Catherine’s Reviews > Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath > Status Update

Frank O'Hara's breezy, conversational tone is pleasant, but doesn't leave me craving more.

Anne Sexton, confessional poet extraordinaire, does, especially Transformations, her collection of fairy tale poems, of which "Rumpelstiltskin" is included in this anthology.

Philip Larkin makes me laugh with the blatant bitterness of his poems ("This Be the Verse," I'm looking at you!), but I wouldn't choose to read more.

Denise Levertov, on the other hand, be still my heart! "The Secret" has long been a favorite.
Add to that "Talking to Grief":
Ah, grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.

Dylan Thomas, Robert Lowell, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Duncan:
None of their poems in this anthology make me want to read more.

Randall Jarrell & John Berryman: two suicidal southern white guys, neither of whom float my poetic boat

Two activist/poet/professors:

Muriel Rukeyser:
I ask him: How can we go on reading
and make sense out of what we read?...
while you go on pouring grape into ORANGE
and orange into the one marked GRAPE -- ? ...

William Stafford:
"I'd promise to be loyal to California
and to guard any stars that hit it," I said,
"...unless the star was bigger than the state--
in which case I'd be loyal to it."

Robert Hayden: I was familiar with "Those Winter Sundays," which recalls his childhood (with cold, adoptive parents), but not his later poetry, dealing with racism and Vietnam, influenced by his Baha'i faith.

We must not be frightened nor cajoled
into accepting evil as deliverance from evil.
We must go on struggling to be human,
though monsters of abstraction
police and threaten us.

Elizabeth Bishop: "One Art" is in so many anthologies, but "The Fish" (which I read to my boys), "The Armadillo," and "In the Waiting Room" are equally delightful & relatable. Complete Poems: 1927-1979 is just over 100 poems.

Following up Auden is his contemporary (and friend), Louis MacNeice, who is new to me.

"Bagpipe Music" is delightful:
It's no go the merrygoround, it's no go the rickshaw,
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.

Another poet for my to-read-more-of list

Dana Gioia on W.H. Auden: The writers who affect us most deeply are usually the ones we discover early--often in adolescence. We read differently then, with more passionate curiousity, because we are caught in the process of discovering who we are and what we might become.

These words are true for my experience with Auden, another favorite.

"The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living."

Langston Hughes: I'm finally getting back to this project with another of my favorites. "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "I, Too," and "Harlem" are included in this anthology. I want to reread "Let America be America Again."