One of Those Ten Best Lists

With a Challenge for My Readers

Sep 19, 2023

Everyone loves those “Best Of” or “Favorite” lists of movies or books. In our celebrity culture, we like to find out what our “favorite” celebrities like to eat or drink, or, more salaciously, what their favorite sexual positions are. (I know a guy who actually inexplicably [and somewhat sadly] scoured the Internet for that information).

Between 2005 and 2009, Barnwood Press published Poet’s Bookshelf: Contemporary Poets on Books That Shaped Their Art, edited by the poet Peter Davis. In two volumes, Davis asked, close to 100 contemporary poets, to choose “5-10 books that have been most ‘essential’ to you as a poet,” and to say why they are “essential.” Below is my list, and I offer you this challenge. In my comment section or on my Substack Notes, mention 1-2 books that were essential to you as writer, and if you aren’t a writer, mention 1-2 books that were essential to you as a human being, since our lives, of course, are, hopefully, works of art in progress.

Here is my list, with an explanation of how I went about choosing them.:

Kim Addonizio, Tell Me

The Poetry of Catullus, trans. G.H. Sisson

Stephen Dobyns, Cemetery Nights

Russell Edson, The Reason Why the Closet Man is Never Sad

Max Jacob, The Dice Cup: Selected Prose Poems, ed. Michael Brownstein

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Nicanor Parra, Antipoems: New and Selected, ed. David Unger

Charles Simic, The World Doesn’t End

Bruce Smith, The Other Lover

James Tate, Selected Poems

Poets always complain about how difficult it is to publish books of poetry, yet hundreds appear every year, and many major poets seem to publish a new book every other year. Why? Partly because publishers will print anything they write; partly because they have jobs with little or no teaching, which frees up a tremendous amount of time. I mean, if you’re getting paid a lot of money to teach one or two days a week, you better be writing something.

The literary scene is indeed manic, as if whoever publishes the most poems is the best poet. Consequently, most books are thin at best, and if you leaf through the last three books of your favorite poet—books probably published within a four or five year period—you’ll realize that if your favorite poets had been patient and chosen the best poems from their last three books, they would have written one of those volumes poets call their “favorite” books—ones they return to over and over again for solace, for inspiration, even for entertainment.

Many of my favorite books, ones that continue to influence my own poetry and fiction, are classics such as Ovid’s Amores, anything by Sappho, Shakespeare, or Virginia Woolf, Andreas Capellanus’ The Art of Courtly Love, Voltaire’s Candide, Don Quixote, Gulliver’s Travels, and Novalis’ and Kafka’s short prose. But in compiling this list, except for one classical author, I decided to privilege some contemporary books I often reread whenever I’m bored or unable to write. Although I can think of at least ten more books, I’ll stick with these for now—in alphabetical order:

Tell Me: No fluff here. Poem after poem rocks with cruelty and compassion. It’s very easy to become self-indulgent or oversentimental when dealing with her subject matter. So easy to romanticize and idealize drunks and drug addicts, or to feel sorry for oneself or one’s personal history or past mistakes. Yet, with dark irony, Addonizio embraces her own and everyone else’s bumps and bruises. “I am going to stop thinking about my losses now,” the narrator of the title poem says, “and listen to yours. I’m so sick of dragging them / with me wherever I go, like children up too late / who should be curled in their own beds.”

The Poetry of Catullus: Whatever happened to invective—the fine art of skewering someone? Every night we’re assaulted by the unreality of Reality TV, and every morning we’re greeted by another stupid war, while our poets unashamedly hawk their poems like insurance salesmen or traveling medicine men. It’s certainly time for another Catullus. “Thallus, you pansy, softer than rabbit’s wool / The down of a goose or the lobe of an ear, / Softer than an old man’s penis and the cobwebs hanging from it / . . . Give me back my cloak, you stole it . . .” Enough said.

Cemetery Nights: Probably my favorite contemporary book of verse poetry. A making of new myths and a wacky retelling of old ones, played out in a world overseen by a God wearing blinders. Yet amidst the absurdity and horror, optimism and compassion lurk. Consider this from the opening of “Cemetery Nights”: “sweet dreams, sweet memories, sweet taste of earth: / here’s how the dead pretend they’re still alive, / one drags up a chair, a lamp, unwraps / the newspaper from somebody’s garbage, / then sits holding the paper up to his face. / No matter if the lamp is busted and his eyes / have fallen out. . . .” A contemporary classic.

