Me personally? Eliot, GM Hopkins, Blake, Kathleen Jamie, Tennyson, Tony Harrison, John Donne, Wilfred Owen. Shakespeare, obviously.
Fred: It's the pictures in my mind that are getting me. It's like being stuck in a really bad movie with those Clockwork Orange clampy things on my eyeballs. Wesley: Why imagine? Reality's disturbing enough.
'Shells'
Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
Fay - Oct 20, 2008 11:00:21 pm PDT #7812 of 28414
"Fuck Western ideologically-motivated gender identification!" Sulu gasped, and came.
hippocampus - Oct 20, 2008 11:05:53 pm PDT #7813 of 28414
not your mom's socks.
oomg hopkins.
Love. With Carrion Comfort being the big love.
Didn't mean to sound like a blowhard, btw. Pedant, sure. But not bore.
Barb - Oct 21, 2008 2:54:27 am PDT #7814 of 28414
“Not dead yet!”
But I'm more curious about how they defined 'influential'.
Sox, I think he was just looking to get a cross-section of poems that are commonly included in anthology for study.
He looked through forty-seven major poetry anthologies published since 1980 and counted the poems that appear most frequently. Some people, of course, would quarrel with the notion that literary merit can be quantified. But Galenson simply wanted to poll a broad cross-section of literary scholars about which poems they felt were the most important in the American canon.
hippocampus - Oct 21, 2008 3:03:45 am PDT #7815 of 28414
not your mom's socks.
ah. frequency. Thanks Barb. I totally skipped to the list.
What?
Kat - Oct 21, 2008 4:14:04 am PDT #7816 of 28414
"I keep to a strict diet of ill-advised enthusiasm and heartfelt regret." Leigh Bardugo
American Poets? Errr.... much harder for me!
But from the list of poems I've taught so far this year: Elizabeth Bishop for sure! e.e. cummings. Would W. H. Auden count as American or British? Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Tony Hoagland, Ron Koertge, Gwendolyn Brooks.
I even taught a Bukowski poem and I generally loathe him. Yet I think the poem is awesome and gets kids reading and writing.
Paging Steph! Have you read the second Skulduggery Pleasant book? I just ordered it and wanted to know what you thought.
Frankenbuddha - Oct 21, 2008 4:37:59 am PDT #7817 of 28414
"We are the Goon Squad and we're coming to town...Beep! Beep!" - David Bowie, "Fashion"
Late to the party, but the adolescent reading list was really too, too funny. I'd love to see sci-fi and horror (as opposed to just fantasy - Dune aside) versions of those.
Ginger - Oct 21, 2008 5:02:39 am PDT #7818 of 28414
"It didn't taste good. It tasted soooo horrible. It tasted like....a vodka martini." - Matilda
American poets: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emerson, Edgar Lee Masters, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (at a certain age), Eugene Field (at a certain age)
Longfellow must have influenced me in some way, because I can reel off big chunks of "Paul Revere's Ride" and "Song of Hiawatha."
Kathy A - Oct 21, 2008 5:51:03 am PDT #7819 of 28414
We're very stretchy. - Connie Neil
I'm a big English Lit loser, because I never got into poetry at all. I like some of it (Dickenson, Frost, Yeats, Shakespeare [of course!], and Poe, mostly), but otherwise, I'd rather read prose. It's a major shortcoming of mine, but I just can't get into deconstructing a poem.
Barb - Oct 21, 2008 5:53:05 am PDT #7820 of 28414
“Not dead yet!”
You and me both, Kathy-- I respect poetry and there's some of it that really speaks to me, like Auden, for example, but for the most part, not my preferred reading. And I cannot in any way, get into novels written in verse. They make me twitch.
Kathy A - Oct 21, 2008 5:54:45 am PDT #7821 of 28414
We're very stretchy. - Connie Neil
I do like Homer and Beowulf, as well as Chaucer, but those are more prose-poems than poetry, IMO.
ETA: Would you consider those as novels written in verse, Barb? I don't think I've ever seen a modern novel written in verse form--I shudder to think how that would read.