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Originally Posted by Kim C Not G

I did a report on her a couple years ago. I have her complete collection of poems and recited one for school. What other poets are you all a fan of? Plath, Atwood, Crane, Roethke, etc. are some of my favorites.

ah... a favorite subject. among american poets i love whitman above all others; and of course st. dickinson; pound and tears eliot, though pound can be a bit abstruse; e.e. cummings (who in one if his diaries christened eliot "tears"); carlos williams; kenneth kock (whom i saw do a reading live, i have an autographed copy of "one train"); irish poets are many & good but i don't know enough, so i'll mention yeats again above everyone else and paul muldoon; among the english moderns, philip larkin is a funny nihilist, but auden surpasses all others i know, and before that there were keats and shelley and the luminous william blake (i am not a fan of wordsworth. i don't know why); i like the rhythm in tennyson and swinburne; and among the welsh of course there is that drunken butterfly known as dylan thomas, what a voice. latin americans-- that's my subject, but i'll start with the spanish predecessors: garcilaso, lope, quevedo, gongora; and then centuries later in latin america ruben dario, the supernova; marti, huidobro, vallejo, neruda, even the often-stiff borges; lezama lima; i do not like gabriela mistral; more recently alejandra pizarnik, rafael hinostroza, antonio cisneros; octavio paz can kiss my ass for the most part; and back to spain federico garcia lorca, juan ramon, antonio machado, miguel hernandez, some of cernuda & that wonderfully depraved person known as gil de biedma. of course i leave many out. we could start with the french: baudelaire of course, rimbaud, gautier, nerval, artaud-- i am not a fan of valery. whoever wrote la chanson de roland. and then there are the arab poets of the ancient kingdom of granada, whose names i dont remember but who wrote some gorgeous erotic poems. and germans like rilke, goethe, holderlin, and paul celan-- a pity i can't read them in the original. and the brazilians! carlos drummond the andrade i love best; the concretists were perhaps geniuses but their theory rarely reaches the gonads. and i could go on an on-- george seferis, odysseus elytis-- and homer!! fucking homer!! sappho, catullus, dante, lewis carroll, shakespeare (i am getting chaotic i know), etc, etc, etc...