Shame on me. Seriously. What a wonderful little assignment from 32 Poems — list your favorite five single-author poetry books for National Poetry Month. I definitely have my five favorites, that’s not the problem. The problem is when it comes to contemporary poetry, I’m the bastard child of a lost cause. I read many more anthologies and collections than single-author full-length books, and of those I do read, for this particular assignment it helps if the poets weren’t dead. If part of the point is to list OPPs so that there is a bit of juice coming the poet’s way, I should be ashamed of myself. After scanning my bookshelf, I can only ask, do I even have five I can list as favorites?

The short answer is yes and no.

The other short answer is I have to group them first.

After grouping them into categories, I have come up with five fabulous books. Fabulous because calling them favorites implies they are better than a whole slew of others. They are better than one or two similar books, but favorite can be stretching it.

They are:

1. Ants on the Melon, Virginia Hamilton Adair. Category: poetry book I’ve re-read the most
2. Midnight Voices, Deborah Ager. Category: Favorite book by local poet
3. Niagara River, Kay Ryan. Category: book by a poet with a poet-household name.
4. After Oz, Michael J Bugeja. Category: poetry book by a teacher-poet.
5. Beowulf, by Seamus Heaney. Category: ancient text with a translation by a contemporary poet.

Adair has indeed passed away, but I had to include her, because this book really does top the list of my favorites.

Thanks to Reb Livingston for the inspiration behind this idea. Each year, she invites poets to share their favorite books in December.

Through this celebration, we hope to:

1. Promote the work of writers who may be new to you. Someone already wrote me to say they bought a few of the books recommended by John Poch on Day One.

2. Promote the work of the writers who volunteer to share their recommendations. At the end of each post, you’ll notice a juicy bio—often with links to the writer’s projects. I hope you take a moment to find out what they are working on these days.

The schedule of writers follows. Please feel welcome to share it on your blog. We’re creeping into the month of May, which shows poetry can’t be contained to just one month.

April 1: John Poch
April 2: Jonterri Gadson
April 3: Eric Weinstein
April 4: M.E. Silverman
April 5: Arielle Greenberg
April 6: Lucy Biederman
April 7: Eric Pankey
April 8: David Lehman
April 9 AM: Collin Kelley
April 9 PM: J.J. Penna
April 10: Jennifer Atkinson
April 11: Luke Johnson
April 11: Interview with Terri Witek
April 12: Holly Karapetkova
April 13: Daniel Nester
April 14 AM: Donald Illich
April 14 PM: Ravi Shankar
April 15: Carolina Ebeid
April 16: M. Scott Douglass
April 17 AM: Adam Vines
April 17 PM: Erica Dawson
April 18: Elizabeth J. Coleman
April 19: Bernadette Geyer
April 20 AM: Sally Molini
April 20 PM: Amit Majmudar
April 21: Kelli Russell Agodon
April 22: Jeannine Hall Gailey
April 23: George David Clark
April 24 AM: Ren Powell
April 24 PM: Dan O’Brien
April 25: Randall Mann
April 25: Andrew Kozma
April 26 AM: Mary Biddinger
April 27 AM: Juliana Gray
April 27 PM: Carrie Jerrell
April 28: Steven Allen May
April 29: Erin Elizabeth Smith
April 29: Joshua Gray
April 30: Rachel Zucker
May 1: Erika Meitner
May 2: Caki Wilkinson
May 5: Andrea Hollander Budy
May 6: Lisa Russ Spaar
May 7: January Gill O’Neil
May 10: Brian K. Spears

Today Bernadette Geyer brings her suggestions to the 32 Poems blog.

Burning the Empty Nests, by Gregory Orr – Orr’s poems are linguistically playful and emotionally razor-shap. I find myself returning frequently to the final section, “The Adventures of the Stone.”

What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire, by Charles Bukowski – Shows that Bukowski is not just a poet of whiskey and expletives. His emotional range is phenomenal.

Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems, by Wislawa Szymborska – I will always return to this collection for Szymborska’s poetic gaze, and for the brutally frightening power of the poem “Discovery.”

Selected Poems, by Mark Strand – Strand exhibits a wonderful depth of emotion without losing his inherent sense of the wry and surreal.

True Stories: Poems, by Margaret Atwood – Atwood’s voice is intimate and compelling in these poems which read sometimes as confessions, sometimes as myth.

BIO: Bernadette Geyer is the author of the chapbook What Remains and recipient of a Strauss Fellowship from the Arts Council of Fairfax County. Her poems have appeared in Oxford American, 32 Poems, The Los Angeles Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. Read her poetry book reviews.

1. The Last Predicta by Chad Davidson
I’d rather read a new poem by Chad Davidson than any poet of my generation. For word play, gigantic conceits, line by line surprise, and contemporary culture looked at with wisdom rather than condescension, you just can’t beat it.

2. Every Riven Thing by Christian Wiman
One of the smartest poets we have, enamored of silence and able to make beautiful sounds with it. Some have blamed him for sounding like Hopkins, Donne, and Herbert. I praise him for that, but he’s really doing his own thing, completely, writing some of the most daring poems of our generation.

