Top* 10** Poetry*** Books**** That Most***** Influenced Me******

Yes, so, first, let's dispense with the matter of the asterisks, which I rebelliously am gonna give the key for at the top, not the bottom like some factitious hangers-on.

* Top in the sense of top of mind, top of bookshelf, or top as in "that's tops, pop" because my preferred lingo (and I do love lingo) is much older than me.

** I cannot count. Apparently. Watch. I routinely go over on these things or come up short.

*** You'll see.

**** Again, you'll see. The effect of these things I can equate to booklike.

***** An evanescence.

****** Ditto.

Without further, & oh yeah, also dispensing with hierarchy, so no numbers.

Anything, but first "Melanctha," technically a short story or possibly a novella, that reviled term, but POETRY for sure, then oh, well, let's see, everything else, but you can't go wrong beginning with (or revisiting) The Selected Writings by [one] Gertrude Stein & yes, I'm counting that as one bullet whaddaya gonna do.

The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, more recently than you might think or I might admit except this once & anyway it seems like forever, first read it, in a period of solid days in 2000ish, twice & a half. Exclaiming aloud. Angry that nobody'd shown it to me before. That sounds practically slow-witted & isolated, I don't care. I'd even been in NYC 5 years at that point. I didn't know. Know I know & I am very very glad. & influenced.

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Let's go back in time to oh say spring of 1988. I was awkward, stoopid, making many mistakes, but mostly, I credit myself now, because I was so busy LOOKING for something my tinyass little Texas town didn't have readily available. Aw yeah. Found it. Or a piece of it. (Shout out to Mr. Ray Langford.)

Is that ten yet? The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. A hair, timelinewise, before WS, overlapping, but a much deeper obsession. At first. (A shout out to Linda Post, who wore a miniskirt to her wedding as documented in the pages of Seventeen & just happened to be my 11th grade English teacher. Bless ya.)

Kenneth Koch. I'm not even going to explain this one again, and if you'll allow "poetry" to include the books he wrote re: teaching poetry to children, lucky lucky lucky me. That & your indulgence, I'll make me some.

Now here I'll get way off-the-beaten, but Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Circa 1985. I was a strict vegetarian for about 10 years, & still am about half so. Mebbe I should read it again, but I'm, um, chicken. Not poetry, well so what. You are what you eat, & I'm a poet.

Crap, I'm only down six. I've already started mentally revising & I've got a very late dinner in the oven, probably burning. So, lessee, really, I'd have to say that I feel like I'm choking on a test. Am I passing? Oh, wait, no grades. (& if I fail there's always the lake . . . for swimming & fireworks. Don't be so gloomy.) So, another "book" that influenced me/my life would have to be a short story called "A Jar for Yellow Jackets" by my husband, in a long-defunct literary mag, which you never read or heard of. He was 19 when he wrote it. I was 21 when I read it. But trust me, wow, was was it influential. & also poetry.

So, that's 7. The Collected Poems of Pablo Neruda. I don't really feel like explaining this one either, but suffice to say, I was in Mexico for longer than I should have been (oops, forgot to go back and finish that semester), relatively heartbroken (tho that seems silly now), & very soothed & bubbled up by these poems, their music and deceptive simplicity. I am still a sucker for them, 'specially in Spanish.

Uh, this one's a tie. A three-way tie. & again not poetry per se, nor can I limit myself to single books because, at this point, come on, you see it--I do this in GIANT GULPS: Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf & Edgar Allen Poe. Beckett placed me outta two years of college English. More time for elective poetry classes. Woolf & Poe gave me plenty to read, in the vast amount of time I had before I had the opportunity (literally) to branch out from the well-worn. An orangutan in a wardrobe--that still gets me. And The Waves. If I could do that, dying = happy.

Lastly, & also firstly, Leaves of Grass by Father Walt. Saint of the DIY & shameless self-promotion, the virtues of exuberance & expansiveness in a small, miserable sphere.

& a bonus, because I've already gone way over 10 & have 10 more to replace them with: The Oulipo Compendium edited by Harry Mathews & A. Brotchie. & also In the American Tree, editor Ron Silliman. & also My Life by Lyn Hejinian (rethinking: no, not really, not so much. I like it lots tho, which would be a different list, I guess.) & also Alice Notley except I'm still in absorption stage & not yet quite to influence. & also The Complete Poems of Lorinne Niedecker. & also. & also.