Natalie Diaz for her lexicon and how far she can take an image. Ellen Bass for her ability to take a moment in time y spin it into something interesting y that she also writes about the reality of long love. See “Marriage”. Donika Kelly for her imagery and metaphors.
Kaveh Akbar is a big one in my personal canon. I'm blown away by all aspects of his work, but I especially connect with how he talks about faith. I also love Chen Chen, especially for his humor and incisive observations. "I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party" was one of my favorite poems I read last year. Richard Siken is incredible as well. His poems are so emotionally-charged and brimming with tension, and the imagery is so rich.
I also want to second everyone who has mentioned Megan Fernandes! I just recently read I Do Everything I'm Told and loved the city sonnet sequence.
Elisa Gabbert is one of those "wildcard" poets for me. I wouldn't say I *enjoyed* reading Normal Distance, per se, but it truly LIVES in my head. Her voice and her formal choices are so unique. I'm always going back to those poems to try to tease them apart.
I love the idea of organizing a personal cannon. Here’s some of my thoughts
Aria Arber - specifically Dirt and Light. I find the lost love, other loves and civil life compelling. And I find it generative in my own writing.
Bianca Stone - just embodies the poet's life and Vermont. I love her Ode & Psyche podcast.
Victoria Chang - I loved Obits and I’m getting into s.
Stanley Plumly - In Passing. I like how it juxtaposes death and sex, kitch and art, the lover and beloved.
Anne Sexton - “My friend, my friend I was born doing reference work in sin and confessing it. That is what poems are” Yes!
Wallace Stevens - I like his high rhetorical style and his quest on how to fill the void now that God is dead. Two favorites are Sunday Morning and the Idea of Order at Key West.
AGNI and Missouri Review are favorite lit mags for new poems.
I'm a fiction writer just dipping a toe into the world of poetry, so my canon is still a work in progress, but here are some favourites:
1 - Richard Siken. (with an emphasis on "Crush") I love his intensity, the frantic, obsessive pace of each poem, how he's able to use structure to mirror the feelings he's trying to evoke. My absolute favourite - if anyone has any similar recommendations, I would lovelovelove to hear them.
2 - Dorianne Laux. Sensual, intense, with imagery that hit very close to home for me
3 - Louise Glück. Love her for similar reasons - her ability to depict trauma, desire, and often complicated events/emotions
4 - Kim Addonizio. A hit/miss for me, as some poems feel a bit too simplistic for my liking, but I absolutely adore the way she writes about sex/desire, with this raw heat that feels very realistic
5 - Emily Skaja. This is a newer find for me, but I greatly enjoyed "Brute" - I usually get bored with nature / animals as metaphor but she kept it fresh and interesting
1) chen chen. what's not to love about gay? his writing is ridiculously whimsical in a way that fawns and frowns against the sexual world.
2) jack gilbert. his melancholic tone is a "mournful hope?" it feels both nihilistic and nurturing at the same time.
3) abby johnson. i read her chap "opportunity cost" which had evocative language and musings centered on assault, navigating the (im)personal and rift of mind.
I'm still new to poetry and only started building a canon today. I've noticed that a lot of the love poetry I like deals with male dominance and/or violence or generally aren't very lovey or sexy.
So far I've got
1. Taylor Byas for the way she plays with form and how her poems feel like little novies.
2. Amanda Hope for how she superimposes the mundane with personal experiences
3. Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose for the way she interweaves the fantastical and also for openly approaching topics like postcoital sadness (in Tristesse)
4. From the "classics" I think I could learn from Pablo Neruda's obsessiveness and surrealism
surrealism
5. Kamala Das for the way images are repeated to become visceral symbols
It's amazing how we can observe these things in our own modes of thinking as we start figuring out our personal canons. Love your list here -- Taylor Byas is doing some great things
Yes, there is a sexy history between the two. So much has been written of it that it is quite hard to be original when it comes to any writing of it. Good read!
I’m just building a canon of poets. I enjoy Ted Kooser, his ‘5 PM’, ‘A Letter’ and ‘Sparklers’ by intimating what his characters mean or are thinking. His surreal allusions in
‘Sparklers’ – ‘I scratched your name in longhand on the night…’ Louise Gluck’s ‘The White Lilies’ also makes surreal allusions – ‘…make a garden between them like a bed of stars…’; While ‘From A Journal ’relates the melancholy of loss – ‘…to have lost any chance of actually knowing you or remembering you over time as a real person…’; and again with a surreal reference: Mary Oliver’s ‘I know Someone’ – ‘I know someone who kisses the way a flower opens, but more rapidly.’ I often revisit e.e. cummings’ ‘new she was’ for the way he used pacing and metaphor to express physical interaction. (See how I skipped around fucking).