3. Half Life by Meghan O’Rourke
Lines chiseled from stone, yet poems that make you feel deeply. I’ve read this book over and over, and I never change my mind about it.

4. Things Are Disappearing Here by Kate Northrop
One of the most subtly gorgeous books I’ve ever read.

5. Bucolics by Maurice Manning
So idiosyncratic you’d think no one could pull this off, but he does. I wish I’d written it.

BIO: John Poch’s most recent book of poems is Dolls (Orchises Press 2009). He teaches at Texas Tech University.

Erika Meitner attended Dartmouth College, Hebrew University on a Reynolds Fellowship, and the University of Virginia, where she received her M.F.A. in 2001 as a Henry Hoyns Fellow.

She’s received additional fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts (2002, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2009), the Blue Mountain Center (2006), and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference (John N. Wall Fellowship, 2003).

1. You’re a contributor to 32 Poems, a professor at Virginia Tech and you’re completing a doctorate in Religious Studies. What “hat” do you find most difficult to wear and why?

Right now the hardest of these–between teaching in a relatively new job, trying to write poems during the semester, reading all the applications to our MFA program, advising students, and mothering a toddler–is finding the time in the day to work on my doctoral research. Happily, that’s what they made summers. It’s also hard to peel off my professor-identity, in the sense that when I meet with my religion professors, I have to inhabit my role as a student again. It’s humbling and good for me though–it reminds me, on a fairly regular basis, of how my own graduate students feel.

2. Your biography mentions that your grandparents survived concentration camps in Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, and Mauthausen. Have those stories and experiences influenced your poetry or writing?

I think the way that my grandparents’ experiences have influenced my work the most is that there’s always been this deep well of silence around my family history. My grandmother didn’t start talking about the war and her experiences in it until well into her 80′s, when different foundations started coming around with video cameras to record survivors’ stories. Until then–until I was in college–I had never heard about her war experiences.

When I was little, she used to tell me that the numbers on her arm were her phone number, written there so she wouldn’t forget it. Part of me writing about her in my first book was, I suspect, part of my concerted effort to combat that silence. But she also had a real streak of black humor, and I definitely think that shows up a lot in my work as well.

When I write about uncomfortable or difficult situations in my poems, I tend to temper them a bit with small moments of situational humor, to give the audience that permission to laugh. She passed away, though, on Mother’s Day of last year, so I’ve been writing elegies to her that take various forms. One of them, “Godspeed,” just came out in the most recent issue of Washington Square.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

I’m obsessed with Easter candy–particularly slightly stale marshmallow peeps. I think of peeps as sort-of guardian angels–the bunnies just look so benevolent, kind, and wise. I keep them everywhere. I have boxes of them that students have given me as gifts taped to my office wall; I have a yellow stuffed-animal bunny peep in the cupholder of my Civic who functions as a co-pilot of sorts. I realize this is weird. I also often gift people with peeps.

4. Most writers will read inspirational/how-to manuals, take workshops, or belong to writing groups. Did you subscribe to any of these aids and if so which did you find most helpful? Please feel free to name any “writing” books you enjoyed most.

When I teach poetry workshops, I love to use Steve Kowit’s book In the Palm of Your Hand. I find outside mini-research projects much more inspiring though, in terms of my own work. I’m currently really into Robert Smithson’s work–especially his essays. Also, Joshua Lutz’s “Meadowlands” photos, and a book by Iain Borden called Skateboarding, Space and the City.

In terms of my own writing process, I currently belong to two virtual writing groups. One is constant, and it’s a password-protected blog where a few other poets and I post exercises and the poems that we write from them. This tends to get more active when the semester gets less busy, as most of us teach. I have another virtual group that’s a closed Google group. We pick 2-week or month-long chunks about twice a year to meet online, and when we meet, we write intensely–usually a poem-a-day. It came out of the NaPoWriMo idea, but we usually tend to meet in the summer for a month, and over winter break for a few weeks, as again, most of us teach and April (which is actually officially Poetry Month) tends to be too hectic in the academic calendar for anyone to get much writing done. We don’t comment on each other’s work, but I think we all like the group accountability of these virtual communities, and the fact that they help mitigate the loneliness of plugging away on your own a bit.

5. Poetry is often considered elitist or inaccessible by mainstream readers. Do poets have an obligation to dispel that myth and how do you think it could be accomplished?

