Outside poetry readings, in workshops, on evening walks, at shows, and over text, we started exchanging favorite poems, articulations of taste and invitations to grow a shared field for conversation.

Eventually, a simple question emerged: Which individual poems most shaped the way we read and write poetry? Which poems played a transformative role in our personal development, and continue to inform our conversations with writers on and off the page?

Intending to fashion definitive Top Ten lists (impossible), we first gathered too many poems, and the conversation grew to include questions of personal literary canonicity, and of divergences from an established academic canon. Our catalogs of personally resonant poetry force proximity between millennia, movements, forms, and schools of study in a way that calls for capacious, socially engaged reading.

Considering the list itself as text, we are guided in part by Fred Moten’s call to see text as a “social space”: “people, things, are meeting there and interacting, rubbing off on one another, brushing against one another—and you enter into that” (Moten and Harney, 108).^[1] Being given access to a friend’s top ten list occasions an exciting opportunity to engage with the intertextuality at the very heart of their work.

In the piece below, we share our early impressions of each other’s work and approaches to each other’s lists, select a poem from the list that we feel teaches us something about the other’s work, and conclude with responses to each other’s analyses.

 

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Scout:

 

​​My introduction to Kiril began with his poem “on the shelf.” Written in August 2020, it captures a rupture: in it, voices collide, characters are introduced and cast off, eyes extend past the head. In the last stanza, signaling a shift outward, the speaker grimly declares, “viva san rocco and the mini-golf course of his body.” I was struck by the gallows humor: the minimization of a saint’s body, riddled with contagion, into a field of play. 

The poem is accompanied by an interview: when asked about the poetry scene, Kiril expresses a desire to engage in a community that feels slightly out of reach—a feeling he attributes to lockdown. He ends with, “Bay Area poets reading this should feel free to hit me up.” Reading the interview years later, I wondered if the sentiment held true.  

Over the following months, Kiril and I struck up a friendship—chatting over workshops, after shows, at readings and bars. Kiril initiated the idea that we could share our respective histories with poetry through a top ten list—a guide through our personal canon.

Kiril sends me their top ten: it includes the opening monologue from Richard III, June Jordan, Allen Ginsberg, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Natalie Diaz. Stein receives an honorable mention. It was the poem “Persimmons”  by Li-Young Lee that captured my attention.

It begins with a slap—the speaker’s punishment for failing to identify the difference between persimmons and precision. The narrative that follows is a painstaking account of the speaker’s English acquisition. The language is spare, allowing emotional heft to sit in simple images, single words, and the lapses in between. “I teach her Chinese./ Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I’ve forgotten./Naked:   I’ve forgotten./Ni, wo:   you and me./I part her legs,/remember to tell her/she is beautiful as the moon.” 

Lapses in language aren’t the only kind of loss the poem is concerned with: along with words in Chinese, objects are shed, eyesight is forfeit. Persimmons form the only constant, a kind of object permanence, as Lee encounters them constantly. By the last stanza, Lee’s father, now blind, describes the feel of the act of painting persimmons, saying some things never leave a person. The struggles of language become a stand-in for the speaker’s relational struggles—as a student in a punishing educational system, as a lover, and a child of immigrants.

Kiril’s writing recalls the expression getting schooled, a phrase that encompasses fighting, learning, correcting, punishment and play. His poems are tongue-in-cheek, a combination of rhetorical strategizing of sound, quiet insight, and verbal play. As sound carries its own logic, it runs the risk of superseding other kinds of meaning; but when done well it interlocks with the poem’s reasoning, creating a mutually reinforcing structure. Kiril’s poems are built as such. In one dashed-off draft, he mirrors each sentence of the first stanza in the second, forming a circuitous meditation on balance, falling, stasis. I’ve quoted the first half below:

 

Chaotic Little Insomnia Poem Draft Thing
 
The nonsense of romance, writing
on dependence. I have not one
original room. Cleaning, I felt joy,
and immersed, clowning, for now.
Enough reaching for what is not
yet realized. Build, and build
to the light of the sun. So you’re meant
as if thought. Something, today, fell,
and a voice I loved emerged, measuring
mind, unnatured. I add a measured try.
Let bed’s bad gravity stop. Resist is
is within rest, is wakes the other word
from susurrus. Or one might say, within
resist is is, the rest is rest. What is
sleep’s calling? I only know it costs me
silence. If you want to fall, feel
your weight; the same if you want to balance.
But I can’t make the making music sleep.

