Fifteen Favorite Poets

A few months ago, Charlie asked me who my favorite poets were. I gaped into space for a few moments, confounded, suddenly unable to choose from the wash of names flooding my brain. It seemed like a simple enough question, one that I should have had a ready answer to. But there are so many ways to like a poem and, consequently, so many ways to like a poet. Defining "favorite" isn't easy: are my favorites the ones I read the most? Or the ones I respect the most? Are they the poets I most take after? Or the poets that I wish I could emulate?

So instead of attempting a list of ten "favorite" poets, here are three lists of poets that I love and why I love them.

Poets By Whom I Am Flabbergasted
These are the poets that surprise me, that leave me slack-jawed and astonished as they stretch my ideas about what a poem can do and what poetry can be.

1. John Donne: Donne's poems are taut, gnarly, musical, and absolutely insane. Intelligent and challenging, he makes my brain hurt in the best way possible.
   
2. Gertrude Stein: Most readers can't stand Stein, but I love how she makes me experience language and meaning in a new way. If you give Tender Buttons a chance, the stacked and muddled images start to reveal their beauty and their meaning.
   
3. Edgar Allen Poe: Poe is strange and Gothic and over-the-top and wonderfully musical. "The Raven" especially makes me giddy.
   
4. Harryette Mullen: Mullen works in puns and layered meanings and a sort of razor-sharp humor. What she does seems elementary, but it's incredibly difficult to emulate.
   
5. Wallace Stevens: Stevens's poems are titillatingly multivalent. Their language is hard, and so is their meaning, and, well, his imagery can be a bit of a challenge, too. But, you know, confusion can be a very exciting thing.
   

Poets With Whom I Like to Spend Time
These are the poets that I like to read for fun. They're accessible, smart, lyric, and wonderfully entertaining.

1. Walt Whitman: I read Song of Myself whenever I'm feeling sad or uninspired or empty. He makes me believe in the goodness of all the world's things.
   
2. Allen Ginsberg: Ginsberg was one of the first writers to make me love poetry, and I've probably read more of his poems than any other poet's. I love his sweet enthusiasm and his delicate golden lions.
   
3. Kay Ryan: Ryan's poems are fun, terse, and wise, and there's always more to them than immediately meets the eye. Though her poems poems seem simple, I believe that she works very hard to make them look that way.
   
4. Mary Oliver: American Primitive is full of gnarled, transcendental hymns that are so delicious they run down your chin like blackberry juice. She's a master of the American nature lyric.
   
5. Theodore Roethke: Roethke is a poet of things. His poems are rich and laden with physical details, and I love how they're all mood and connotation. I think that some of my poems have a lot on common with Roethke's.

Poets I Want to Be Like When I Grow Up
These are my favorite teachers. They don't just blow my mind, they push me to be a smarter reader and a better poet.

1. Robert Frost: Oh, the awesomeness of Robert Frost! My favorite thing about his poems is the sounds; he manages to write highly rhythmic, strictly rhymed poems that sound as natural and as unstudied as human speech. On top of that, he's also a master of tone and voice, and he harbors such a haunting darkness in his verses. In a hundred years, I think Frost will still be around when many other famous Modernists are just footnotes.
   
2. T.S. Eliot: Frost barely beats Eliot as being my favorite poet ever. I love how Eliot stacks his images and the darkness of his vision, but my favorite thing about him is the way he uses sounds. While Frost uses sound subtly, Eliot yanks you through his poems ear first. His obscure references might make him a scholars' darling, but it's the song beneath those images that makes Eliot a great poet.
   
3. John Keats: The odes. [Sigh.] How can anyone ever write anything better? I love how Keats orders his poems, how he mirrors the human thought process by pulling the reader back and forth from yearning to joy to despair and back again. And his images are so beautiful and sensuous and memorable, especially in The Eve of St. Agnes.
   
4. Sylvia Plath: So vicious and so good. Plath is underrated because of her titillating life story and because her readership is mostly female. But despite her reputation as some sort of overly morose women's poet, I think that her poems speak for themselves: they're intensely emotional, relentlessly original, and delightfully surreal, whether you've read The Bell Jar or not.
   
5. Marianne Moore: Moore is also terribly underrated. I love how she uses each line--no, each word--to its greatest advantage. She confuses and intrigues me and challenges me to be a more adventurous poet, to always push my poems further, and to never underestimate the intelligence of my audience.