A NEW LIST!

As I've said probably too often, I was born with a compulsion to make lists in my head, in my poetry, in my conversation, etc. but the minute I came to after my brain operation in November of 2009, and ever since, I can't put a list of more than two items together in my head without giving up or having to consult my computer or bookshelves.

In conversation with a friend recently about how I can fall in love with a writer's words on the page so intensely I feel a deep need to read every word that writer has ever written, and still reread them, I started listing authors I felt that way about. Here's a much expanded version of what I came up with (with help from my bookshelves and limiting it to pre-my generation (unless already deceased)):

Dante
Goethe
Laurence Sterne
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson
Theodore Dreiser
Rainer Maria Rilke
James Joyce
William Carlos Williams
Blaise Cendrars
Edith Wharton
Zora Neale Hurston
Jean Toomer
Jean Rhys
William Saroyan
Martha Gelhorn
Muriel Rukeyser
Samuel Beckett
Henry Miller
James Baldwin
Jack Kerouac
Gary Snyder
Frank O'Hara
James Schuyler
John Ashbery
Diane di Prima
Michael McClure
Hubert Selby Jr.
Henry Roth
Joanne Kyger
Bobbie Louise Hawkins
Lee Lally
Ted Berrigan
Joe Brainard
Etheridge Knight
Lorenzo Thomas
Roberto Bolano
Tim Dlugos