Pomes, Po–emmms

My friend Joanne, who makes wonderful films and is very knowledgeable on the subject of film, asked me the other day what books I would recommend to someone who hasn't read that much modern poetry. So I endeavored to compile a highly subjective list of the stuff that I really love and think people should be exposed to if they haven't been already. As you can see, the list includes mostly stuff that's basically canonical in a counter-canonical way. It's all Anglophone and 20th century. Also of note, I didn't include anything hyper-contemporary and that's because I think that it's hard to understand a lot of very contemporary poetry without having read some of the earlier stuff:

-Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems

-Lorine Niedecker's Collected Works, especially the poems "Next Year, or I Fly My Rounds Tempestuous" and "My Life by Water"

-Eileen Myles' Not Me

-T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (I know every one reads these in High School, but they never lose their dreary, apocalyptic awesomeness for me)

-Frank O'Hara's The Lunch Poems, especially the poems, "The Day Lady Died" (on the first day of grad school, I was stupid enough to say I loved this poem when the teacher handed it out. The second year students looked at me as if I was some kind of vulgarian quelle horreur! you don't come to grad school to love anything.)

-Alice Notley's The Mysteries of Small Houses

-Kamau Brathwaite's Trenchtown Rock

-Ann Lauterbach's On a Stair

-Charles Reznikoff 's Testimony: The United States (1885-1915) Recitative vol. 1 and 2

-Mina Loy's The Lost Lunar Baedecker, especially the poem, "Songs to Johannes"

-Lyn Hejinian's The Cold of Poetry, especially the poem, "Gesualdo"

-Ted Berrigan's (click to hear incredible Berrigan readings* of) The Sonnets and "Red Shift"

-William Carlos Williams' Spring and All

-Melvin B. Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia

-Joe Brainard's I Remember (though Brainard mostly dedicated himself to visual art, he also wrote)

-David Antin's Talking at the Boundaries

*Actually, there are good recordings of most of these poets on PennSound, the vast audio archives of poets reading kept at the University of Pennsylvania and made accessible to the public through their extremely navigable website.