MFA Reading List

This is my final book list for my upcoming oral defense. As you can see, my book list is far different from the list provided by our two faculty poets. I can tell which professor chose certain books based on previous classes (i.e. the fact that I’ve been assigned Mary Ruefle books THREE times in two years…). 

Thank goodness I get to design my own reading list apart from this one because quite honestly, I expected a little bit more from the faculty in terms of breadth and diversity.

Books Chosen by Faculty

• Rae Armantrout, Versed or Next Life
• John Ashbery, Collected and/or Self-Portrait
• Frank Bidart In the Western Night
• Anne Carson, Plainwater, Glass, Irony & God, or Autobiography of Red
• Norman Dubie, The Mercy Seat: Collected and New Poems, 1967-2000
• Russell Edson, The Tunnel
• Louise Gluck, Collected
• Louise Gluck, Proofs & Theories (essays)
• Jorie Graham, Collected
• Robert Hass, The Apple Trees at Olema: New & Selected Poems
• Lyn Hejinian, My Life
• Donald Justice, Collected
• Yusef Komunyakaa, Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems
• W. S. Merwin, Migration or The Lice
• Paul Muldoon The Annals of Chile or Poems 1968-1998
• Alice Notley Grave of Light
• Carl Phillips Quiver of Arrows
• Claudia Rankine Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
• Mary Ruefle Madness, Rack, & Honey (essays)
• Cole Swenson Goest or Gravesend
• C. K. Williams, Collected
• Charles Wright, Negative Blue

Books Chosen by Me

• Charles Bukowski's Pleasures of the Damned                                        
•  Raymond Carver's A New Path to the Waterfall
•  Rebecca Wolff, Catherine Wagner, and Alicia Ostriker’s Not for Mothers Only 
•  Catherine Wagner's My New Job
•  Michael Robbin's Alien VS Predator
•  John Berryman's The Dream Songs
• William Carlos Williams' Spring and All
• E.E. Cummings Selection of Poems
• Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town
• Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
• Joe Wenderoth’s It Is If I Speak
• Rachel Zucker Mothers
• Rebecca Wolff’s King
• Rachel Zucker’s The Bad Wife Handbook
• Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poem of the Deep Song
• Sharon Olds Satan Says