Joshua Weiner : part four

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to?   A particular author?

I return to the Scottish border ballads, especially "Edward" and "Sir Patrick Spens"; poets from the English Renaissance--Wyatt, Gascoigne, Ralegh, Spenser, Fulke Greville, Sidney, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Campion, Donne, Herbert, Jonson, Henry King, Marvell.  I turn to the Romantics--Blake's Songs, Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, Coleridge, Keats, Clare; also Dickinson & Whitman.  I find renewal in the poems of Hardy and Hopkins; Frost, Stevens, Williams, D.H. Lawrence, Pound, Moore.  And Mina Loy.  And then later, Sterling Brown, Auden, Roethke, and especially Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell; also Gwendolyn Brooks, and Larkin.  I find it in Ammons, and Creeley, also Kenneth Koch, and Ginsberg.  Ted Hughes and Adrienne Rich, Gary Snyder and Derek Walcott.  Thomas McGrath and Robert Duncan.  Seamus Heaney and Roberts Pinsky & Hass.  Anne Winters and David Ferry.  I save the first for last, Thom Gunn; Thom Gunn, most.  This is my DNA, my rhythm book, my source and sorcery; these are the constellations of my night sky.