I’ve not had many poems published, but Longing and Singing both reach into the melancholy of lost or unrealized love.
Ah thank you so much for reminding of that Kooser line, and all those poems in fact. Mary Oliver of course is the gold standard for so many poets. Love the poems you've shared too!
Olivia Gatwood for her wit and boldness in metaphor. Megan Fernandes for these same reasons. Eileen Myles for their punchiness, how sex and love is treated like a well-worn afterthought woven into everyday humanity. Ada Limon for her starkly rendered joy and pain.
I'd heard of all the other poets you named but Gatwood is new to me. Really enjoying what I've seen online! I recently read Megan Fernandes' Good Boys and my copy's full of underlines
Jack Gilbert for how he grieves lost love and for how he uses imagery and metaphor. Dorianne Laux for how she chooses just the right raw details. Mary Meriam for her use of meter and rhyme, especially in sonnets. Of course all three of these poets do many things well..
So hard to choose. Mary Oliver for showing me how to pay particular and specific attention, a practice that has decoded my world. Emily Dickinson for her passion and intensity, and for making the anchorite life cool. Leonard Cohen is the poet of my soul and Patti Smith speaks the language of my gut.
some of my canon, with an eye towards desire, intimacy, sex, love:
Eileen Myles for their unequivocal colloquial style, threaded through with matter-of-fact queer desire and mundane details (e.g. “Peanut Butter”. Frank O’Hara for his rattling off of scenes and names and the intimacy of the scenes he makes here (“having a coke with you” the most obvious, but my favorite, the ode to love and friendship and desire and hope: “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s”). Olena Kalytiak Davis (I’ve long been obsessed with her “Shatter Sonnets”) for her sounds and rhythms as an inheritor of Gerard Manley Harris—and in her later work she leans more towards the colloquial rumination of Myles and O’Hara that I love. Jane Kenyon for her lucent, simple, images and subtle sensations. I am also drawn to the fleetingness of love in her poems. Garth Greenwell’s substack introduced me to the most sexy poem: “September Garden Party” and I’m also partial to “Otherwise” as a marriage poem.
My Canon: There are too many but if I have to name a few: Carolyn Forché because I got to study with her years ago and love her global sensitivities/focus making the personal political and a kind of soft approach; Hieu Minh because I relate to his queerness, and his leaps toward transformation feel healing; Jane Huffman for clarity/brevity; Kazim Ali for sound; Divya Victor for voice, lushness, global consciousness and politics; Joelle Taylor for truth, narratives with honor and lust; Emily Berry, Ilya Kaminsky, Octavio Paz, Milosz, Simic, Vitale, Beckett, Dickinson and Gertrude Stein, new ways to language experience/the world, Plath and Sexton for saying the unsayable, and the Psalms.
some of my canon: li-young lee makes my writing more lyrical and prosodic, mary oliver helps me love the natural world better, gustavo hernandez' work is a masterclass in loving care for settings, torrin a. greathouse and stacey waite are butch guideposts making my writing better as a femme dyke
Yes. I learned that poem from Modpo too. 😁
Natalie Diaz for her lexicon and how far she can take an image. Ellen Bass for her ability to take a moment in time y spin it into something interesting y that she also writes about the reality of long love. See “Marriage”. Donika Kelly for her imagery and metaphors.
Kaveh Akbar is a big one in my personal canon. I'm blown away by all aspects of his work, but I especially connect with how he talks about faith. I also love Chen Chen, especially for his humor and incisive observations. "I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party" was one of my favorite poems I read last year. Richard Siken is incredible as well. His poems are so emotionally-charged and brimming with tension, and the imagery is so rich.
I also want to second everyone who has mentioned Megan Fernandes! I just recently read I Do Everything I'm Told and loved the city sonnet sequence.
Elisa Gabbert is one of those "wildcard" poets for me. I wouldn't say I *enjoyed* reading Normal Distance, per se, but it truly LIVES in my head. Her voice and her formal choices are so unique. I'm always going back to those poems to try to tease them apart.
