Tachibana Akemi ….. 2 poems beginning “Happiness is”
Wakayama Bokusui ….. “Look at the mountain …”
Yosa Buson ….. 3 haiku
Chiyojo ….. 2 hokku
Billy Collins ….. The Best Cigarette & Budapest
Gregory Corso ….. Dialogue – 2 Dollmakers
Lucille Lang Day ….. from Field Notes: “Sea Slugs”
Jean Follain ….. October Thoughts
Jim Harrison & Ted Kooser ….. 10 poems from Braided Creek
Ozaki Hosai ….. “Carved into Buddha’s form …”
Kobayashi Issa ….. 7 haiku
Jakuren ….. “Loneliness has no special color …”
George Oppen ….. from Twenty-Six Fragments
Priest Saigyo ….. “At the roadside” & “The deep snow that” & “Ice wedged fast” & “In a hailstorm” & “Today again”
Senryu by anonymous poets ….. 5 senryu
Princess Shikishi ….. “Would there were other means of consolation …”
Fujiwara no Shunzei ….. One-Sided Love
Tanigawa Gan ….. Morning in a Foreign Land
Natsume Seibi ….. “Once when my five-year-old daughter was out playing …”
Shigeji Tsuboi ….. Balloon
Masaoka Shiki ….. 3 haiku
Ishikawa Takuboku ….. 2 haiku
a Tsukeai, an anonymous ‘linking’ poem ….. “I made her wet …”
John Yau ….. A Sheaf of Pleasant Voices
Ishihara Yoshiro ….. Song of the Ringing in the Ear
Kinoshita Yuji ….. Late Summer
Since 1989 I’ve been collecting poems. The best poems are the poems I like best, not just the poems I like, admire, think are done well, but the poems I want to spend time with and look forward to returning to because they strike something inside me that might, for all I know, be peculiar to me. Not so peculiar that someone else didn’t write the poem, but unique enough that just cuz I think it’s great it don’t mean everybody else will. So. The best poems are the ones that work best for me. No surprise, eh? It’s not like there’s objective criteria, you know.
With “The Best Poems of 2003” I am exposing the last of the contents of the looseleaf binder that I’ve been filling up for the last 12 years.
These are the other eleven:
The Best Poems of 2011
The Best Poems of 2010
The Best Poems of 2009
The Best Poems of 2008
The Best Poems of 2007
The Best Poems of 2006
The Best Poems of 2005
The Best Poems of 2004
The Best Poems of 2002
The Best Poems of 2001
The Best Poems of 2000
1 comment:
glenn, those are great lists. much for me to look for. i am cleaning off my shelves. have mariah and luster publications if you want them or know a good collection.
jimmccrary81@gmail.com
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