This is an interesting question. I’ll write what I think is a fairly accessible poem, it will come out in a journal, and my mother will still take a copy of the journal next door to our neighbor, who’s a former English teacher, so she can tell my mom what my poem “means.” People, on the whole, tend to be scared of poetry–like it’s this code they have to crack, and they don’t have the key. I think that my work does tend to be accessible in that I often (especially in my earlier work) wrote more narrative poems. I wrote those though because the material I was working with, I felt, demanded narrative in some way. I feel like my contribution to dispelling this myth is through my teaching. The more contemporary poets that I expose my students to, the more accessible, in general, poetry becomes, as they start to understand that poets have really different projects, and need to be approached in slightly different ways. I mean, you can’t read a Matthea Harvey poem the same way you would read a Mark Doty poem. I’m teaching a contemporary poetry lit class this semester, and we just finished studying Robert Creeley, who was pretty viciously opposed to large and complicated words in his poems, and even eschewed figurative language. He was hell-bent on writing in the vernacular, but his poems are still really complex and tightly wound. Which is to say that I think that if more elementary and middle and high school students were exposed to a wide range of contemporary American poetry in the classroom, there would be less fear of the genre in general among mainstream readers. And there are great programs (like Teachers & Writers Collaborative or the Community-Word Project, both in New York) that are trying to bring poets into the schools to redress this.

6. When writing poetry, prose, essays, and other works do you listen to music, do you have a particular playlist for each genre you work in or does the playlist stay the same? What are the top 5 songs on that playlist? If you don’t listen to music while writing, do you have any other routines or habits?

I don’t generally listen to music when I work, unless I’m at a colony, because I can’t write with headphones on for some reason, and at home I write really late at night (midnight-3 a.m.). And actually, in the past few years, I’ve taken to listening to NPR when I write at colonies. I like the challenge of trying to block out the announcer while I write. When I’m editing at a colony, I like to listen to old school hip-hop–Tribe Called Quest, Blackalicious, Lyrics Born, Beastie Boys–something about the beat helps me cut extraneous crap out of my poems, which tend to be more expansive in early draft forms. But at home, I like the silence and peripatetic night-noises: car doors slamming, wind shaking the window frames, leaves skittering down the street.

Top 5 poem-editing playlist:
1. Blackalicious – Alphabet Aerobics
2. Tribe Called Quest – Steve Biko
3. Beastie Boys – Brass Monkey
4. Missy Elliott – Bring the Pain
5. Brand Nubian – Slow Down

7. In terms of friendships, have your friendships changed since you began focusing on writing? Are there more writers among your friends or have your relationships remained the same?

I’ve been focusing on writing since college, so a fair number of my friends have always been writers in some way, shape or form. As I’ve moved through grad school, colonies, and fellowships, my circle of writer-friends has certainly grown. I’d say the thing that’s the hardest, being an academic, is that we’re like the domestic foreign service–we go where the work is. This means that keeping in touch with my friends–especially the writers–has been harder as we’re a fundamentally transient population (especially those of us who teach). Things like Facebook and AWP and listservs definitely make it easier to feel connected though. I even have a virtual writing group now that meets online about twice a year.

8. How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

My newly two-year-old son Oz just weighed in at his last checkup at 34 pounds (93rd percentile). Keeping up with him is like training for a decathlon–there’s the shoe-sock wrestling match, the morning dead-lift from his crib, the “get back here” supermarket sprint, the let’s-clean-up-the-lego crawl, the getting him in and out of the highchair squats, etc. It’s really a full-body workout.

9. Do you have any favorite foods or foods that you find keep you inspired? What are the ways in which you pump yourself up to keep writing and overcome writer’s block?

I think food actually serves as a great distraction. I love to bake and would rather face down a banana bread recipe than an empty page. If anything, it’s easier for me to write away from home (and the distractions of the cupboard and fridge); I tend to do most of my writing in local coffee shops, so in that way, I guess coffee keeps me inspired.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

I have an office in our house–since we live in a fairly rural area, space is pretty easy to come by. Unfortunately, my office is usually a disaster area–the floor is covered with papers and other assorted items, which means getting to my desk requires navigating a horrendous obstacle course. I ended up clearing out the closet in the office, and putting a desk in there with a manual typewriter, since there’s no outlet in there. But then the closet got full too. This means that I end up doing most of my writing on the dining room table, once everyone is asleep.

11. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

I’ve just finished a third collection of poems called Ideal Cities. I borrowed the title from my visual artist friend Kim Beck, who has an amazing project with the same name (http://www.idealcities.com/index.html). The collection was inspired by the work of Robert Smithson and other Land Artists of the late 1960’s, who often created work based on landscapes of urban peripheries and structures in various states of progressive disintegration. Many of the poems deal with the human geography of urban border-lands—people on the margins of society. Who do we leave behind or look past? What do we discard, as purposeful markers or accidental refuse? How can these people, places, and objects be woven into larger ideas about nature, sense of place, home, exile, and both personal and collective memory? Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan terms this bond between people and place “topophilia”—we manifest our ties to our geography in aesthetic, tactile, and emotional ways. In 2007 I moved from Washington, DC to Blacksburg, Virginia—a distinctly ex-urban landscape, where I’ve been exploring interstitial, overlooked, and marginalized spaces: malls, office buildings, suburban developments, superstores, construction sites, and interstates. I am also working with the idea of women’s bodies as geographical locations and sites of inscription via sex, childbirth, and other highly physical acts.