"a few books that were formative for" me...

These are the poetry shelves at my apartment.
They are only partially organized and at present
all the poetry criticism lives in another bookcase.

It is not that often than anyone asks me what books of poetry were particularly formative for me (for my development as a poet, I assume, rather than my fashion sense or whatever). Sometimes this question is a toss-off, but when it is sincere it seems to me that one should try to give a solid answer to it. And as it has been some years now since I heard that question, I thought, why not both answer it and get a blog post out of it at the same time?

One of the first complicated things is deciding what counts. That is, I was asked about "books that were formative" - but I have to wonder if my questioner meant books of poetry, or whether any and all books counted. & what to do about The Four Horsemen who have surely been formative in many ways but not as book-based experiences. Anyway, the list below will exclude audio stuff (though maybe a list of that stuff will be added later.)

Anyway, here my list - not everything on here is currently *crucial* to my thinking about poetry, but everything surely had an impact in its time.

David Antin
SELECTED POEMS, and all the talk poems and so TALKING, TALKING AT THE BOUNDARIES, TUNING, WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AVANT GARDE etc etc
…also worth finding are the pieces of David's from BOUNDARY2 as well as the book version of the magazine SOME/THING issues 1-3 and the 4th issue too if you can find them. I loaned my SELECTED POEMS to someone in the APG some years ago and never saw it again. Damn it. Also my various collections of talk poems are falling apart. I'd love to see some press do COLLECTED TALK POEMS someday. If it is not obvious, is was David's example - and my email exchange with him - that led me to improv (though don't let that be a black mark on his record). In the SELECTED the poem "definitions for mendy" has always been a huge favorite of mine.

Bruce Andrews
I DON'T HAVE ANY PAPER SO SHUT UP (OR SOCIAL ROMANTICISM)
Bruce has many great books. Given how I have grown up within the APG it might make more sense *now* to cite his LOVE SONGS, as it would seem to have been influential. But that is a false positive as I discovered it only later when those things which would make it seem influential on the group were already well underway. Instead it is the book listed here which blew me away (and still does). Not an easy book to find these days, it needs a reprint.

John Ashbery
THREE POEMS, THE TENNIS COURT OATH
I understand why THE TENNIS COURT OATH has such a crucial place in literary history - at least if one is into language poetry. And it was important to me. But, though I had read SELF-PORTRAIT IN A CONVEX MIRROR already, somehow it was THREE POEMS that really grabbed my attention and squeezed. Ashbery is probably always worth reading, but these two texts both suggest so many things beyond what they accomplish and yet what they accomplish is pretty amazing.

Steve Benson
BLUE BOOK
This is another great book that doesn't get talked about enough it seems to me. Benson's other books are worth a look too if you can find them. What I like about this one is the approach that SB takes to improvisation - so radically unlike what Antin does. It was helpful for me in many ways to think about where I might go, and though in my practice I tend more toward the unaided solo voice (thus more antinian) in my interest in disjunction and fragmentation and so forth much of what I produce is closer to Benson (or further toward the world of pound poetry than he).

Charles Bernstein
DARK CITY, THE SOPHIST, ROUGH TRADES
I read these three books in this order and all are fabulous. DARK CITY remains my favorite, especially for "Lives of the Toll Takers". But I have trouble separating these books from my reading of Charles' essays in CONTENT'S DREAM (and again, is there anything by Charles that is not worth reading and thinking about? I doubt it. I got ATTACK OF THE DIFFICULT POEMS for xmas). Probably a few ideas from CONTENT'S DREAM are still crucial aspects of my poetic thinking (re: Voice for instance).

Bertolt Brecht
POEMS 1913-1956
I just love this book. The "reader for those who live in cities" is incredible. The only poem that I have ever intended to memorize comes from this book

Once there was a child

That didn't like to wash.

They washed it and behold

It rubbed its face in ash.

The Kaiser came to call 

Up seven flights of stairs.

Mother looked for a towel 

To wipe its face and hair.

But the towel had been mislaid,

The whole visit was wrecked.

The Kaiser went away,

What could the child expect?

…Brecht's writings on theatre and some of his plays too have been important to me, for instance "Baal" which I read just after dropping out of high school.

John Cage
SILENCE
There are many books by Cage and a great variety of stuff to be found therein, but this one remains my favorite one. I bought it in German translation for someone as a gift but I don't know if she ever read it. (The 2 CD set "Indeterminacy" has also been a huge favorite for many years).