The Reason Why the Closet Man Is Never Sad: When I first began writing and submitting prose poems, rejection slips came back, suggesting my poems were cheap imitations of Russell Edson’s. Considering I had never heard of Edson, I was a bit shocked, yet believing you should at least read the authors you’re influenced by, I bought The Reason Why the Closet Man Is Never Sad. I admire all of Edson’s work—its apparent and seductive simplicity, its logical zaniness, its comic-book texture—but this particular book is his best. It’s comic, for sure, but also characterized by what he calls the “dark uncomfortable metaphor,” suggested by the “closet man” himself, who tries, hopelessly, of course, to control his life.

The Dice Cup: Selected Prose Poems: Edited and with an Introduction by Michael Brownstein, this is a book I never tire of. Constantly inventive and surprising, Jacob would have made a great stand-up comedian. He does with words what the Cubists did with paint, his greatest virtue being that he never took himself too seriously.

Lolita: How does one make us want to listen to a pedophile, or even like him? Unreliable narrators are scattered throughout my prose poetry and fiction, and Nabokov’s book taught me how to keep them from becoming caricatures. Humbert Humbert sings, and we are seduced by his language while simultaneously questioning his erotic outbursts and lack of self-knowledge. “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” Whoof!

Antipoems: New and Selected: “Maximum content, minimum words,” Parra said. “Economy of language, no metaphors, no literary figures.” Funny, angry, self-deprecating, politically savvy, skeptical of grand narratives, all the necessary talents to be a poet in our absurd times. Who else, after years of taunting us, would apologize for his poetry, ask us to burn his book, then say, “I take back everything I said”?

The World Doesn’t End: This book of prose poems received a Pulitzer Prize in 1990, much to the dismay of many formalist poets, who were outraged that a book of prose poems could win such a prestigious award. I think it’s Simic’s best book, and I wish he would write more prose poems. The genre has always welcomed comic juxtapositions and the merging of different genres, making it a fertile place for Simic’s prodigious imagination. The simplicity of this book still astounds me.

The Other Lover: A book that was up for a National Book Award the same year as Addonizio’s Tell Me. All of Smith’s talents come together here. Equally adept at formal patterns or the prose poem, he’s a troubadour of lost love, a social critic, a blues-and-jazz man, both learned and hip. A very American book, with poems full of loss and love, all held together by wisdom and compassion.

Tate’s Selected Poems: Constantly surprising, Tate is a comic genius. Marjorie Perloff argued that Rimbaud’s “multiplicity of meaning gives way to a strange new literalism.” Ditto for Tate. Reading his poems, I often feel as if I’m visiting another planet, governed by a philosopher king wielding a poo-poo cushion instead of Excalibur. Tate should be given an honorary Nobel Prize for his titles alone: “Same Tits,” “Goodtime Jesus,” “Teaching the Ape to Write Poems,”…

P.S.: If you want to be a dope an argue about the correct pronunciation of Nabokov, read below what the author himself says.

Q: As with Gogol and even James Agee, there is occasionally confusion about the pronunciation of your last name. How does one pronounce it correctly?
A: It is indeed a tricky name. It is often misspelt, because the eye tends to regard the "a" of the first syllable as a misprint and then tries to restore the symmetrical sequence by triplicating the "o" -- filling up the row of circles, so to speak, as in a game of crosses and naughts. No-bow-cough. How ugly, how wrong. Every author whose name is fairly often mentioned in periodicals develops a bird-watcher's or a caterpillar-picker's knack when scanning an article. But in my case I always get caught by the word "nobody" when capitalized at the beginning of a sentence. As to pronunciation, Frenchmen of course say Nabokoff, with the accent on the last syllable. Englishmen say Nab okov, accent on the first, and Italians say Nabokov, accent in the middle, as Russians also do. Na-bo -kov. A heavy open "o" as in "Knickerbocker." My New England ear is not offended by the long elegant middle "o" of Nabokov as delivered in American academies. The awful "Na-bah-kov" is a despicable gutterism. Well, you can make your own choice now. Incidentally, the first name is pronounced Vladeemer -- rhyming with "redeemer" -- not Vladimir rhyming with Faddimere (a place in England, I think)

Old Man Still Howling at the Moon

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