Tagged by Jordan Stempleman to list the 10 books of poetry that have influenced me most. (I don't know how much these have influenced me, but these are the ones I return to / think about the most.)
1. After Lorca, Jack Spicer
2. Primitive, George Oppen
3. Spring in This World of Poor Mutts, Joseph Ceravolo
4. Front Matter, Dead Souls, Leslie Scalapino
5. The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow, Opal Whiteley (not really poetry, but actually poetry)
6. Medieval English Lyrics, ed. RT Davies
7. The Tablets, Armand Schwerner
8. Inferno, Dante
9. Sun, Michael Palmer
10. Poems (Oxford edition), Gerard Manley Hopkins
I now propose a new tag: Things which one has read and has been influenced by which are not confined to those paper-bound vessels of the printed word we refer to as books. Let's call these Non-Books. Or maybe Impossible Books. Or Limen Books? It's up to you. List five. Here are mine:
1. Walls. House upon house of blank walls.
2. Two entwined crow corpses which I bent over to snatch up, believing they were actually a crumpled black plastic bag full of money (on a sidewalk in San Diego in the late-1980's).
3. Under-eyelid patterns that occur when rubbing the eyes.
4. A sheaf of remembered impressions I meant to write out in longhand on leaves and paper scraps, and then bury underneath the MAX tracks at the 181st & Burnside stop in Portland, OR, but never did. Thankfully.
5. The mulched newspapers that muddy the downtown Portland sidewalks after rain.
I re-tag Jordan, and tag anybody who'd like to play. (I have billions of hands.)
1 comments:
1. wooden spoon = "soul": a childhood association I've never been able to shake.
2. the phrase "spur of the moment" in a "Sex & Your Body" column in Seventeen magazine, circa 1987.
3. the kaleidescope-type behind-the-lid eye shows are called phosphemes, I was once told while crossing the Brooklyn Bridge for the first time.
4. the ceiling of my family room that I tapped repeatedly with a broom handle, determined to find a room from the Underground Railroad & even maybe some new old friends still hiding in there, despite the fact that the house I grew up in was built in the 20th century.
5. an insistently mocking slippery high nasely phrase/utterance I heard all the time as a child, especially when looking in the mirror.
6. ripples on water & waterbugs skating the dimpled surface.
7. the well in the woods off Nash Rd. in North Salem, NY, past the bedframe & foundation ruins.
8. bird mouths
9. when the faucet turns on during the sex scene in Fatal Attraction.
10. the quality of diffused light in Portland that makes the houses' colors glow like nite lites in the daytime.
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