All right, I have a question for you to perk up our summer writing doldrums:
Which ten books are the books that have inspired the most writing from you? The books you read that you couldn’t wait to put down so you could write afterwards? These aren’t neccessarily your “favorite” books, but the books that have helped you generate the most new work. If you are a poet, they do not have to all be poetry, they can be fiction, non-fiction, etc.
Here are my top ten “inspiration-generating” books so far:
-Louise Gluck’s Meadowlands
-Hayao Kawai’s The Japanese Psyche: Major Motifs in the Fairy Tales of Japan
-Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen
-The Armless Maiden: And Other Tales for Childhood’s Survivors, Edited by Terri Windling
-Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run with the Wolves
–Humphries’ translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses
–Margaret Atwood’s Selected Poems II
–Marina Warner’s From the Beast to the Blonde
-I’m going to cheat and allow film in this list: Hayao Miyazaki’s entire oevre
-HD’s Collected Poems
-My mother’s copy of XJ Kennedy’s Introduction to Poetry, circa1969, including all her notes
I’d love to see your lists!
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
Responsible Artist
Dr. Neruda’s Cure for Evil by Raphael Ygelias
Flying Leap by Judy Budnitz
Stealing Time by Mary Grimm
The Blue Fairy Book by Andrew Lang
Five Children and It by E. Nesbit
Hotel Eden by Ron Carlson
The Holocaust Kid by Sonia Pilcer
Citizen in Spaceby Robert Sheckley
We Have Always Lived in The Castle Shirley Jackson
Margaret and I by Kate Wilhelm
A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz
The Tunnel by Russell Edson
Selected Poems by Mark Strand
Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
A Treatise on Poetry by Czeslaw Milosz
The Idea of Fraternity in America by W. Carey McWilliams
Lucky Life by Gerald Stern
Plainwater by Anne Carson
The U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos
Great American Prose Poems edited by David Lehman
Justin Evans
The Light the Dead See by Frank Stanford
The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I love You by Frank Stanford
My Town by Dave Lee
Legacy of Shadows by Dave Lee
Theory of Twilight by Gary Short
Flying over Sonny Liston by Gary Short
From a Three Cornered World by James Mitsui
A History of the Garden by Katharine Coles
Loup River Psalter by William Kloefkorn
Saling Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins
Collin
Complete Poems – Anne Sexton
Singing Yet – Stan Rice
Morning in the Burned House – Margaret Atwood
Satan Says – Sharon Olds
Complete Poems – Robert Frost
Horses Make A Landscape Look More Beautiful – Alice Walker
The Collected Poems – Frank O’Hara
Whore – Sarah Maclay
Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman
Sacrifice – Cecilia Woloch
jeannine
Good lists – there are books on all of them I love love love! The Blue Fairy Book – Harold and the Purple Crayon! – Morning in the Burned House – great stuff! Thaks for posting them!
Anonymous
Kinky by Denise Duhamel
Between Angels by Stephen Dunn
Troubled Lovers in History by
Albert Goldbarth
Babel by Barbara Hamby
Teaching Poetry Writing: A Five Canon Approach by me
My Twentieth Century by David Kirby
Elegy by Larry Levis
Sleeping with the Dictionary by Haryette Mullen
Paroles by Jacques Prevert
In Order to Talk With the Dead by Jorge Teillier
Lies by CK Williams
Tom C. Hunley
k1tchenwitch
this was fun! I’ve written down some names I haven’t read before for future trips to the bookstore.
my list:
Good Bones & Simple Murders, Margaret Atwood
Awake, Dorianne Laux
Tender Hooks, Beth Ann Fennelly
Ariel, Sylvia Plath
The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros
Study for the World’s Body, David St. John
Kinky, Denise Duhamel
Guiding the Stars to their Campfire, Driving the Salmon to Their Beds, Tiffany Midge
Enola Gay, Mark Levine
The Gold Cell, Sharon Olds
jeannine
Hey, step up, you Kinky fans, you! Good lists…this is giving me so many good reading ideas…