 

“Resist is/is within rest, is wakes the other word/from susurrus. Or one might say, within/resist is is, the rest is rest.” The word resist is thumbed apart, like segments of an orange, an action that generates new insight. I’ll bring this poem to him later, mentioning a throughline in his work. He will have forgotten about it entirely.

Kiril first encountered “Persimmons” years ago, in his copy of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. We’re in their apartment looking for the book. He pushes aside a pile of clothes obstructing the bookcase, and some shirts fall over the side of the stairs.

Recently, Kiril sent me a poem that ends “down here there is little light/ but in what little there is, did I mention/ that my ass looks amazing?” The line contains the gallows humor of that first poem I read, but with a self-insert, funny and brazen in its insistence on being seen.

Reading into Kiril’s writing is an imperfect practice; there’s no single favorite poem of his that serves as a legend to his style. Kiril’s poetry is a shifting composite, constantly upending expectations. I sit in these favorite poems like I sat in his dining room; really, a table in his kitchen, covered in scraps of paper covered in his writing. It is a pleasure to sit amidst them, and rifle though, where occasionally the shape of something emerges. 

 

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Kiril:

 

Preparing for this piece, I asked Scout to send me a series of poems I had only heard at readings, never read. Listening to Scout read always leaves me grinning, partly because they are plain funny (“Cars have a rich interior life/The desires of cars must be studied further”) and partly because their poems dance from subject to subject across apparently tenuous connections. Listening as part of an audience, this is an approach that can often make me feel lost. But though the poem quoted above leaps from deadnames and Blundstones to the Duchess of Sussex to an artist making sex toys out of bread, Scout is so matter-of-fact about their kinship, and so colloquial in tone, that I do feel guided through the actual order of their mind, seemingly disparate ideas layered purposefully into meaningful sculpture. From the get, I have been hard-pressed to explain to myself why I think Scout is successful in this, where I have felt others fail.

Also from the get, it felt clear that the poets my work was conversant with were not who Scout was necromancing, given our differing approaches to rhythm, sound, and the line. So when one day I decided to try and list out the poems that had most influenced me, I mentioned it to Scout, and was glad when they took up the challenge.

Before I even processed the poems and names on the list, there was one thing I loved about what they sent me: Scout had, at their own behest, included a column for recordings of the poets’ readings. This alone felt illuminating, seeming to affirm that I was right to note the way Scout read their work aloud, and that the intertextuality at play in their work is not just writing guiding writing, but speaking guiding speaking, the poets’ very voices part and parcel of the intertext.

The premise of our project allows for expansive reimagining of canonicity, so, approaching Scout’s list for the first time, I wanted to see how their list hewed to or diverged from a traditional canon. There were two poems I had read before, one by Plath, one by O’Hara—these I set aside, because I could have guessed them myself. Some were poets I knew but poems I hadn’t read—Catullus, Glück, Brooks, Berrigan. The rest I didn’t know at all, which at a glance made them look farthest from canon.

One of these was Seidel’s “Kill Poem”, which I read first, because it was first on the list—noteworthy because Scout has conveniently arranged the poems in chronological order of encounter. I like the poem’s irregular movement between free verse—though sometimes with rhymed end-words—and metered lines, as in the iambic pentameter couplet that first truly grabs my attention, which begins the second stanza: “We follow blindly, clad in coats of pink,/A beast whose nature is to run and stink.”

