Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Sole arbiter=taste

Got this e-mail yesterday:
I was just thinking of you because I'm planning to go to a "read your favorite poem" event tonight. ... I'm not reading because I don't really know what my favorite poem is. Now, I realize that no one else would know or care if I just read one of the poems of which I'm particularly fond, but by the time this idea had occurred to me the deadline for declaring oneself as a reader had passed. I'm taking along "Dreamwood" by Adrienne Rich just in case they happen to have on-the-spot reading opportunities. So I was wondering — have you ever been to such an event and, if so, what did you read?
I haven't, actually, been to such an event but I love the idea very, very much. I was equally baffled by the idea of a "favorite," but I think my friend makes a good point about how no one can (or will) judge that. It's OK to pick something you like as much as you like other poems, or even just one you like today. It's not a commitment for life.
And still, it took me a minute. I discarded a bunch of stuff by John Donne and Christina Rossetti and Alix Olson. I tried unsuccessfully to find something by Luis Alberto Urrea to love as much as his prose. I remembered, eventually, that Langston Hughes's "Theme for English B" used to be very important to me, and remembered even after that that some of my own friends, including the author of the e-mail, are poets who used to write things that I loved, but haven't read in years and years.
I pick "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg. I love me some Beat poets.
So if you were going to something like this, tonight, what would you bring?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Keeping Things Whole" by Mark Strand.

Other contenders:

"Animals are Passing from our Lives" by Philip Levine

Hal Sirowitz's "Mother Said" collection is great, if overexposed a few years back

Anonymous said...

Tonight I'd bring two poems of the same name (that's only one technically) that I just heard on "Prairie Home Companion" today. But only if you Lucy would be in attendance because:

when I hear "haiku,"
in my mind, i think Lucy.
Where else would i think?

Ron Padgett said he was going to read "Haiku" and then said:
That was fast,
life, I mean

I love it even if it doesn't add up like his real "Haiku" says it should:

First: five syllables
Second: seven syllables
Third: five syllables