I actually own Their Eyes Were Watching God, but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet — I will!

Marie, if you decide to work on this list, may I suggest that you read To Kill a Mockingbird? Because it is, without a doubt, my favorite book of all time. I make it a point to read it at least once a year. And also The Sound and the Fury, because Caddy is one of my favorite characters of all time. Also Their Eyes Were Watching God, because of passages like this:

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some, they come in with the tide. For others, they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by time. That is the life of men.

O! O! O!

Okay, Lily, my list is done…

Ann and I are going to feature this on the next episode of the podcast!

But sure, I’ll do a list. How about if I do twenty, you do twenty, and others do twenty and we put them up. With this genre, though, I think it should be poets, not poems. I mean, everybody should read some Wordsworth. It doesn’t matter if it’s the whole prelude or it’s that poem about daffodils or the one about clouds (oh, I have such a bad memory, but I’m CERTAIN he’s done both….). And, also, I’m bad at poets in other languages, but I’ll but somebody else is good.

So, here are my twenty: Shakespeare, Chaucer, Spencer, Milton, Donne, Coleridge, Wordsworth, oh god I’ve missed a hundred years in there, but I’m on a roll, Eliot, Stevens, Dickinson, Whitman, Yeats, how is it possible there’s only ONE WOMAN so far, very bad, Brooks, Bishop, Moore, Sexton, Plath, Rich, and I’ll leave later ones to you, except Gauthier, Bolden, and oh, I used to really like Forche, and I’ll confess to Collins and Koozer oh and Neruda and I’m missing so many others, but that’s the twenty three I came up with this instant and yes, I know, it’s heavy on the canon and there are tons of other good people, and I’ll add more when I have time, oh, yes, Milosz and Akhmatova, and Merrill, also Heaney and Wolcott, oh, and Hecht.

For a long time on my blog I’ve been slowly making my way through my hundred favorite poems, but I’ve stalled a little and this reminds me I need to get going.

Lily! Are you volunteering??