In the library in my brain, Michael Chricton does not get shelved with the sci-fi

See, in the library in my brain, he just doesn't get shelved.

Dr. Aranda rocks.

Dr Aranda is freaking me out because Aranda is the name of a Canberra suburb, which when I lived there had the distinction of being about the only residential suburb with no government housing whatsoever.

...Ok, so I'm easily freaked out right now.

...Ok, so I'm easily freaked out right now.

"Look! A firefly!"

Poetry recommendations.

As It Was In The Beginning

1. Sappho

Even in translation, the regal beauty of her language is unsurpassed.

Labor
for my mad heart, and be
my ally.

2. Dante

What do you gain by locking horns with fate?

3. John Milton

Paradise Lost is the greatest epic poem in the English language.

I may assert Eternal Providence
and justify the ways of God to men.

4. George Gordon, Lord Byron

Punk rock, baby. He drank wine out of a silver-plated skull. He's the reason there's a quote about being "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." Westminster Abbey refused to bury him. Thankfully his talent as a writer meant that he walked the walk, too, and wasn't just a huge poseur.

They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well: —
Long, long shall I rue thee,
Too deeply to tell.

5. John Keats

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

If Keats had lived to be 55, the entire face of modern literature would be different--imagine Keats writing at the same time as Walt Whitman. Instead, he died at 25, in 1821, with a body of work that was already a triumph.

Is Now

1. Scott Cairns

He'd gotten skinnier
than I'd imagined, and though he told the same
old jokes he's always told, there was something angry
in his laugh. Just before we left his room,
he stole my nose and wouldn't give it back.

I have a weakness for a great last line, and Scott Cairns knows how to write a last line that lands like a sucker punch to the gut.

2. Margaret Atwood

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

If you think she's a canon-izable prose writer, I beg you to read some of her poetry. I think it's a thousand times better.

3. William Butler Yeats

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

4. Mark Strand

...you will fall into another darkness, one you will find
yourself making and remaking until it is perfect.

5. e. e. cummings

love is the every only god

No poet more truly expresses joy.

6. Robert Frost

Now no joy but lacks salt
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault

Frost is dark. Dark, bitter, grim, and beautiful. Forget the way you learned about him in school and read "The Road Less Travelled" as a story of weary regret.

7. Leonard Cohen

When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want my body and my hands
to be pools
for your looking and laughing.

Even if he'd never written music, he'd still be a great writer. Poetry is, I think, his first and true talent.

8. Marilyn Hacker

I drank our one year out in brine instead
of honey from the seasons of your tongue.

9. Rainer Maria Rilke

...while in the sky
the starry nights of another, sweeter country
blossomed above them and would never close.

10. Mary Oliver

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

11. Robert Lowell

a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

The first and best of the "confessional" poets.

12. Adrienne Rich

The words are purposes. The words are maps.

13. Sylvia Plath

In the melee surrounding her life and suicide, the fact of her genius as a lyricist is almost always neglected.

What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?

And Ever Shall Be, World Without End

William Shakespeare, _Shakespeare's Sonnets_. Every single one of them. Because it's the best book of poetry ever written. Language, passion, love, and the frailty of human hearts combined to blow the doors off the sonnet conventions. "With this key, Shakespeare unlocked his heart."

Amen.

"Look! A firefly!"

"Look! A robotic firefly!"

5. John Keats

Love.

Oooh, go Jen with your big poetical love.

However, you skipped the darkest work of art in any medium: Crow by Ted Hughes.

The poetry a talented man might write with two suicides on his conscience.

Where's my good friend, Wm. Blake: "Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by incapacity."

William Stevens? Marianne Moore? More recently, Sharon Olds. C'mon, work with me here.

I'm on my way out the door, so the list is shorter than it could be. Wallace Stevens would have been an excellent addition, yes ("the nothing that is"); I can live without Hughes, Moore, and Olds.

This was a very "what Jen likes" recommendation list, so it's skewed heavily towards things I like to read and not just the talent of the writer.

If you think she's a canon-izable prose writer, I beg you to read some of her poetry. I think it's a thousand times better.

Jen, the Atwood you quoted is the Atwood I think of when I think of her poetry.

Which, of course, falls under the "modern Canadian poetry" section of my collection that I mentioned earlier.

Discussions I've had off thread have made me wonder, and this is a curiousity question more than anything: are you more prone to enjoy a book if you stumbled across it yourself, or if it was at some point assigned?

Most of my WC reading (you know, that could be read two ways, but I'll let it stand, because the sight makes me giggle) was done on my own, because I wanted to broaden my reading horizons. I spent most of a summer at 14 tracking down and reading books considered great, because I figured that was as decent a starting point as any. Which means I've loved Hardy for more than half my life. Which scares me, but I digress. Then I hit my all-Atwood, all-the-time period, and my short story period, and so on and so forth. I used to read a lot. I miss having that amount of bandwidth.

However, I've been blessed in that from high school on, I've had (mostly) incredible lit teachers and (mostly) great reading lists. (The notable exception to both is all one woman the first year at Evergreen, and not to put to fine a point on it, I was right and she was wrong, so there. Oddly, this was my only prof who rejected all things European when teaching Latin American lit, which is sort of like only counting one half of someone's DNA. Did I mention I was right and she was wrong? Because I was. Honest.) So things I've been assigned have been enjoyed at about the same ratio as things I picked up on my own.

are you more prone to enjoy a book if you stumbled across it yourself, or if it was at some point assigned?

I think I get a bit more of a thrill from the things I've found myself, but on reflection a lot of my favorite books and poets were assigned. Probably a similar ratio to you, Ple.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Robert Frost rules.