the bookshelf thing -- on Gabe Gudding's blog, on Silliman --

canonical vs. "favorite"

if the canonical is the "everybody loves" poetry, or perhaps the "everybody agrees it is poetry" and the favorite is "I love"

but the bookshelf is talking about INFLUENCE, and very specifically influence writ large -- what is the difference between the "small shelf of poetry" one presumably had when one started writing poetry and "influential poetry"?

before I had oodles of poetry, I had, or rather my parents or schoolbooks or I had:

Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson
Marianne Moore (I had a propensity for tricorn hats 1976-7 after our vacation to DC / Virginia in 76)
Yeats
Eliot
WCW
Toby Olson
Langston Hughes
Carl Sandburg
Dylan Thomas
Sylvia Plath
James Joyce
several children's poetry anthologies
several children's literary encyclopedia
fairy tales

my sister, who actually wrote as a child, unlike me, had Odgen Nash, Shel Silverstein, etc.

So, this is a little ideosyncratic, but all in all, fairly standard stuff, especially for a person of Irish descent living in Illinois (note the paucity of Brits).

Then there is a question of who is influencing me *now.* Hmmmm.