SoFloPoJo
  • SFPJ Poetry #28 - Feb 23
  • SFPJ Flash #28 - Feb 23
  • JUST SAY GAY
  • Calendar
  • Contributors
    • Contributors 2016-19
  • Essays
  • Interviews
    • Interviews 2020-21
    • Interviews 2016-19
  • Reviews
    • Reviews 2020-21
    • Reviews 2016-19
  • Special Section
    • A BRIEF HISTORY OF SOUTH FLORIDA POETRY
    • Adam Day
    • Album of Fences
    • Favorite Poems
    • Follow the Dancer
    • In Memoriam, John Arndt
    • Hargitai Humanism and
    • Kiss & Tell
    • Lennon McCartney
    • Neighborhood of Make-Believe
    • PBPF Ekphrastic Contest
    • Rystar
    • Surfside
    • Visit to the Rio Grande
    • WHAT FICTION ARE YOU READING?
    • SNAPS
    • SoFloPoJo Nominations >
      • Best of the Net Nominations
  • Video
    • Florida Center for the Book
    • MIAMI BOOK FAIR Interviews
    • MIAMI BOOK FAIR POEMS
    • Palm Beach Poetry Festival
    • SFPJ Video
  • Visual Arts
    • Visual Arts 2020-21
    • Visual Arts 2016-19
  • Archives
    • SFPJ Poetry #27 - NOV 22
    • FLASH #27 - Nov 22
    • POETRY #26 - AUG 22
    • FLASH #26 - AUG 22
    • POETRY #25 - May 22
    • FLASH #25 - May 22
    • POETRY #24 - Feb 22
    • FLASH #24 - FEB 22
    • POETRY #23 - NOV 21
    • FLASH #23 - NOV 21
    • ISSUE 22 POETRY AUG 21 >
      • ISSUE 22 POETRY PG 2 AUG 21
    • ISSUE 22 FLASH AUG 21
    • ISSUE 21 POETRY MAY 2021
    • ISSUE 21 FLASH May 2021
    • ISSUE 20 FEB 2021
    • ISSUE 19 NOV 2020
    • ISSUE 18 AUG 2020
    • Issue 18 Pt. 2 of AUG 2020
    • ISSUE 17 MAY 2020
    • ISSUE 16 FEB 2020
    • ISSUE 15 NOV 2019
    • ISSUE 14 AUG 2019
    • ISSUE 13 MAY 2019
    • ISSUE 12 FEB 2019
    • ISSUE 11 NOV 2018
    • ISSUE 10 AUG 2018
    • ISSUE 9 MAY 2018
    • ISSUE 8 FEB 2018
    • ISSUE 7 NOV 2017
    • ISSUE 6 AUG 2017
    • ISSUE 5 MAY 2017
    • ISSUE 4 FEB 2017 >
      • Kostelanetz Visual Poem
    • ISSUE 3 NOV 2016
    • ISSUE 2 AUG 2016
    • ISSUE 1 MAY 2016
  • MASTHEAD
  • Submission Guidelines
  • Tip Jar
  • What is an Epoem?
  • WITCHERY
  • SFPJ Poetry #28 - Feb 23
  • SFPJ Flash #28 - Feb 23
  • JUST SAY GAY
  • Calendar
  • Contributors
    • Contributors 2016-19
  • Essays
  • Interviews
    • Interviews 2020-21
    • Interviews 2016-19
  • Reviews
    • Reviews 2020-21
    • Reviews 2016-19
  • Special Section
    • A BRIEF HISTORY OF SOUTH FLORIDA POETRY
    • Adam Day
    • Album of Fences
    • Favorite Poems
    • Follow the Dancer
    • In Memoriam, John Arndt
    • Hargitai Humanism and
    • Kiss & Tell
    • Lennon McCartney
    • Neighborhood of Make-Believe
    • PBPF Ekphrastic Contest
    • Rystar
    • Surfside
    • Visit to the Rio Grande
    • WHAT FICTION ARE YOU READING?
    • SNAPS
    • SoFloPoJo Nominations >
      • Best of the Net Nominations
  • Video
    • Florida Center for the Book
    • MIAMI BOOK FAIR Interviews
    • MIAMI BOOK FAIR POEMS
    • Palm Beach Poetry Festival
    • SFPJ Video
  • Visual Arts
    • Visual Arts 2020-21
    • Visual Arts 2016-19
  • Archives
    • SFPJ Poetry #27 - NOV 22
    • FLASH #27 - Nov 22
    • POETRY #26 - AUG 22
    • FLASH #26 - AUG 22
    • POETRY #25 - May 22
    • FLASH #25 - May 22
    • POETRY #24 - Feb 22
    • FLASH #24 - FEB 22
    • POETRY #23 - NOV 21
    • FLASH #23 - NOV 21
    • ISSUE 22 POETRY AUG 21 >
      • ISSUE 22 POETRY PG 2 AUG 21
    • ISSUE 22 FLASH AUG 21
    • ISSUE 21 POETRY MAY 2021
    • ISSUE 21 FLASH May 2021
    • ISSUE 20 FEB 2021
    • ISSUE 19 NOV 2020
    • ISSUE 18 AUG 2020
    • Issue 18 Pt. 2 of AUG 2020
    • ISSUE 17 MAY 2020
    • ISSUE 16 FEB 2020
    • ISSUE 15 NOV 2019
    • ISSUE 14 AUG 2019
    • ISSUE 13 MAY 2019
    • ISSUE 12 FEB 2019
    • ISSUE 11 NOV 2018
    • ISSUE 10 AUG 2018
    • ISSUE 9 MAY 2018
    • ISSUE 8 FEB 2018
    • ISSUE 7 NOV 2017
    • ISSUE 6 AUG 2017
    • ISSUE 5 MAY 2017
    • ISSUE 4 FEB 2017 >
      • Kostelanetz Visual Poem
    • ISSUE 3 NOV 2016
    • ISSUE 2 AUG 2016
    • ISSUE 1 MAY 2016
  • MASTHEAD
  • Submission Guidelines
  • Tip Jar
  • What is an Epoem?
  • WITCHERY
  SoFloPoJo
Picture
SoFloPoJo Contents:  Essays  *  Interviews  *  Reviews  *  Video  *  Visual Arts  *  SUBMIT  * Archives

