I love desert island picks and readings lists, even the dumb "stick" game was fun, so I was happy to receive today in the mail a book compiled by painter and poet Peter Davis:The Poet's Bookshelf. Basically Peter, a reader of Bemsha Swing, asked a bunch of poets to give him their list of 5 to 10 books. 81 responded, with lists and explanations. It has Silliman and Armantrout, Anselm Berrigan and Lisa Jarnot, but also Franz Wright, Philip Levine, Lyn Lifshin, Gabriel Gudding. It's a good enough cross section to make everyone happy. You can even scoff at the choices of your least favorite poet. Probably the least inspired choices, to my mind, are those by Adrienne Rich, but these still gives useful information about her.

Who are the poets cited with most frequency? A list at the back tells us:

WCW 17
Whitman, Dickinson 16
O'Hara 12
Yeats, Shakespeare 11
Stevens 10
Ashbery 9
Rilke, Bishop, Lorca, Pound 8

This confirms my theory that O'Hara is the most influential poet of the postwar period. Lowell was mentioned by only 3, fewer than Melville or Keats or Mark Twain.