i love having a tiny project - a direction with constraints. similar to my short stories project of 2022, i’m going to read (at least) 52 classic/notable poems in 2023. this is borrowed from this lithub list and i’ll round it out with a few more - please make suggestions! i’ll keep this post evergreen and link to my silly little writeups afterwards.
to read
T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”
Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”
Emily Dickinson, “Because I could not stop for Death –”
Sylvia Plath, “Daddy”
Robert Hayden, “Middle Passage“
Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”
Maya Angelou, “Still I Rise”
Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven”
e.e. cummings, “i carry your heart with me”
Marianne Moore, “Poetry”
Rudyard Kipling, “If”
Robert Burns, “To a Mouse”
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
Audre Lorde, “Power”
Frank O’Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency”
John McCrae, “In Flanders Fields”
Lewis Carroll, “Jabberwocky”
W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”
Sappho, “The Anactoria Poem” (tr. Jim Powell)
Mark Leidner, “Romantic Comedies”
Muriel Rukeyser, “The Book of the Dead”
Rita Dove, “After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed”
Nikki Giovanni, “Ego Tripping”
Terrance Hayes, “The Golden Shovel”
read
Gertrude Stein, “Sacred Emily” (post)
Philip Larkin, “This Be The Verse” (post)
Louise Glück, “Mock Orange” (post)
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias” (post)
Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool” (post)
Lucille Clifton, “Homage to My Hips” (post)
William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow” (post)
Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” (post)
Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck” (post)
Paul Laurence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask” (post)
Maggie Nelson, “The Earth in April” (post)
Jack Gilbert, “A Brief for the Defense”(post)
e.e. cummings, “yes is a pleasant country” (post)
William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 18” (post)
Carolyn Forché, “The Colonel” (post)
Wislawa Syzmborska, “The End and the Beginning” (post)
Langston Hughes, “Harlem” (post)
Patricia Lockwood, “Rape Joke” (post)
Mary Oliver, “The Pond” (post)
William Blake, “The Tyger” (post)