A LIST!

As some of you know, I've been a list maker all my life. It was one of the strongest aspects of my personality and the way my mind worked. If I met you for the first time at a party I'd probably ask you to name your ten favorite movies or five favorite books or something like that.

I made lists in my head all day long and fell asleep making them. My poetry and other writing was full of them. Litanies, triplets, top ten top twelve etc. lists. Trying to fall asleep at night I'd make them difficult enough to strain my mind so that before I got to the end I'd be asleep. Like favorite movies with one syllable titles from A to Z, etc.

Then I had that brain operation in November of 2009 and as soon as I came out of the anesthesia it was apparent to me that a lot in my brain had changed, including the compulsion to constantly be making lists. So whereas "lists" was the top category in this blog archive up until then, after that I only made one or two, and those I had to use outside sources to compile because the reality remains that even when I feel like trying to come up with a list I grow bored of the whole idea after I come up with only one or two items.

So several weeks ago I started compiling on my phone some rhymed couplets (at least their last syllables rhyme in my mind) of favorite writers who don't write in English or American. I used my bookshelves to do it. I'm not done, still have some names with none I can find to rhyme with, but decided to post what I have just to include a list on this bog for 2013:

Goethe
Rilke

Murasaki
Nemirovsky

Dostoevsky
Mayakovsky

Cendrars
Cesar

Cervantes
Borges

Lorca
Porchia

Castillo
Bolano

Rimbuad
Desnos

Villon
Ponge

Brecht
Hikmet

Dante
Genet

Mishima
Kundera

Sappho
Plato

Joubert
Baudelaire

Confucius
Catullus

Augustine
Celine

Novalis
Frisch

Buddha
Neruda

Virgil
Roussel

Rumi
Martory

Turgenev
Jimenez

Mann
Brinkmann

Boccaccio
Michaux

Kafka
Parra

Artaud
Vallejo

Lao Tzu
Camus

Homer
Kabir

St. John of the Cross
Propertius

Lagerkvist
Seferis