Clark Coolidge
SOUND AS THOUGHT, SOLUTION PASSAGE
Coolidge is often great. Maybe too consistently awesome, so much so that it's irritating for the rest of us. But these two collections form the base of my affection and inspiration for his work.

Ed Dorn
GUNSLINGER
Essential. Probably has an unrecognized role in my Johnny Minotaur  series.

Jessica Grim
LOCALE
I wonder how many readers will know this book. It was important to me as I encountered it early, just as I was beginning to get some sense of the poetic terrain and it gave me a view into a way of writing that I had not imagined. I still think its a solid read though I have not seen other book by Grim.

Lyn Hejinian
MY LIFE (any edition), WRTING AS AN AID TO MEMORY, THE CELL, THE COLD OF POETRY
Take you pick of these or anything. Lyn doesn't seem to write anything not worth dwelling within for however many hours it requires. MY LIFE was an inspiration for the decade in the making and still untitled APG Autobiography Project

Jackson Mac Low
REPRESENTATIVE WORKS
Still my favorite. The drama involved in Mac Low's leaving chance procedures aside is fascinating and had an impact on me that is hard to quantify, but I still favor the work he produced before he abandoned constraints.

Frank O'Hara
COLLECTED POEMS
This is screamingly obvious, get it and his plays and that other collection of stuff that was found after the collected came together.

Maureen Owen
UNTAPPED MAPS
This is another one that, like Grim's book above, hit me at just the right time. I reread it last year and it still stands up I think.

Leslie Scalapino
WAY
Other titles could have been chosen, but this one works very well for me and is the 1st book of hers I read.

Jack Spicer
COLLECTED BOOKS
Again, obvious if you know me (I think). & though this is the book that made me love Spicer, THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT made me love him all over again and really, you need to read everything and the bio POET, BE LIKE GOD. (Be a good host and the Martians will love you)

Ron Silliman
TONER, XING, DEMO TO INK
These are first three titles I read by Silliman, nowadays one can buy the entire Alphabet in a massive tome. I plan to but have not yet gotten around to getting it.

Gertrude Stein
TENDER BUTTONS, STANZAS IN MEDITATION, etc
It is impossible to narrow down what from Stein had an impact, but these two books are the 1st two I bought (both in beautiful Sun & Moon editions) and it was upon these rocks that I was broken and reformed. Or something like that. LIFTING BELLY is also great. There is nothing "bad." my copy of LECTURES IN AMERICA is heavily underlined.

Hannah Weiner
SPOKE
I need more books by Weiner, sadly this is the only one that I own. What I like most about it is the sense of voices contending within her. That might be to fetishize her somewhat, I hope not. But that aspect of her writing really does grab me and I have tried to allow my own work to open itself to such things too.

Philip Whalen
ON BEAR'S HEAD
There is a newer selected poems, and I have that too, but somehow this collection is still my favorite. I got this in the first month that I'd decided to turn to poetry (to help me write better song lyrics) and so it comes along just after Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman in my personal idiosyncratic chronological development but unlike much else that I read in that 6 or 7 months when I was casting around in poetry, it has stuck with me.

Louis Zukofsky
"A", COMPLETE SHORT POETRY
Some of the later sections of "A" (especially where he is using Marx) and things like "80 Flowers" in the SHORT POETRY volume are all time favorites of mine. His essays have also been important to me in many ways.

… Ok, I have probably forgotten other crucial stuff, or maybe it was repressed (like, that in the 6-7 months of poetry reading I was pretty enthused with Charles Simic, then later lost almost all interest in him.) & what this list doesn't include really is the impact of a single essay by Harry Mathews on OULIPO, the book CONVERSATIONS WITH MARCEL DUCHAMP, the works of Arakawa and Gins in WE HAVE DECIDED NOT TO DIE: REVERSIBLE DESTINY (which Madeline sent me for free because I had loved "The Mechanism of Meaning" so much!), the plays and essays of Richard Foreman, the essays of Dick Higgins (which I often disagree with but nonetheless am influenced by), and what about anthologies? I should certainly mention the Douglas Messerli edited FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CENTURY (the poetry one not the drama one, though that is an interesting book as well) which served to introduce me to so many poets that I have learned since then to love. & what about books by Perloff or Altieri that shaped my thinking about matters poetic?



p.s. I couldn't fit all the labels I needed, dang it!