The Lists That Started It All . . .

Way back in December of 2011 Kailana of The Written World had a crazy idea. It was originally called Read more: Blog More, but soon morphed into The Poetry Project. The intent was to encourage bloggers to read more poetry and then write about it.

In her initial post she offered two lists of poems. (a total of 131 poems) The Poetry Project challenge set for this month, is to revisit those lists. Seeing as my blog is ostensibly poetry, I decided to read, or reread all the poems on her lists for the challenge.

                   Don't laugh. I am not crazy! (My mom had me tested.) 

Many of the poems on her lists have already been featured here at The Hearth, and those which haven't soon will be . . . (as long as I can get a hold of them.) After posting for a few years, falling back on old favorites becomes too easy, and I am always looking for new inspiration.

I have reproduced her lists here and charted my progress (or lack thereof). Those I have read (or reread) by today are crossed out, while those I was unable to read for any reason remain as a continuing challenge.

As you can see, except for two that I was unable to find, I demolished the first list. (Yes, I know it's the short one.) For one reason and another, I've only dented the second list. I hope you won't think less of me. I'll repost when I actually complete the challenge. I promise.

As I find and read (With seven shelves of poetry books and anthologies, the odds are in my favor.) the poems I have not yet posted, I will put them up for you to enjoy as well. This challenge has, unfortunately, forced me to purchase more books of poetry. The sacrifices I willingly make for you, my loyal reader.

Jason's List of A Month's Worth of Poems:

1 - Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti
2 - Renascence by Edna St. Vincent Millay
3 - The Changeling by Charlotte Mew
4 - The Waste Land by T S Eliot
5 - If Not, Winter by Sappho (Haven't been able to get a hold of this one yet)
6 - Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barret Browning
7 - Daddy by Sylvia Plath
8 - The Second Coming by William Butler Years
9 - Poems for Akhmatova by Marina Tsvetaeva (Haven't found this one either)
10 - Orchard by H.D.
11 - Resume by Dorothy Parker
12 - The Lady of Shallot by Alfred Lord Tennyson
13 - To make a prairie by Emily Dickinson
14 - The Poison Tree by William Blake
15 - Batter My Heart (Holy Sonnet XIV) by John Donne
16 - High waving heather, 'neath stormy blasts bending by Emily Bronte
17 - For the Courtesan Ch'ing Lin by Wu Tsao
18 - The Wanderer by Anonymous
19 - Cinderella by Anne Sexton
20 - I Sing the Body Electric by Walt Whitman
21 - The Touch by Renee Vivien
22 - Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria by Langston Hughes
23 - Ozymandias by Percy Bryce Shelley
24 - As Kingfishers Catch Fire by Gerard Manley Hopkins
25 - A Ballad Maker by Padraic Colum
26 - There was a man of double deed by Anonymous
27 - Lunar Eclipse by Mai Yao-ch'en
28 - Donal Og by Lady Gregory
29 - Muse by Anna Akhmatova
30 - Sonnet #147 (My love is a fever) by William Shakespeare
31 - To One Hated by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Lu's List of 100 Poems:

