creating a syllabus

Someone asked me about the books that appear on my syllabus. For one class this semester, (I teach two), it was easy: I let the students pick half the list.

The class is a year-long undergrad workshop, with only seven students. Over the fall semester, they impressed me so much with their poems and hard work and seriousness that I allowed each one to pick an author. (Two picked Pizarnik)
The students chose:
Jimmy Santiago Baca, Healing Earthquakes
Alejandra Pizarnik, (a xeroxed packet)
C.K. Williams, Selected Poems
e.e. cummings, i-Six non-lectures
Mary Ruefle, Post Meridian
Phil Levine, Selected Poems
I added:
John Berryman, Selected Poems
Major Jackson, Hoops
Paisley Rekdal, The Invention of the Kaleidoscope
Thylias Moss, Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky
Lorca, Selected Poems
Christopher Davis, A History of the Only War
I mix my reading lists up each semester, to keep it fresh. We read a book a week. I often assign a few books that I’ve never read before. Sometimes I’ll assign a book or two that I've struggled with, hoping that the intensity of reading it in a group will help me find an entry point. And then there are the poets whose work I return to again and again. If it’s a regular workshop, I don’t usually look for an overt thematic link. I guess I hope the syllabus will function like a constellation: sparkly, non-linear, with some aesthetic dark space between the collections.