I feel like I’ve done a pretty decent job of listening to my grad school supervisors since my initial resistance resulted in such a thorough facing. (Yeah, as in, I got faced. I got faced badly.) When they’ve told me, “You should read x,” I’ve dutifully gone out and found a copy of x so I’d have the benefit of reading x while I was under their tutelage. I mean, that seems simple enough– if they’re charged about a piece of work and think it will help me, I’m going to trust that impulse. Sometimes, I’ve finished the book and felt differently, but even that has occasioned some spirited conversation (and some conversation I wish had been more spirited, but you can only bait someone so far in a letter).

But I made one boo-boo– Mary Leader suggested James Wright, and though I’d gone ahead and bought his Above the River: The Collected Poems, I flipped through his early iambic work and got a little intimidated.

No, “a little intimidated” isn’t quite strong enough. I said in a recent letter, “I was too chickenshit to read it.” That’s the truth. Wright’s early formalism scared me.

Here’s what I read that semester. (Yes, there’s an implied “instead” at the end of that sentence.)

• Amichai, Yehuda. Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai.
• Dennis, Carl. Practical Gods.
  
• Eliot, T. S. Selected Poems.
  
• Gilbert, Jack. Refusing Heaven.
• Glück, Louise. The First Four Books of Poems.
• Grotz, Jennifer. Cusp.
• Halliday, Mark. Jab.
• Herbert, Zbigniew. Selected Poems.
• Kelly, Brigit Pegeen. Song.
  
• Levine, Philip. What Work Is.
  
• Neruda, Pablo. Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda.
• Pope, Alexander. The Works of Alexander Pope.
• Ryan, Kay. Elephant Rocks.
  
• Simic, Charles. Unending Blues.
  
• Syzmborksa, Wisława. Poems New and Collected 1957-1997.
  
• Wilbur, Richard. Collected Poems 1943-2004.
  
• Yakich, Mark. Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross.
  
• Zawacki, Andrew. By Reason of Breakings.

I can’t knock any of that stuff (though the Neruda is the Belitt translation, which I think is a little wretched), but seriously, I had an advisor excited about James Wright and I chickened out in favor of Andrew Zawacki?  One of the folks in that reading list is also a member of my graduate faculty, and I don’t have a hard time seeing her, upon finding out that I skipped Wright, smacking me silly and saying, “Why did you read my book when you could have read Wright?  You idiot!”  (In fairness, she is so sweet, I half-expect that she would thank me for reading her book, though I don’t know if that would be before or after the smacking.)

I don’t think Mary Leader is trolling the Internet, looking at her former students’ blogs, but in case she’s Googling herself someday and see this: Mary, I am sorry I was so stupid that I passed on the chance to read James Wright with you.

(And, on the off chance that Andrew Zawacki is trolling the Internet looking for his own name: Andrew, I really did enjoy your book, dude, and I hope you are not offended by the above. It’s just… James frikkin’ Wright… augh.)