(Now that I think of it, discussions like these with someone who cares as much as I do is a thing which I never would have found in Los Angeles. The most important thing about the program really is the people in it, no doubt about it.)

As I mentioned a few entries back, there are a lot of important poets I don't know, and I intend on getting to know them.

It's not as if I don't read poetry. I sporadically discover poets, read them rabidly and fall in love with them. Moreover, I have quite a collection of poetry books and anthologies. I am quite familiar with the British Modernists, whom I studied as an undergrad: Eliot, Lawrence, Yeats, et al. But there are many, many poets that I know due to one or two heavily anthologized poems, and I don't know any of their other work.

Today, after a scintillating morning of latte making, I went to two used bookstores (Pegasus and Black Oak Books, both in Berkeley) to buy poetry books. Pegasus was the real winner here: I got an illustrated volume of Blake for $3, and a bunch of other stuff that averaged $5. The Black Oak books averaged about $8, although this didn't stop me from getting an armload of them as well.

I also got the Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry, which has listings on many schools of poetry and poets, including one of my professors. I also picked up a couple of anthologies, one of which contains a poem by yet another of my professors. Small world, this poetry world. So anyway, sitting on my table right now is a stack of poetry waiting for me to dig into it.

It's my new project: my poetry literacy project.

(I know I may seem somewhat at cross purposes here: wasn't I talking about focus a while back? Having too many things on my plate? And here I am, picking up a new project. However, I am a poet. I am in San Francisco to attend poetry school. I need to be reading more poetry, learning more context, and using it to expand my writing. I need a basis from which to teach in the future. I need this knowledge. If this isn't focus, I don't know what is.)

So, now that I've adequately defended my project, let's ponder the mechanics of it. I haven't really decided how to organize this project. I know I need a reading list, but I'm not certain where to cull it from or how large it needs to be. I am toying with the idea of making it an actual writing project: immersing myself in one volume at a time, and writing concurrent poetry that is intended as sort of a hybrid of my own style and theirs. (Hark! Is this a thesis project idea I see before me?)

I have no doubt that my list is going to be somehwat arbitrary; in fact, the books sitting on my table are rather arbitrary. The books I bought today were purchased for any one of a number of reasons: I've always wanted to read them, I hear their name a lot, I have been compared to them by someone, or I flipped through it and it looked keen. My list is haphazard like that.

I did find one useful list to start with. I was perusing my copy of Best American Poetry 2000 last night (some great stuff in there) and noticed an interesting "Millennium" themed list at the back. Each guest editor selected a list of the fifteen "most important" poems of the past century. Then there is a master list of poets who appear on at least two of those lists. I think I'm going to dig into that master list.

The poets are: A.R. Ammons, W. H. Auden (best known as the Four Weddings & a Funeral poet), John Ashbery (bought his book today), Elizabeth Bishop (taking a class on her next semester), Gwendolyn Brooks, Hart Crane, Robert Creeley (bought his book today), T.S. Eliot (know him, love him), Robert Frost (have his book), Robert Hayden (who?), Langston Hughes (I'm ashamed that I don't have a Langston Hughes volume yet), Randall Jarrell (who?), Kenneth Koch (who?), Robert Lowell (bought today), James Merrill, Marianne Moore (studing her next semester), Frank O' Hara, Sylvia Plath (one of my favorites), Ezra Pound (taking a class next semester), Kenneth Rexroth (who?), Edwin Arlington Robinson (who?), Theodore Roethke (him, I know), James Schuyler, Delmore Schwartz and William Stafford (otherwise known as who, who and who?), Gertrude Stein (stood in front of her grave in Paris), Wallace Stevens (have the book), Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, William Carlos Williams, and James Wright (I think I have one of his books, not sure).

I can't imagine that non-poets even care about this in the slightest. I'll have to work on a Sims update soon.

My parents don't understand the concept of a poetry career, and I would guess that many of my friends don't get it, either. It's an insular little world, the world of poetry. My father once asked me if I would make a lot of money when I became a famous poet. And, although I appreciated his confidence in me, I laughed and laughed.

There's no glorious cash prize at the end of the rainbow. The goals aren't really material at all. Poets want to be published in prestigious magazines, find an audience, have their books published. If they're extremely lucky, one in a million, they might win a Pulitzer or a Guggenheim fellowship, or end up reading a presidential inauguration poem, or become famous enough to make some real money in some other venue. But poetry doesn't make money.

So of course, what I want is not money. What I want is to be respected in the world of poetry, to make a name for myself within that world. What I want is for you all to be able to say, "Yeah, we always knew she would do it. We knew her when." I want to light up the sky like a flame. I want to make it to heaven. Baby, remember my name. Remember, remember, remember...

Ahem. So, back to the Best American Poetry. It represents the best poetry published in a previous year. Lots of big names, and some lesser known names. It's my personal Holy Grail of poetry. I would possibly keel over and die with happiness if I appeared in that book.

I know my poetry may not be quite on that level yet, but it does stack up to some of the stuff in there. I believe my writing is good, and it's getting better. I feel confident that I can have a poetry career, that I will be a successful poet. I've never really been confident about that in the past. But now, I am operating under the assumption that if I go past the rejection slips, keep improving my work, and don't give up, I will make it. Whether I'm completely delusional or not, that's a great mental place to be.

At first, I was sort of intimidated by the "best" poetry I was reading. Sure, my writing may be almost as good as that woman's, or aspiring to the level of that guy's stuff. But I don't fill my poems with classical allusions, like that guy over there. And I have never written a great sestina, like that woman. And I don't write with the same degree of musicality as that other guy. I was comparing myself to every poet, thinking that they all had something I lack in my own writing.

Then I realized. I don't have to be all of those poets, all rolled into one. I just have to be one of them.

Esperanza

There is beeping machinery
in this room, and monitors,
blue-grey sheets and IV drip bags.
Almost like the scene I am watching
on my favorite telenovela,
a Mexican soap opera,
with Lupe sobbing, crying into a corner of the sheet,
and Rodrigo barely clinging to life.

Except, instead of my husband's long lost
amnesiac twin brother, it is my husband,
who has no brothers, hooked up here.
And rather than an eleventh hour miraculous recovery
and the discovery that he faked his own
terminal illness, there is beeping
machinery. Monitors and drip bags.

I have forgotten how to say the word
hope. I don't know how to wail,
like La Llorona looking for her lost child,
or Lupe, who goes on finding a different reason to cry
each and every Friday.

But I don't begrudge them their story.
Instead, I get caught up in the possibility
of spontaneous amnesia
and fake pregnancies, and revenge plots
from beyond the grave.
And I worry about the fate of poor Rodrigo,
and his long lost identical twin brother.

It is Friday afternoon.
Lupe weeps onto the sheets,
and the eyes of the man in the bed flutter open.
I squeeze my own husband's hand,
limp and pale,
and never take my eyes off the TV.

Non.