Patrick W. MarshSix American Poets
Daily writing prompt What book could you read over and over again? View all responsesFor all the media I’ve consumed over the years, and from what I’ve talked about on this blog about what raindrops from the zeitgeist I keep catching on my tongue, one collection of poetry jumps up in my brain when I saw this question. That collection is Six American Poets. The poets included in this collection are Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens.
You can find that collection on Amazon right here
I’ve always enjoyed poetry. At this point in my life I’d call myself a poet. I write poems every week, nearly every day, and I’ve been published enough times to claim this label for myself, despite my midwestern background telling me I shouldn’t ever celebrate any accomplishment. Maybe that could be my self-loathing upbring? Lack of emotional validation when I was kid? All of it perhaps. Pick a card, there are plenty.
Anyways, prose and narrative sort of hit the same beats for me over and over again. Once I experience the story, I often don’t need to go back to it. I mean have on certain books, but they’re pretty seldom. I have my emotional crutches of shows, books, movies, that I rewatch when all my depression and anxiety roars and tumbles within me. Reexperiencing media repeatedly can be a coping mechanism for emotional stress.
Overflowing on that inventory.
I was given this book back in college at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. I was in a class called Textual Analysis Methods, and we thoroughly explored this book in every facet of analysis. My professor at the time had just come from Harvard. He was utterly passionate about examining literature, and he implored us to not only write in our books and not resell them, but to also employee a found writing notebook, where we wrote down stuff that inspired us. This could be a quote from Homer Simpson or a favorite line by Langston Hughes. I still have a found notebook today. It is sitting just a foot away from me while I write this blog post. This has built me up as a writer in countless different ways.
However, the found notebook is a whole different blog post.
When I reread this collection of poets, I see my original notes as the goofy English major who thought he was going to change the world. It brings me joy to see that I still have the same aspirations now as I did back then, despite a myriad of successes and failures in my personal and professional life. I’m brought back to walking across the bridge between campuses, flirting with other writers and poets at parties in crowded dorm rooms, or spoking cigarettes outside Lind Hall arguing with people about using rhyme scheme or free verse.
Nostalgia isn’t the only reason I go back to this book, but it is simply the quality and diversity of voices within this collection. It a wholesale trip through American history in the form of these poets. Each one is different, unique, and represents a different period of time within America. As an American, I am curious about our inherited identity. I do wonder about where I come from. America from my own POV is very much of an experiment. We’re a sort of orphan, forced to raise ourselves in the shadow of older civilizations and nations with stronger historical identities.
Now of course the collection could stand to be more diverse (one woman, one black man out of the group), but the range of voices is still a bit of wonderment. The nature infused rhyme scheme of Frost. The ghostly wanderings of Emily Dickson. The meditative role of identity by Hughes. The precision of William Carlos Williams. The lullaby flow of Walt Whitman. And my person favorite, the bits of imagination and randomness from Wallace Stevens unique diction. Each poet offers a staggeringly good snapshot into their individual style, and why they’re legendary in the halls of American poetry. I have read this collection a ridiculous amount of times, to the point that the plastic is separating from the paper cover.
So yeah, besides my personal relation to the book, this is just a great collection. For any writer for any genre, I implore studying and reading what made these poets standout.
I could read this book everyday and still find something new.
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