The short list

"Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers." -Mignon McLaughlin

Oh my God! How true is that?!!

Anyway, I've thought about the poet I'd pick to spend the day tagging along with (see my earlier post) and it's a tough call. I am narrowing it down... Ok, honestly I kept adding to the list as often as I whittled it. It was like two steps forward and one back. But this is where I am at now...

• W.S. Merwin
• Sharon Olds
• Donald Hall
• Cecilia Woloch
• John Ashbery
• Kim Addonizio
• Denise Dehamel

There is a lot of variety between these poets, and there is something about each that makes them and or there work fascinating enough to believe that one could learn a lot from them if you had the opportunity to follow, observe, and ask questions of them through a day of watching them work. Now, the trick would be to decide upon just one of them. Oh, and not add any more to the list in the meantime.

A Day With A Poet

So today I was thinking about this unrealistic possibility that if we could pick a poet, any living poet and spend a day with them, tagging along, picking there brain, watching them at work... who would I pick? Of course there is like no chance of this happening, but it raises the question of who I might like to experience such an encounter with, someone who I'd like to believe such an experience might influence in some small way my approach to poetry, poetic theory, maybe learn something more about their work habits, the way they rework their drafts, etc.

I suppose this is the point where I reveal who this poet might be. Still, after much thought I have a list of candidates in mind, but have not been able to decide one one single victim.

What is interesting however, is the fact that my list includes some rather famous poets, but it also includes some lesser knowns. It is not simply the celebrity aspect that is important here, but individuals whose work I greatly admire and respect. I think back at history and the associations that developed between some prominent poets that you know had to have some impact on one another. Robert Lowell to both Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery. Robert Bly and James Wright, just to name a few. These connections fascinate me. I've found reading the published selected letters of many writers to be both enjoyable and in some instances educational. But I digress.

So I have this list which I will not expose just yet. I want to whittle it down a bit. Maybe I'll share it when I shorten the list a bit, and let you get the feel of me agonizing over the final selection (albeit an exercise in pure fantasy).