(16) I should mention too the prose I have read that contributed to my poetic education. I always read fiction voraciously until a certain point when the intensity and obsessiveness of reading poetry led me to read less, and more selectively, and even to go whole months or even six-month periods sometimes without reading a novel. As Cervantes said of himself, I would read the "los papeles rotos de la calle." I dislike having not read something that someone I know has read, or not having read all of novelist's work when I consider myself a fan. Needless to say, I am more conscious of the enormous gaps in my reading than of how much I have read. As a kid I would read certain novels over and over: Catch 22, The Lord of the Rings, and Robert Penn Warren's The Cave. I never liked RPW's poetry much, but I did love this novel. I've read the Quijote three or four times as well.

As I noted earlier, nobody who's not already fallen in love with poetry has even read 20 books of poetry. Kids who love to read, though, will go through dozens of novels a year. It's good, too, that kids are less discriminating, because that allows for a critical mass of reading. I read every novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow, John Updike, and Philip Roth that came out in the mid-seventies, along with every short-story in the New Yorker. I've read every novel written by Henry Green. One summer I read thousands of pages of Galdós. Before grad school, wanting to be a Latin Americanist but never having taken a course in 20th century novel, I read numerous novels by Puig, García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Rulfo.

Novelists, more than poets really, are the guardians of the literary language. Poetry is too eccentric, too much of a violation of other uses of language, to fulfill this function. Usually, specialists in poetry have also read novels in some quantity, assuming that they were kids who were just reading all the time, like me. The converse, however, is less true. I know very literate people who see poetry as a dark alley in a deserted neighborhood that they may have glanced into a few times.

When discussing one's one personal poetic development, it is very hard to be honest rather than creating an "aspirational" lineage that reflects what one would have wanted to be influenced by, knowing then what what knows now. We always want to project backwards a knowledge that we didn't have in the past. The other pit-fall is false modesty, of course--pretending to be even more clueless than one really was. On a comment on a post below, Steve Tills seems to want me to have been more aspirational.

For example, aspirationally, I would want to have been influenced by a lot of women writers, yet my truly formative influences are not. I could list a ton of names of people that I would have wanted to have influenced me. If only!

So I continue my story...

(13) I didn't really connect with people my own age or younger as poets until I was about 36 and started with the Buffalo Poetics list. Before that I always thought poets were either idiots or sort of un-contactable icons. I still despise many poets for their stupidity.

(14) Lola Velasco is a friend of mine. One of the cases where friendship leads to writing about a poet's work. Beginning to write in Spanish is a formative development for me, but one that takes places only after 2002 or 03. I try not to write about close friends who are poets.

(15) I've abandoned all sense of chronology at this point. At a certain point I felt I had become a person with the beginnings real education in poetry. This was several years after publishing my first two books of criticism and getting tenure. At the same time, I sense of being a talented poet but one without a poetic work per se. The number of poems I've published is laughable, and I've never published a book or even a chapbook.

(8) Really learning Spanish was significant. All of a sudden I had twice as much poetry available to me as before. My first Spanish lit course we read Machado. When I went to Spain, I studied with the greatest living Spanish poet, Claudio Rodríguez. I learned Spanish to read this poetry and also found my profession in the process.

(9) Then, later on, I discovered that I hadn't really known Spanish as well as I thought I had. In other words, looking back now, I know things now that i didn't when I wrote my first few books. Maybe ten years from now I'll have even deeper insight. I don't think I could really hear the rhythms of Spanish poetry until 10 years out. There are things I learned last year that I consider very fundamental.

(10) I went to school with numerous poets--Coolidge, Bronk, Guest, Schuyler--while having my career as Spanish professor. Later it was David Shapiro (and still is). I learned things from poets younger than myself or my same age, but only after about 1996.

(11) The New York poets have always been central to me. That's one constant. I also went back to the sources of these poets. Flann O'Brien, Henry Green, Raymond Roussel, Morton Feldman, etc... I first heard about in connection with Ashbery, Koch, O'Hara.

(12) My Aunt, Lenore Mayhew, the one Poe wrote a poem about, has translated Chinese and Japanese poetry. I've developed an interest in classical Japanese poetry and the standard T'ang dynasty canon. Yet I cannot read Russian poetry in translation, execpt for Mayakovsky.

... to be continued

The thing about the twenty book meme is that it is aspirational. Those have to be the books that you want to have been the books that made you fall in love with poetry, because, face it, nobody who isn't already in love with poetry has even read twenty books of poetry! Even English majors pretty much read what is assigned in anthologies. I had people in my creative writing classes with me in college who hadn't read five books of poetry. Here is my rough chronology:

1. I discover that something called poetry exists, in a book at my Grandmother's house. It is by Edgar Allan Poe, and think there is some connection between Poe and Poet. It seems suspiciously coincidental. It also seemed suspicious that Poe would use the names of two of my aunts in his poetry, Helen and Lenore, and that both of my these aunts of mine were also writers. Of course, I knew that he wasn't referring to my own aunts, but it seemed kind of fateful to me. I was maybe 7 or 9, I'm not entirely sure.

2. We had some kind of book of poetry, probably A Child's Garden of Verses. I remember Wordsorth's daffodils too.

3. In sixth grade, we are to write poems. I decide at that moment that I will be a poet. I've never really been seriously interested in anything else, except for music. I hadn't really read any poetry except for a few Longfellow and Poe poems.

4. Cummings is a big one. I save my money to buy the Collected Poems. I am still twelve or thirteen, maybe 14 by the time I actually have the money to buy it. Meanwhile I buy the cheap paperbacks of Cummings. Later I won't like Cummings nearly as much, but I have to give credit where it belongs.

5. I read some more Longfellow. A boy's will is the wind's will and the thoughts of youth are long long thoughts. I loved that line in Junior High.

6. In French class in High School we read Baudelaire and LaFontaine. I learn the rules of classical French prosody which I still know to this day.

7. I work my way through an edition of X.J. Kennedy's textbook and the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, from ages about 13-18. Williams, Stevens, O'Hara, Koch, Berryman, and Ashbery. Some Creeley. I like James Tate and Mark Strand. I see poetry readings by poets like Stephen Spender and Richard Eberhart when they come to my local university. I occasionally ride my bike past Karl Shapiro's house. I read Howl. I have a subscription to the APR. I send poems to magazines and get rejections. By the time I start college I own about 200 books of poetry. I know Neruda and Breton in translation.

... to be continued