Sitting across from Scout at my kitchen table, I copied the poem out by hand, and they asked what I learned doing it. I hesitated, then told them it makes me confront each word more precisely, and makes the poem a little mine. This felt true, but vague. Scout started to copy out Li-Young Lee’s “Persimmons”, only to abandon the project, deciding they would rather use the in-browser find function to analyze the frequency of words’ recurrence in the poem. “I want the data,” they said, ironic and earnest.

The data-driven approach was not one I had considered, but it suddenly made sense for Seidel’s poem. I found out “kill” appears, in different usages, twenty times. “Disappearing scut,” which first appears in reference to the short tail of a deer, is later employed metatextually (“I write disappearing scut.”) in a way that seems to playfully insult his own text. “Hunt” brings up five results, including the first word, Huntsman, which refers to an upscale clothing store on Savile Row. Seidel, I learned, was born into wealth, and is often portrayed as a dandy of the Upper West Side. Some revile him for this, and for his plain portrayal of privilege. Indeed, besides his patronage of bespoke London tailors, “Kill Poem” is frank about his Ducati motorcycle, hunts with bugles and servants, and time in the Hamptons and Paris. But these casual references to signs of privilege are haunted from the end of the first stanza: “London once seemed the epitome of no regrets/And the old excellence one used to know/Of the chased-down fox bleeding its stink across the snow.”

Talking recently about the Catullus poem on their list, Scout noted a category of poetry that approaches the object of the speaker’s desire through some object that has caught their object’s attention. Over the course of reading the poems Scout selected, the sideways approach has started to feel emblematic of their own work; not to obfuscate or deflect, but rather to guide, and to inform. Seidel, too, comes to his point slowly and initially obliquely, wandering back and forth between the old world and the new in a way that itself feels intertextual (“Winter, spring, Baghdad, fall,/Venery is written all/Over me like a rash,/Hair and the gash,/But also the Lehrer NewsHour and a wood fire and Bach.”). He spirals, too, through multiple rounds of reflection on the violence of the hunt before coming to a point, summoning three epoch-making political assassinations of the 1960s—JFK, RFK, and MLK—and pinning them to the wall.

In Scout’s work, I see Seidel’s influence in strong images, referential specificity, a willingness to trust the reader to bridge apparent gaps. “Kill Poem” ends more neatly than Scout would, I think, putting a little bow on a parallel between mounted game and political assassination, handing conclusions to the reader as a key to the rest of the poem, should they reread it. But the neatness of that ending is belied by the circuitous path towards it, offering something sculptural, something worth sitting with.

 

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Scout:

 

On Seidel: he was the first poet who taught me you could proclaim your own villainy. I like that he’s such a material girl. This is not the first time someone’s compared me to him—and while I wish I was the ghost of Catullus resurrected, I think it’s a fair read of my poem and his. I once gave my poem-self a silver convertible to match Seidel’s Ducati racer.

Recently, I saw Vi Khi Nao read at Prairie Lights. During the Q&A, in response to a question about being a multilingual writer, she says (and I am paraphrasing): “I spend a lot of time encoding my writing, I really try to make a cipher, like a second language to the poem. And my readers are so smart. They look at the page and the puzzle falls away. They read with such clarity, like they are reading a recipe for banana bread.”^[2] There’s a book by Robert Bly (another villain) called Leaping Poetry. In it, he encourages a leap from the conscious to the unconscious, that poets should jump most erratically from image to image, or line to line. I like to picture drawing points around some unrecoverable center. It is from point to point that my poems make their leaps, and, I think, generate their energy. The center is all that stuff that cannot be captured in language, an essential truth poetry fumbles for.

 

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Kiril:

 

“Persimmons” feels like a poem greater than the sum of its parts: reading it from beginning to end, I am invariably shivering by the final stanza. I have tended not to analyze it, cheerful about the mystery, but Scout’s note on lapses of language does catch my attention, because where I have always thought of this poem as one of surprisingly simple language, in fact its simplicity is at odds with the very subject of the piece, a child outside his mother tongue, learning “precision” of language, only for the final lines to celebrate what memory holds that language struggles to: scent, texture, weight.

