1) Anne Sexton & Sylvia Plath: poems that come from the abyss, painfully, and a life obviously just as contemptuous; literary (Sexton) could use some substance in her poetry other than nudity, being free verse I think it allows more freedom to do this. Her book, “The Book of Folly”, appears to have been written quickly and, for her skill level, could have been done better; like hers her first two books (To Bedlam and All my Pretty Ones). Her friend, Sylvia Plath, with whom they both attended classes, shared the same style of confessional poetry, both largely suicidal. Overall, Sylvia may be the better poet, but Sexton, who perhaps took the family away from her to write poetry, by all means wrote and published more of her poetry. In such cases, I believe that when mental illness is present, it is a way for the person to survive, it is too difficult for them to live in the pot of crickets and therefore they find an escape.

2) Howard Nemerov: good lyricism, one of the poets I ran after my first days at the university to read and try to understand. He writes well, but I find that something is often missing, maybe he (or poets like him) need to march to the end of the road (experiment more, to fill the gaps in his poetry, when I say gaps, it’s what I feel is missing between lines, to him perhaps nothing, to me something, on the other hand, perhaps I expect too much).

3) Allen Ginsberg: when he was 20 years old, he wrote his best works (particularly “Empty Mirror”, it all went downhill from there I think); he lost it for good taste and good sense, which he didn’t have, and he traded it for pleasure and a twisted mind, God help the reader. “Howl” and “Caddish” are some of his worst work, or should I say, some of the worst poetry I’ve read to this day. He takes his reader in a circle that never ends. His book and his poems about Cambodia come from a fragmented mind, he changes where he starts (Cambodia) and goes off the road every time he eats, to go into a frenzy for something else, that means something to him. perhaps, but the reader, he is far from where he originally took him, and the reader expects him to finish what he started, but he never does. And most of his poetry involves his obsession with dirty homosexual sex. He has to tell the public about it, he just can’t get over it; until his last days.

4) EE Commings: Cummings poetry is Cummings! That is, more than most poets; if you have read one of his poems, you have read most of them; a good and genuine poet, to be sure, perhaps uncompromising, but I get bored after a few of his poems, unfortunately.

5) Gary Snyder: Academic poetry, but in the middle (the era of beatniks): he embraces zen like so many back then; I was at the end of that era. He used his techniques correctly, for what it is (or was): sharp, clear and detached poetry.

6) Walt Whitman: He was, of course, the hero of Allen Ginsberg, and perhaps because he shared the same sexual impulses as him. I can see in Ginsberg’s poetry, Whitman’s style. Whitman was perhaps the father of modern free verse and he did it much better than Allen. The bad thing about Whitman was that he started with a book of 12 poems and ended up with a book of 400 poems, which he spent a living time going over and over and over again. When you have something good, leave it alone, who can go back 40 years and say: this is what he was thinking then, and accordingly, change his book, “Leaves of Grass”. If you read his poems, you have to read between the lines. When he talks about women, he often means men. You can see this by comparing older versions of his poems with newer ones. He is not a bad poet in my eyes, just a dirty old man.

7) William Blake: the poet of mystery, and with a macabre style. I like his poetry in general, there’s not much to say about him, he came, he was, he always will be. I would call him a light-hearted Poe.

8) Robert Bly and Donald Hall, both good poets (I’ve known them both). Bly’s best work is his first and second books “Silence in the Snowfields” and “The Light Around the Body.” The only bad thing I can say about these books is that they have too long a title. However, I realize that his quest to have his political views heard begins in his second book, and never ends, and gets a bit boring after fifty years of reading it. His book “My sentence was a thousand years of joy”, again a long title, but a good book to read nonetheless, and offers a more personal approach. Donald Hall, on the other hand, has short titles. The best book of him being (sorry) is “Sin”, a book written about grief. His first book, which I also signed for him, “Exiles and Marriages (1955)”, needs some of that older Donald Hall. He’s written a dozen books or more, and I haven’t read them all, so I’d better stop here, while perhaps I’ve read too much of Mr. Bly.

9) George Sterling: He was like Sexton and Plath ever since, he took his own life, he died in 1926, at the age of 58, Sexton in his late 40s and Plath in his late 20s. Not many people have heard of Sterling, but he was San Francisco’s number one poet and a friend of Jack London. He is perhaps the best poet I have read on imagery. However, reading it, one can get lost. He gets so involved with the images of him, I think he loses himself, they are beautiful, strange but hard to maintain. He wrote about 14 books, I think I have all but one. He was arguably the teacher of Clark A. Smith, both Smith and he belonged to the “Weird Tales” writing period, from the 1930s to the 1950s, with Robert Howard.

10) Robert Jeffers and Tennessee Williams: Perhaps one of the greatest poetic prose writers of his day was Robert Jeffers, he was even hailed by George Sterling as a great poet, and rightly so. Perhaps even Mr. Sterling helped Jeffers in imagining him. I have several of his books, and one signed, so I’m proud to have them, “Hungerfield and other Poems”, it’s a good book, as is “Collected Poems” by him. As for Tennessee Williams, one thinks he was just a playwright, but he was a poet and he wrote In the Winter of Cities, a very good book. I was surprised by the depth of his writing, but like Whitman, he must read between the lines if he wants to remove the pretense.

11) James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway: yes, both were poets, or tried to be. Joyce was not only a bad writer in general, but she wasn’t a very good poet either; if it hadn’t been for Ezra Pound, you would never have heard of James Joyce. As for Hemingway, his poetry was right up there with Allen Ginsberg’s, without dirty homosexual overtones. At heart, his poetry was, depressingly, more of the order of dispiriting satirical poetry, with a touch of Plath and Sexton, but with less substance. But he was Hemingway, and he could get away with it from time to time.

Poetry comment:

“Blessing of the Poem”:

There is nothing on earth that can match the hard and deep work, the stirring of the blood and the sense of sanctification that a good poem can offer (it is the highest quality of writing that a writer can do).

That new promising poem, felt in the midst of silence, in the corner of the night, attached to your mind and ribs until it finds its way out of your box and into the world of literature; faint at first, then like radiation from an atomic bomb.

The question posed: “Why do people write poetry?”

A good question, and difficult to answer, more subjective than anything else, but let me try, how I see it: imagine (dreams, seeing in your mind, imagine), everything is under the same umbrella; such things come out of the unconscious, from the mind, convinced, even written, then emancipated (and never lost in the vaults of humanity).

Note: Poets seem to have vanity once, if not several: for some it is hard to live in this world, and it is an escape. Many are very smart and skilled, some just have deep seated emotions and use poetry as a form of therapy, others like Ginsberg, just need to feed their egos (he never said much unless there was public opinion about him). However, it’s all in the package, you could say, it’s all good, as long as it’s truthful and it doesn’t hurt the innocent, if you give it to the public, that is, because it can influence minds, young minds and we have the responsibility to write what will be useful, unpretentious, otherwise lock it in the basement and leave it there. I started writing poetry at 11, now I’m 60. Funny, my first poem “Who” written in 1959 is more popular than most of my writing and I’ve done 2300 poems, 350 short stories, 36 books and 950 articles, I have two million readers. a year in more than 400 sites, and this poem is in more sites than any other writing I have to date. What does this say? He tells me, what everyone is looking for; what I just mentioned. And this little poem stands out above all of them, so simple.