1. “Please” by Yusef Komunyakaa
2. “At the Screen Door” by Yusef Komunyakaa
3. “The Sea is History” by Derek Walcott
4. “Cottonmouth Country” by Louise Glück
5. “All Hallows” by Louise Glück
6. “October (Section 1)” by Louise Glück
7. “At the Fishhouses” by Elizabeth Bishop
8. “First Death in Nova Scotia” by Elizabeth Bishop
9. “The Bat” by Claudia Emerson
10. “Daybook” by Claudia Emerson
11. “The Bat” by Ellen Bryant Voigt
12. “Tropics” by Ellen Bryant Voigt
13. “The Morning Again It Was In the Dusty Pines” by Mary Oliver
14. “The Kingfisher” by Mary Oliver
15. “Electrical Storm” by Mary Oliver
16. “Separation” by W. S. Merwin
17. “What the Body Told” by Rafael Campo
18. “Cultural Stakes: or, How to Learn English as a Second Language” by Kevin A. González
19. “To You” by Kevin A. González
20. “Hanging Fire” by Audre Lorde
21. “Never to Dream of Spiders” by Audre Lorde
22. “Dirge Without Music” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
23. “Hearing your words, and not a word among them” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
24. “Inland” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
25. “The Afterbirth, 1931” by Nikky Finney
26. “Aubade” by Philip Larkin
27. “I Have Started to Say” by Philip Larkin
28. “Flying at Night” by Ted Kooser
29. “Porch Swing in September” by Ted Kooser
30. “Daddy Long Legs” by Ted Kooser
31. “Artichoke” by Joseph Hutchinson
32. “Something About the Trees” by Linda Pastan
33. “Lines” by Ruth Stone
34. “Prayer for Sleep” by Cheryl Dumesnil
35. “Of the Parrat and other birds that can speake” by Nick Lantz
36. “i have found what you are like” by e. e. cummings
37. “the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls” by e. e. cummings
38. “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in” by e. e. cummings
39. “Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World” by Sherman Alexie
40. “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel” by Sherman Alexie
41. “Crow Song” by Margaret Atwood
42. “I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move” by Louise Erdrich
43. “Speaking of the Devil” by Leslie Adrienne Miller
44. “Cherries” by Leslie Adrienne Miller
45. “Blood” by Naomi Shihab Nye
46. “Last August Hours Before the Year 2000” by Naomi Shihab Nye
47. “Making a Fist” by Naomi Shihab Nye
48. “Hir” performed by Alysia Harris and Aysha El Shamayleh http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/07/01/748654/-Brave-New-Voices
49. “Pesto in August” by Katrina Vendenberg
50. “Op-Talk” by Rives (spoken word)
51. “Glaucoma” by Rives (spoken word)
52. “I Could Be A Poet” by Taylor Mali (spoken word)
53. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens
54. “To My Lover, Concerning the Yird-Swine” by Julianna Baggott (This poem is not online. I will feature it in Poetry Wednesday one day.)
55. “When At A Certain Party in NYC” by Erin Belieu
56. “Here and There” by Billy Collins
57. “Fishing on the Susquehanna in July” by Billy Collins
58. “There’s Been A Death in the Opposite House” by Emily Dickinson
59. “Natural Wonder” by Diane Ackerman
60. “Buckroe, After the Season, 1942” by Virginia Hamilton Adair
61. “Louisiana Line” by Betty Adcock
62. “Language of Love” by Rae Armantrout
63. “Dusk” by Rae Armantrout
64. “Mothers” by Nikki Giovanni
65. “Poem for a Lady Whose Voice I Like” by Nikki Giovanni
66. “Entrance into wood” by Pablo Neruda
67. “Love for this Book” by Pablo Neruda
68. “The Lark” by Gabriela Mistral
69. “Lost in the Hospital” by Rafael Campo
70. “Firefly Under the Tongue” by Coral Bracho
71. “Boy Breaking Glass” by Gwendolyn Brooks
72. “This Corner of the Western World” by Jennifer Chang
73. “Bankruptcy Hearing” by Dana Bisignani
74. “Requiem for a Nest” by Wanda Coleman
75. “sweet reader, flannelled and tulled” by Olena Kalytiak Davis
76. “Weighing In” by Rhina P. Espaillat
77. “Bilingual/Bilingüe” by Rhina P. Espaillat
78. “The Sign in My Father’s Hands” by Martín Espada
79. “Kaddish” by Allen Ginsberg
80. “After Fifty Years” by William Faulkner
81. “Ways of Talking” by Ha Jin
82. “Chernobyl Year” by Jehanne Dubrow
83. “Visiting My Gravesite: Talbott Churchyard, West Virginia” by Irene McKinney
84. “Our Lady of Perpetual Loss” by Deborah A. Miranda
85. “Love Poem to a Butch Woman” by Deborah A. Miranda
86. “Out of the rolling ocean the crowd” by Walt Whitman
87. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” by Walt Whitman
88. “Sometimes with One I Love” by Walt Whitman
89. “Clarinet” by Terrance Hayes
90. “Planetarium” by Adrienne Rich
91. “What Kind of Times Are These” by Adrienne Rich
92. “Genesis: The Resilient Colors” by Roberto Tejada
93. “As from a Quiver of Arrows” by Carl Phillips
94. “This Can’t Be” by Bruce Smith
95. “A Certain Kind of Eden” by Kay Ryan
96. “Paired Things” by Kay Ryan
97. “Flounder” by Natasha Trethewey
98. “Pilgrimage” by Natasha Trethewey
99. “Providence” by Natasha Trethewey
100. “Blackberrying” by Sylvia Plath