Yes to Chen Chen. And love his voice. And yes to Megan Fernandez. I took a great class with her on rhythm and beat. Mind-blowing.
I love the idea of organizing a personal cannon. Here’s some of my thoughts
Aria Arber - specifically Dirt and Light. I find the lost love, other loves and civil life compelling. And I find it generative in my own writing.
Bianca Stone - just embodies the poet's life and Vermont. I love her Ode & Psyche podcast.
Victoria Chang - I loved Obits and I’m getting into s.
Stanley Plumly - In Passing. I like how it juxtaposes death and sex, kitch and art, the lover and beloved.
Anne Sexton - “My friend, my friend I was born doing reference work in sin and confessing it. That is what poems are” Yes!
Wallace Stevens - I like his high rhetorical style and his quest on how to fill the void now that God is dead. Two favorites are Sunday Morning and the Idea of Order at Key West.
AGNI and Missouri Review are favorite lit mags for new poems.
You have some of my absolute favorites here, Dave. Aria Aber especially is doing wonderful things
I'm a fiction writer just dipping a toe into the world of poetry, so my canon is still a work in progress, but here are some favourites:
1 - Richard Siken. (with an emphasis on "Crush") I love his intensity, the frantic, obsessive pace of each poem, how he's able to use structure to mirror the feelings he's trying to evoke. My absolute favourite - if anyone has any similar recommendations, I would lovelovelove to hear them.
2 - Dorianne Laux. Sensual, intense, with imagery that hit very close to home for me
3 - Louise Glück. Love her for similar reasons - her ability to depict trauma, desire, and often complicated events/emotions
4 - Kim Addonizio. A hit/miss for me, as some poems feel a bit too simplistic for my liking, but I absolutely adore the way she writes about sex/desire, with this raw heat that feels very realistic
5 - Emily Skaja. This is a newer find for me, but I greatly enjoyed "Brute" - I usually get bored with nature / animals as metaphor but she kept it fresh and interesting
I loved "Brute" too. And I'll have to check out Siken. Glück is always fabulous. Laux and Addonizio less so but still often very good. Thank you!
I LOVE when I hear about new poets from people's personal canons and faves. Really enjoyed Emily Skaja, Olesya.
Canon list:
1) chen chen. what's not to love about gay? his writing is ridiculously whimsical in a way that fawns and frowns against the sexual world.
2) jack gilbert. his melancholic tone is a "mournful hope?" it feels both nihilistic and nurturing at the same time.
3) abby johnson. i read her chap "opportunity cost" which had evocative language and musings centered on assault, navigating the (im)personal and rift of mind.
So on board with your assessment of Chen Chen haha :)
I'm still new to poetry and only started building a canon today. I've noticed that a lot of the love poetry I like deals with male dominance and/or violence or generally aren't very lovey or sexy.
So far I've got
1. Taylor Byas for the way she plays with form and how her poems feel like little novies.
2. Amanda Hope for how she superimposes the mundane with personal experiences
3. Elizabeth Johnston Ambrose for the way she interweaves the fantastical and also for openly approaching topics like postcoital sadness (in Tristesse)
4. From the "classics" I think I could learn from Pablo Neruda's obsessiveness and surrealism
surrealism
5. Kamala Das for the way images are repeated to become visceral symbols
It's amazing how we can observe these things in our own modes of thinking as we start figuring out our personal canons. Love your list here -- Taylor Byas is doing some great things
Yes, there is a sexy history between the two. So much has been written of it that it is quite hard to be original when it comes to any writing of it. Good read!
Thanks Luis!
I’m just building a canon of poets. I enjoy Ted Kooser, his ‘5 PM’, ‘A Letter’ and ‘Sparklers’ by intimating what his characters mean or are thinking. His surreal allusions in
‘Sparklers’ – ‘I scratched your name in longhand on the night…’ Louise Gluck’s ‘The White Lilies’ also makes surreal allusions – ‘…make a garden between them like a bed of stars…’; While ‘From A Journal ’relates the melancholy of loss – ‘…to have lost any chance of actually knowing you or remembering you over time as a real person…’; and again with a surreal reference: Mary Oliver’s ‘I know Someone’ – ‘I know someone who kisses the way a flower opens, but more rapidly.’ I often revisit e.e. cummings’ ‘new she was’ for the way he used pacing and metaphor to express physical interaction. (See how I skipped around fucking).
