One of my poetic fantasies is to sit in a cozy coffee house and listen to poets (living and dead) read from their work. As a bonus, the organizer of this fantasy reading has asked me to create a list of 10 poets that I would like to choose the poets for the reading. After getting over the OMG-who-should-I-choose attack, my list would look like this:

Walt Whitman

Mary Oliver

Rumi

Gwendolyn Brooks

William Butler Yeats

Thomas Hardy

Jane Kenyon

Naomi Shihab Nye

John Updike

Stanley Kunitz

(I would have included William Shakespeare, of course, but I heard that he’s booked up with fantasy readings. However, his people told my people that they would get back to me when he had an opening.)

Note: if you asked me for a list next week or next month, it would be different. Except for Walt Whitman. He is my poetic north star.