[New-Poetry] Re: Books a poet should own

[Roger Day]

I'm not being entirely flippant here when I say, define me a poet.

If you are a poet writing in the English Language, then

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics.
A history of English literature, whether in a series or a single volume.
Some books on litcrit (of a favourite area - mine is Pound). With
Pound as my starting point, I spread out to Browning, Propertius,
Catullus, the vorticists, the imagists,
Biographies of poets of interest.
Dictionaries - SOED at the very least, but also a variety: Chambers,
Oxford Concise.
Slang dictionary - Cassells (Johnathon Green) or Partridge.
Thesauraus
Linguistics and Grammar - Describing Language, Syntax, The English
Verb, something by either Quirk and/or Greenbaum.
Etymology? I saw Skeat's book going from £110 this morning ... umm ...
As my practice doesn't extend to traditional form, I may be light in
this area, but Hobsbaum form and meter was pretty good. I've got
rhyming dictionary somewhere but I've only found that moderately
useful.

Then the hinterland might extend to philosophy, economics, history.

But what, as part of your practice, if you translate poetry? I'm
interested in French poetry so a set of books parallel to the above in
french for me then

Roger
On 10/24/06, Bob Grumman <bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net> wrote:
>
>
> I'm curious, since I'm about the only one who answered the question: what
> books, if any, ought a poet own--as a poet--that is, as opposed to what
> books one thinks are good books?
>
> --Bob G.
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