I’ve not had many poems published, but Longing and Singing both reach into the melancholy of lost or unrealized love.
Longing - an American cinquain
In dreams
my glimpse of you,
a faint whispering pale
affirms a hint of what I dared
was love.
Singing - an American cinquain pair
How do
I sing for you
after the wind sweeps you
forever away to touch the sky,
lyrics
composed
intimately
encased in words and touch
delivered to an audience
of two?
Ah thank you so much for reminding of that Kooser line, and all those poems in fact. Mary Oliver of course is the gold standard for so many poets. Love the poems you've shared too!
Olivia Gatwood for her wit and boldness in metaphor. Megan Fernandes for these same reasons. Eileen Myles for their punchiness, how sex and love is treated like a well-worn afterthought woven into everyday humanity. Ada Limon for her starkly rendered joy and pain.
I'd heard of all the other poets you named but Gatwood is new to me. Really enjoying what I've seen online! I recently read Megan Fernandes' Good Boys and my copy's full of underlines
Jack Gilbert for how he grieves lost love and for how he uses imagery and metaphor. Dorianne Laux for how she chooses just the right raw details. Mary Meriam for her use of meter and rhyme, especially in sonnets. Of course all three of these poets do many things well..
Looked up Mary Meriam and so glad I did!! Thanks TR <3
So hard to choose. Mary Oliver for showing me how to pay particular and specific attention, a practice that has decoded my world. Emily Dickinson for her passion and intensity, and for making the anchorite life cool. Leonard Cohen is the poet of my soul and Patti Smith speaks the language of my gut.
Yep, totally feel you on it being hard to choose. Also, you had me at Leonard Cohen
some of my canon, with an eye towards desire, intimacy, sex, love:
Eileen Myles for their unequivocal colloquial style, threaded through with matter-of-fact queer desire and mundane details (e.g. “Peanut Butter”. Frank O’Hara for his rattling off of scenes and names and the intimacy of the scenes he makes here (“having a coke with you” the most obvious, but my favorite, the ode to love and friendship and desire and hope: “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s”). Olena Kalytiak Davis (I’ve long been obsessed with her “Shatter Sonnets”) for her sounds and rhythms as an inheritor of Gerard Manley Harris—and in her later work she leans more towards the colloquial rumination of Myles and O’Hara that I love. Jane Kenyon for her lucent, simple, images and subtle sensations. I am also drawn to the fleetingness of love in her poems. Garth Greenwell’s substack introduced me to the most sexy poem: “September Garden Party” and I’m also partial to “Otherwise” as a marriage poem.
Excited to check out Olena Kalytiak Davis. I love poets who have great y interesting sounds
Shatter Sonnets -- excellent choice! And gotta love O'Hara!!
My Canon: There are too many but if I have to name a few: Carolyn Forché because I got to study with her years ago and love her global sensitivities/focus making the personal political and a kind of soft approach; Hieu Minh because I relate to his queerness, and his leaps toward transformation feel healing; Jane Huffman for clarity/brevity; Kazim Ali for sound; Divya Victor for voice, lushness, global consciousness and politics; Joelle Taylor for truth, narratives with honor and lust; Emily Berry, Ilya Kaminsky, Octavio Paz, Milosz, Simic, Vitale, Beckett, Dickinson and Gertrude Stein, new ways to language experience/the world, Plath and Sexton for saying the unsayable, and the Psalms.
I love D. Victor’s “W is for Walt Whitman”. And especially listening to her perform it. Wow!!
Yes, me too! It's great! Do you know about ModPo? U Penn's free course via coursera on the modernists - they brought it to my attention.
You have all my favorites here, Emma. Divya Victor especially right now. And Emily Berry
Probably why I love what you're publishing so much!
I've been wanting to read some of Plath's poetry. Do you have a recommendation or two?
Here are some of her greatest hits... https://interestingliterature.com/2017/06/10-of-the-best-sylvia-plath-poems-everyone-should-read/
some of my canon: li-young lee makes my writing more lyrical and prosodic, mary oliver helps me love the natural world better, gustavo hernandez' work is a masterclass in loving care for settings, torrin a. greathouse and stacey waite are butch guideposts making my writing better as a femme dyke
I’m a greathouse fan. Excited for next book.
Yay, another Lee fan!!