Every time I read a book of poems I stuff in the back a batch of placemarks. When I read a poem I quite like, one that I want to revisit, explore, I pop a placemark in next to it. I return to the poem a few times, reading it carefully, sometimes aloud. If after 5 readings or so I still don't want to leave the poem behind I hand copy the poem into a looseleaf notebook. By hand copying the poem I incorporate it into my body of work -- I've written it, after all. At the end of the year I read aloud all the poems I copied out in that year. This year I didn't get around to the reading until Tuesday night. Here's the list of poems:
"Mom told me to grow up and win the Nobel Prize" by Val Gerstle
"I Remember Clearly" by Imre Oravecz
"Theorem" by Walter Conrad Arensberg
"You say, 'I will come'" by Lady Otomo
"My long white hair is framed by green mountains" by Han-shan Te-ch'ing
"mountain sounds carry a chill wisdom" by Shih-Shu
"Written in the Year of the Parrot" by John Yau
"Hangover" by Jeffrey Conway
"A Week in the Life of the Ethnically Indeterminate" by Elena Georgiou
"As From a Quiver of Arrows" by Carl Phillips
"My Body" by Joan Larkin
"The Cow-Boy" by Vicente Huidobro
"Lovely Childhood" by Gottfried Benn
"People" by Hans Arp
two dinosaur haiku, "Fluxist Poem #5", "Friday", "Beautiful Cowards", and "You" by Sparrow
"Instinct" by Edith Sodergran
"Shhh", "Teeth", and "Heaven" by Billy Merrell
"I tie my Hat - I crease by Shawl", "Because I could not stop for Death -", and "Four Trees - upon a solitary Acre -" by Emily Dickinson
[The above originally appeared (and still appears) on my other blog, LoveSettlement. I am now posting it to Dare I Read because the other Best Poems of the Year posts are on Dare I Read and it seems to me nice to have them all accessible under the Best Poems of the Year tag.]
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