Gamechangers (part 2): Poetry

Continuing in the series of books that changed me as a writer, reader, thinker, and person, here is a very small selection of poetry.

Before I get to the titles themselves, I have to confess a vexed relationship with poetry. When I wrote it (when I was young and didn't know I had no talent) there was a great deal of weird pressure to abandon prose for poetry from teachers and well-meaning folks who saw my writing "going somewhere." (You know where my writing goes? On napkins and paper scraps and thence into an actively disintegrating folder.) I don't know why this was the case; perhaps poetry was seen as a higher art form? Whatever the case, I did not become a poet and I've had a wariness of poetry ever since; to live with me it has to break past my defenses.

I have no idea where I found Gluck's poetry, but I remember insisting that I needed this book for Christmas. On receiving it, I curled up behind my radio with my back to the heater and got lost in its painful darkness. Gluck writes poetry like winter, like heartbreak furred over with frost, brokenness hidden in beautiful patterns and because she is so painful to read, I rarely go back to her!

Wright I discovered in a poetry class that was poorly designed, lacking a syllabus, and taught by an abomination of a poet who thought that sitting a small yellow box in the center of the table and commanding, "Be inspired!" was the way to spur great writing into being. Fortunately, there was a silver lining in the poems I stumbled over in our textbook while I was supposed to be being inspired... and those led me to the yellow-leaf mellow song of Littlefoot.

I found this book when I was working at the bookstore and shelving and it might be the depths of pathetic to admit it, but when I saw there was a misfit character named G, my mind flashed to all my Rush notes where Geddy was represented by just a "G" and I had to know more! I'm so glad that a single tiny bite of the alphabet can draw me in, because this has become one of my favorite works of all time for its complexity (ancient myth and modern life are layered), for its themes (identity, sexuality, locale, inspiration) and for Geryon, who breaks my heart every single time.