Early Louise Gluck--her first book at least--can be quite good, with a colloquial sense of language and zany sense of humor. Since then, her poetry is written in an increasingly stiff, somewhat unreal "poetic diction." Why do poets worsen?

***

Desert islands picks:

1. J. Schuyler: Selected Poems. A beautiful selection. I like almost everything in it.

José Lezama Lima: Obras completas. The great Cuban poet is deliberately "insular," yet expansive in his references. You would need at least one inexhaustible book like this on a desert isle.

3. Coolidge: Solution Passage. A thick, dense book I have been exploring for more than ten years and haven't exhausted yet.

4. Barbara Guest. Selected Poems. A beautiful book in the physical sense; would I want to expose it to the elements on my desert isle?

5. Perec. La vie: mode d'emploi. I'd have to bring the French original, since I would have lots of time to practice my French! The encyclopedic quality of the book makes it ideal for castaways.

6. Beckett. Ill seen ill said. Short, but inexhaustible in its own way. This one I have to bring in English.

7. Góngora. Polifemo. I've always wanted to read this straight through. With enough time on my hands, I could manage it.

8. Pound. Translations. This is really two books in one. A window on "world poetry" through Pound's eyes, and a window on Pound through the eyes of the world.

9. Raymond Roussel. La vue. La source. etc... These "blank" works have always fascinated me more than his texts written according to the "procédé." to me, Roussel is a greater poet than Valéry. Must be read in the original. Can I smuggle in a LaRousse?

10. For the last selection I'd have to choose something I really hated, simply to have something always "in reserve" once I had exhausted 1-9. Nothing comes to mind at the moment, though.


No O'Hara, Ashbery, Koch, WCW? Good question. I have already absorbed these poets enough that I don't *need* to read them ever again. The same goes for Claudio Rodr?guez, Lorca. I could reconstruct many poems from memory so I wouldn't need the physical books.