Reading List: Contemporary American Poetry, Fall 2010

Here is the reading list for my Fall Semester 2010 self-taught class, Contemporary American Poetry. The class consists of my reading these 5 books and blogging about them! (If you're confused about this fall semester stuff, please see yesterday's post below.) Click on the titles if you want to look at them on Amazon.

Sonata Mulattica: Poems. Rita Dove.

Rita Dove is a big deal. She’s won the Pulitzer. She’s been the Poet Laureate before. And, like Katha Pollitt, she picked my poems as the winner in a poetry contest once. I like Dove’s other stuff, and I’m pretty much guaranteed to like this.

Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. Robert Hass.

He is also a big deal—same credentials as I listed for Dove, minus the making me a winner of a poetry contest, but I’ve never entered a contest judged by him. Yet! Once in a while, Hass seems kind of snobby and makes me roll my eyes, but mostly I like him. Maybe this book won’t have anything snobby in it.

Selected Poems. Fanny Howe.

No Pulitzer, no Poet Laureate stint, but still quite a big deal! (In poetry, though, “big deal” is very, very relative.) I’ve never read anything by Fanny Howe at all. Wikipedia tells me her sister Susan is also a poet. Now I remember that I read one of Susan’s poems once, and it was good.

OK, I had another book picked here and I started to type up a poem by the poet for you, and then I realized I wasn’t going to like him that much. So let’s go with… 

heredities. J. Michael Martinez.

I, too, am suspicious of the lower case “h.” But this book won the 2009 Walt Whitman prize, so I’ll give it a go.

It Is Daylight. Arda Collins.

And this one won the Yale Series of Younger Poets thing in 2008. Beautiful book cover, huh? Hopefully she won’t write all in simple declarative sentences, i.e. “It is daylight. /  My dog farts. / I am wearing a blue shirt.”

That’s it for this course. I am also going to be taking Trends in Genre Romance, Classic English Literature, and Popular Science. Do you guys want the reading lists for those? Let me know!