Having lived a long time between languages, I often feel imprecise when I write. In poetry, at least, carrying me through the attendant frustration is Pinsky’s assertion that “poetry is a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art,” taking the poet’s body, and their audience’s bodies, as the medium. This returns me to my childhood lessons from Dada, Shakespeare, and Stein, that sound contributes meaning to a syllable, and can even take a word beyond the meaning it arrived with. Here I can’t help but see a neat place to conclude, a way my work approaches Scout’s, sound and rhythm my way of fumbling for Scout’s “unrecoverable center”, both of us circling what language doesn’t hold.

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Scout’s Top Ten List

Poem	Author	Recording	Note
Kill Poem	Frederick Seidel (1936-)	Seidel reads	found Ooga Booga in some bin somewhere (?), read it, was obsessed
Lady Lazarus	Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)	Plath reads	in high school i was sad, read the bell jar, maybe collected works of sylvia plath
Sparrow, the Special Delight of my Girl	Catullus (84 BC – 54 BC) trans David Mulroy		had a friend named Andres in college, in a band called Lotion, who would send me Catullus poems because he thought they had shock value.	“Very little is objectively known of the life of Gaius Valerius Catullus.”
Purple Bathing Suit	Louise Glück (1943-2023)		part of a class on the odyssey i think association with my friend Margaret who studied under Louise Glück. we all managed a garden together so this poem felt especially apt
Riot	Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)	Brooks reads	joshua clover taught this poem in a course on “love poetry” which has always blown my mind
Gilded Age (pg. 30)	Joshua Clover (1962-)	Clover reads a totally different thing	he’s just my favorite person
A Step Away from Them	Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
Some Other Deaths of Bas Jan Ader	Dana Ward (1949-)	Ward reads	reading starts at 7:00 minutes	read this in Ted Dodson’s Long Poem class
Spring Noise and All- File C166	David Antin (1932-2016)	Antin reads	spoken extemporaneously	read this in Ted Dodson’s Long Poem class– particularly struck by his bit about california seasons being one intersected cone of light. i think abt that always
The Sonnets: XLI	Ted Berrigan (1934-1983)	Berrigan reads a diff sonnet	my teacher Courtney Bush referenced ted berrigan sonnets as an example of a poem in which each line is its own unit of meaning. she also has a book in which she attempts to make the sonnet “think for her”

Kiril’s Top Ten List

Poem	Poet	Years Living	Recording	Notes
“Now is the winter of our discontent…”	William Shakespeare	1564-1616		Vivid memory sitting on my mom’s bed, age 9, in Seoul, with my mom walking me through this speech, pointing out elements of rhythm, sound, and meaning
Footnote to Howl	Allen Ginsberg	1926-1997	Ginsberg reads
To the Fair Clorinda	Aphra Behn	1640-1689
To R.B.	Gerard Manley Hopkins	1844-1889		His last poem; R.B. is the poet Robert Bridges, who was his executor and the one who republished his work thirty years after Hopkins’ death
I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies	June Jordan	1936-2002	Jordan reads	Dedicated to Agostinho Neto
Meditation at Lagunitas	Robert Hass	1941-	Hass reads
Persimmons	Li-Young Lee	1957-	Some Youtuber reads	One of the most recently written poems in my high school’s chronological poetry anthology; one that expanded my idea of what might go in a canon, and one that always baffles me with its ability to invoke raw emotion in me with apparently simple language
I Watch Her Eat the Apple	Natalie Diaz	1978-	Diaz reads
I Passed Three Girls Killing a Goat	Miriam Bird Greenberg	1980-
Matarose Tags G-Dragon on the 7	Rosebud Ben-Oni	?

 

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^[1] Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (London: Minor Compositions, 2013), 108.

^[2] Vi Khi Nao, in conversation at Prairie Lights Books, Iowa City, August 13, 2024.