Monday, September 15, 2008

"COLLECTED" COUPLETS

A hot and humid couple of days around here. Made it a little difficult to fall back asleep after being wokeN up by the usual weekend bar closing arguments and laughter. So, still mindful of my recent post on Joanne Kyger’s collected poems, it occurred to me how many “collected” works I’ve read and dug and continue to re-read and get much pleasure from. Couldn’t come up with an alphabet list, so used couplets to remember them, matching books with something in common, some obvious, some maybe not:

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF FRANK O’HARA
COLLECTED POEMS, JAMES SCHUYLER

THE WORKS OF WALT WHITMAN, VOLUME I THE COLLECTED POETRY
THE WORKS OF WALT WHITMAN, VOLUME II THE COLLECTED PROSE

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, VOLUME I 1909-1939
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, VOLUME II 1939-1962

THE COLLECTED SHORT STORIES, JEAN RHYS
THE COLLECTED NOVELS, JEAN RHYS

ABOUT NOW: COLLECTED POEMS, JOANNE KYGER
RING OF BONE: COLLECTED POEMS 1950-1971, LEW WELCH

THE COMPLETE SHORT PROSE 1929-1989, SAMUEL BECKETT
ALL: THE COLLECTED SHORTER POEMS, LUIS ZUKOFSKY

THE FARMERS’ DAUGHTERS, THE COLLECTED STORIES OF WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
THE COMPLETE STORIES, ZORA NEALE HURSTON

THE COMPLETE POETRY OF JOHN DONNE
THE PROSE AND POETRY OF WILLIAM BLAKE

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF TED BERRIGAN
COLLECTED POEMS, TOM RAWORTH

NEW COLLECTED POEMS, GEORGE OPPEN
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF ROBERT CREELEY

COLLECTED POEMS OF W. B. YEATS
COLLECTED POEMS, T. S. ELIOT

COMPLETE NOVELS OF JANE AUSTEN
COMPLETE NOVELS AND STORIES, KATE CHOPIN

THE COMPLETE POEMS, STEPHEN CRANE
COLLECTED POEMS, EMILY DICKINSON

THE COLLECTED STORIES, HENRY JAMES
THE COLLECTED SHORT STORIES OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

COLLECTED POEMS, DYLAN THOMAS
THE COMPLETE PLAYS, BRENDAN BEHAN

POEMS 1918-1936, VOLUME I OF THE COMPLETE POEMS OF CHARLES REZNIKOFF
COLLECTED POEMS, Ed Cox

Did I leave anybody out? Definitely. But had to stop somewhere.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great list. But do you differentiate between collected and new and selected?

Lally said...

Yep. Just "collected"—which usually means all known published work, at least, or all known published and unpublished work or what the author (or editor) decides is all the work that should be considered the complete works (e.g. Whitman wrote a lot more prose than is in his collected prose, because he was a newspaperman for so long etc.—his early books, formula novels etc. are left off because not the work of the writer and poet he became and so on)
"Selected" or "new and selected" is a whole different deal, a matter of taste about what's the "best" etc. and usually nowhere near all inclusive.