Yes, Martin, we read all over the map in terms of geography and chronology (and often also genre). The student who I turned on to Brigid Pegeen Kelly a couple weeks ago read James Wright and Hafiz with me last week. I suggested that the student to whom I recommended “The Yellow Bicycle” also read some Basho (and I was pleased to learn he already did). Every craft of poetry class I teach has on its reading list at least one book that’s presented as prose. Eclecticism fosters imagination, I believe.

I’m interested, Martin, in your description of your teacher’s styles. We all have so many different teachers, don’t we, who approach poetry in so many different ways.

If I come to San Francisco can an I audit your class? I know the work of a few of these poets, but your list is really quite comprehensive. I love the quote from Harryette Mullen. At any rate, thanks for this lovely accounting of your semester (year?). It makes me realize in a certain way what I’ve missed, far from English language bookstores, out of the loop. I’m going to take your list and see what I can find on-line, start compiling a portfolio of what I don’t know – which is, obviously, more than I do know.

Actually I never even had this kind of instruction…but there were not as many contemporary poets then. In an undergraduate workshop with James Tate (imagine such a thing – I was very lucky) there was a course list…I still read Louise Glück and Bill Knot, some of the very first contemporary poets I learned about, thanks to Tate. In my MFA, which I did mostly under John Ashbery’s tutelage it was much more laissez-faire than what you describe and he was rather reticent and not quite as interested in ultra-contemporary poetry. But he introduced me to tons of poets, most memorably Laura Riding, one of my all time favorites. But he’d mostly send us back to either the lost minor poets of modernism, or back to the eighteenth century. He almost duplicates his limid and whispered teaching style in his book Other Traditions (Harvard 2000).

I’d be curious to know how large your classes are. I can remember one semester when C.K. Williams was filling in for Ashbery, he was teaching at Brooklyn and Columbia at the same time. At Columbia he had about twenty-five. We were five or six at Brooklyn. Williams steered us toward philosophy, theology, essays etc. He talked about poets, but was more interested in prose, at least at the time. I only had him for one semester, but he was huge influence both as teacher and a poet.

Also, I was wondering if you send your students to previous centuries. Do you give them the old stuff?

And, as a teacher and poet, do you ever get too saturated with poetry?

Martin