We will be talking about poetry – poets – anything remotely related to poetry on April 20 at 10:30 and hope you will join us. Please post your favorite poem and bring one along to share (can be heartrending or can be Purple Cow variety – we’re open to anything). Here are some names and titles to get you thinking.
Naomi Shihab Nye – received the 13th Annual robert Creeley Award. Her books include There is no Long Distance Now, I’ll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK? and What Have you Lost?
Billy Collins – former poet laureate – his books include The Trouble with Poetry, Sailing Alone Around the Room and Ballistics
Mary Oliver – her books include Red Bird, The Truro Bear and Other Adventures and When I Wake Early
Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass (or if you are an e-reader – a book called Works of Walt Whitman: Including Leaves of Grass, Specimen Days, Drum Taps & more
Randall Jarrell – The Bat Poet and The Animal Family – both illustrated by Maurice Sendak
Natalie Merchant – Leave Your Sleep a collection of songs from favorite poems for children (and others) – my current favorite CD
The Odyssey –Homer (many translations)
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath (and her Selected Poems)
Langston Hughes – The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
Emily Dickinson – Emily Dickinson, A Biography – Connie Ann Kirk and her poems
Hang a Thousand Trees with Ribbons: The Story of Phillis Wheatley by Ann Rinaldi
Frost: Lit Life Reconsidered – William H. Pritchard
My First Cousin Once Removed: Money, Madness and the Family of Robert Lowell by Sarah Payne Stuart — The art of being truly funny is an undervalued one in these angst-ridden times, but it is an ability that acclaimed novelist Sarah Payne Stuart has in abundance. Her talents have never been on more glorious display than in My First Cousin Once Removed, a memoir—at once hilarious, personal and sad—of her extraordinary Boston Brahmin family, whose most famous member is the legendary poet Robert Lowell, the author’s first cousin (once removed).
The Salt House: A Summer on the Dunes of Cape Cod by Cynthia Huntington – The Salt House is a beautifully observed and written memoir of a long summer’s stay on the back shore of Cape Cod. Each chapter is like a prose poem, shedding increasing light on the challenge of finding “home” without the illusion of permanence, a quest based not on ownership but on affinity and familiarity with an area and its people. Cynthia Huntington expands her theme through images of the landscape, the shack, the new marriage.
Piping Down the Valleys Wild by Nancy Larrick – the favorite collection to share with my children
Donald Hall – books include White Apples and the Taste of Stone, the Painted Bed and Without:Poems.
Maxine Kumin – books include Where I Live and The Long Marriage
Jane Kenyon – NY poet laureate at the time of her death. Books include From Room to Room and Let Evening Come
