old fellow; try not to simplify your life to nullity!

cantdog

cantdog said:

It's sad to think of the shop dying, Og. I shall forever picture you in it.

I see it as a diminution. Good luck in the future, old fellow; try not to simplify your life to nullity!

cantdog

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There is no hope of that. My diary has appointments until 2008. Closing the shop will give me time for all the other things I want to do but can't because I have to be in the shop.

One promise I have made to my wife. I won't stand for Parliament.

Og

oggbashan
One promise I have made to my wife. I won't stand for Parliament.

Og

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Congratulations on the bride's father status. It's wonderful when a plan comes together. Be sure to put on a lively party for them all.



I can see my own bride's father status finally approaching. Maybe eighteen months or so, we shall see. Thank goodness, she is in no hurry.

cantdog