Surely you have cracked a Modern Library edition of a novel, a "great" one, in the past ten years. You've seen that list on the inside, yes? The Modern Libary's 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century. Why it is only the 20th Century sort of confounds me, but maybe I just want to see Moby Dick go toe to toe with Joyce. Anyway, the Board of the Modern Library put together a list, and by most measures it's a good list. I don't quite understand the Faulkner breakdown, nor do I think On the Road is even really a good book, but I'll let that aside. What I find way more intriguing is the Reader's List of the 100 Best Novels. You can find them both here: http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html
I just like the thought of a person sitting in their home, deciding to cast a vote in this debate, and thinking to themselves hmm now who wrote the best novel duh Ayn Rand....ok ok easy enough, but who wrote the SECOND best novel duh Ayn Rand. I appreciate that, of the first ten best novels, Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard comprise six. Some of the other choices which appear on the Reader's List (and not the Board List) I find less ridiculous, and I even rejoice at: Gone With the Wind, Robertson Davies, Blood Meridian. Is To Kill A Mockingbird more than Boo Radley?
Anyway, the reason I am writing is not to deride listmakers. I simply want to know why there is not a list for drama or poetry.
Now, I am not proposing we each try to arrange in order the 100 Best Poems of All Time (perhaps you have seen those lists too, and boy are they fucking garbage), but I want to have a little fun with the idea.
What are your top ten poems of all time? Right now. Don't try to be too sophisticated and say "Paradise Lost the Inferno Song of Songs Metamorphoses Shakespeare Homer AEIOU." You're more than welcome to include those poems, but what ten poems right now in your life are really the ten best?
It may help to think of this another way. If you could only read ten poems for the rest of your life, starting today, what would you choose?
I am not suggesting poems can be qualified or evaluated vis-a-vis one another. Lists, by and large, tell us nothing. But let's have fun with it.
Love,
Dann
Friday, October 24, 2008
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3 comments:
Both of those lists depress me. Brave New World at number 5? Grapes of Wrath at 10? Really? Henderson the Rain King is one of Bellow's worst novels--that spot should be Humboldt's Gift, but, barring that, Herzog or at least Seize the Day. I'm not even going to discuss the reader-chosen.
Anyways I suppose I'll get us started on this poem list thinger. This was hard. I console myself in what you wrote, that this is clearly not a "greatest of all time" list, but merely what I'm into right now. The following is a very abbreviated list of: a) what I'm into right now, b) my favorites of all time (that would be James Wright and Zbigniew), and c) poems that sparked my interest in writing.
James Wright - Youth (really too many Wright poems to choose from)
Zbigniew Herbert - Elegy of Fortinbras
Leonard Cohen - Poem
and Beneath My Hands
William Carlos - Queen Anne's Lace
Rilke - Song of the Little Cripple at the Street Corner
Bishop - Sestina
Blake - The Chimney Sweeper
Seamus Heaney - Punishment
That's only nine. Ten would probably be the collected exile poems by Ovid. Or something by Keats. Anyways it seems unfair to finish it.
1) Paradise Lost (I know this sort of breaks my own suggestion, so of the entire poem I'll limit mine to Book VI, the one where Satan invents a cannon, angels rip mountains out of the ground, and the Messiah sends Satan down to hell)
2) "Crusoe in England" - Elizabeth Bishop
3) "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" - William Carlos Williams
4) "The Snake Doctors" - Frank Bidart
5) The "Sleepchains" sequence from Decreation - Anne Carson
6) "Poem of the End" - Marina Tsvetaeva
7) [Methought I saw...] - Milton
8) "The Old Man at the Wheel" - Frank Bidart
9) "Tonight" - Agha Shahid Ali
10) "Return to Madison" - V.H. Adair
A very scattershot list. About half of them I recognize as lower on a truly great scale than poems I've excluded, but this is what I return to most right now.
Tyler, no "Lost Pilot"?
Lost Pilot is great, still one of my favorites. I didn't really give my list much thought, to tell you the truth. I also love book VI of PL, and certain parts of the Inferno amaze me. Goethe's Faust is really good too, even in translation, though that's less a poem and more a play in verse.
In truth I don't feel as if I've read enough poetry to make a very interesting list.
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