Essential texts appear to be coming into vogue in poetry blogland. I’ll have to give the idea of essential poetic texts some sustained thought, which is obviously not my forte as of late. But here is a spontaneous list of volumes I’d want to save first if my house were burning. You’ll quickly see that my selection criteria is purely one of personal importance, sometimes for reasons completely outside the text. Later I’ll think specfically about poetics. Onward:

• The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano
• Collected Poems by James Wright
• Will You Please be Quiet Please and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Ray Carver
• All Of Us: The Collected Poems by Ray Carver
• Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
• The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake
• Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
• Elemental Odes by Pablo Neruda
• Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
• Metamagical Themas and Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstader
• The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz
• Writing and Difference by Jacques Derrida
• Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake
• Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein
• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
• Collected Poems of Roethke

I could go on for at leat 100 more. But where’s the focus? Where are the women? Tender Buttons and Dickinson have to make it in there, to start. That’s the problem with this listmaking, and why others are doing it much more effectively than I am. I’ll take another, more focused shot later.