A selective history of my reading might be of interest, at least to myself. It's from the point of view of what I remember now; hence anything forgettable or relatively unimportant from present viewpoint drops by the wayside. These are readings that formed me. Don't write in and say, "I'm surprised you never read _______ ." I probably did. I'm talking about books or authors I read either repeatedly or obsessively at some point, or made lasting impression. The order is chronological.

A.A. Milne. Dr. Seuss. Curious George. Beverly Cleary.

The King James Bible. World History, Encyclopedia Brown, Greek Mythology. Poe. Of Human Bondage! Tolkien. Werner Jaeger. Peanuts.

Rod McKuen, Cummings, Williams, Stevens. Vonnegut; Bradbury, Potok; Jack London; Humphrey Clinker. X.J. Kennedy's Introduction to Poetry. Shaking the Pumpkin. The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. The Oxford Book of English Verse. Howl.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Paradise Lost. Yeats, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Levertov, John Berryman, Roethke, etc... Henry Miller.

Updike, Bellow, Roth, Salinger, Singer, Henry James, Carson McCullers. Catch 22. The Cave. André Breton. Learned rules of French prosody from High School teacher.

Flann O'Brien. Henry Green. Anthony Powell. Gilbert Sorrentino. Beckett. Sukenick. Barthelme. Gertrude Stein.

[I'm up to college now]

Latin Poets: Catullus, Horace. Modern Spanish poetry (basically everything.) Galdós. Unamuno. Neruda and Vallejo. Ron Padgett, Ted Berrigan, other "Minor Poets of the New York School." James Wright and James Tate. Attended poetry readings by Spender, Eberhart, Bly, anyone else who passed through the campus. Thom Gunn.

García Márquez, Cortázar. The rest of the Latin American "boom" novelists. Juan Rulfo.

Spicer, Bronk. Borges. Cervantes. Antin. Sophocles. Barthes. Kenneth Burke. Literary theory galore (I must be in grad school now, where I read the least).

After Grad school:

More of everything above, plus Shakespeare Sonnets, Lezama Lima, Bronk, Schuyler, Ceravolo. Japanese poetry. Kerouac. Barbara Guest. Language poetry, especially RS. Coolidge. Scalapino, Susan Howe. Wittgenstein. Gamoneda. Valente. Contemporary women poets of Spain (Isla Correyero, Lola Velasco, etc...). Post avant-garde poets my own age and younger. Edmund White. Soseki. David Shapiro. Blanca Varela... and the list goes on...

***

So if you wonder why I seem to have supercilious attitude toward Billy Collins, now you know. There is such a thing a being a better, more experienced reader than someone else, of being a more "studied" poet. It doesn't make me more talented, unfortunately.