Special Section

Favorite Poems? What's on Your List?

We asked poets to send us their list of the "Top 10 Poems of All Time." 
We know they would choose different poems on any given day.
Perhaps our friend Silvia Curbelo expressed it best--


Well, this was a tough one. I started by making a list of my 10 favorite poets (which in itself was incredibly hard to narrow down), and then tried to figure out a favorite poem from each. But that didn’t work at all. Along the way I discovered while I might love and admire a poet’s entire oeuvre, it was often the case there would not be ONE poem by that poet I could call a top-10 favorite. But it was a start, and I came up with four poems from the list that way. Interestingly, I also quickly discovered the inverse is true. There are many many poems I love written by people whose books and overall work I generally don’t find that compelling. 
So… in the end, this is what floated to the top of my head. I was dying to include a few runners up, but resisted the temptation.


We have selected a poem from each list—hover over the poems to see the link—for you to read should you care to.
Silvia Curbelo

Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías by Federico García Lorca
To Go to Lvov by Adam Zagajewski
Lentes (Lenses) by Delfin Prats
Tear It Down by Jack Gilbert
Trowbridge Street by Octavio Paz
The River of Bees by W.S. Merwin
Refugees by Beckian Fritz Goldberg
My President by Danez Smith
Our Dust by C. D. Wight
Without by Donald Hall



Denise Duhamel

Shooter by Jan Beatty 
Rape by Jane Cortez   
A Small Needful Fact by Ross Gay
The Closet by Bill Knott
Facts About the Moon by Dorianne Laux
The Race by Sharon Olds
Ringing the Bells by Ann Sexton
Incendiary Art by Patricia Smith
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower by Dylan Thomas
The Past by David Trinidad

​

Jim Daniels

Feeling Fucked Up by Etheridge Knight
Did I Miss Anything? by Tom Wayman
Gate A-4 by Naomi Shihab Nye
At the Reading by John Woods
Bless Their Hearts by Richard Newman
Ode to My Socks by Pablo Neruda
Selecting a Reader by Ted Kooser
The Plum Trees by Mary Oliver
The Republic of Poetry by Martin Espada
Jesus on a Tortilla by Lee Upton

​

Ilhem Issaoui

Rain Song by Badr Shakir Al-sayyab   
I shall not live in vain by Emily Dickinson
The Wasteland by T.S Eliot 
Down by the Salley Gardens by William Butler Yeats
Autobiographia Literaria by Frank O'hara
The Moon by Joseph Fasano
Style by Charles Bukowski
Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People are Dying by Noor Hindi 
I lied and said I was Busy by Brittin Oakman
The Melting Star Anatoly Molotov

​

Peter Meinke

An impossible list for a poet and teacher, but this evening these burn brightly in my memory—in my heart and brain.  Tomorrow there certainly will be others, but let’s go with these.

Sonnet XVIII, Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day? by William Shakespeare 
The Sun Rising by John Donne  
The Tyger by William Blake 
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth 
Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats   
Because I Could Not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson   
Lullaby by W. H. Auden   
The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats  
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot   
We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks



Fleda Brown

The Windhover by Gerald Manly Hopkins
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
I Heard a Fly Buzz by Emily Dickinson
Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold
Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
Let Me Not to the Marriage by William Shakespeare
The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Easter 1916 by W.B. Yeats
The Oven Bird by Robert Frost​

​

Arturo Desimone

Poem of the Deep Song (Poema del Cante Jondo) by Federico García Lorca
Shir HaShirim (Song of Songs) for Belle-Kiss, by/from Shlomo Ha-Melech
Nerve-snowfall of Angst by César Vallejo
Daddy by Sylvia Plath
Poetry is a Destructive Force by Wallace Stevens
Preface to a 21 vol. Suicide Note by LeRoi Jones
The Night of Santiago by Leonard Cohen
Lamentation for the turtledove of Butch Buchanan, by Sidney West
The Age by Osip Mandelstam
Amazing Eyes of Rita by Mahmoud Darwish


​

Julie Marie Wade

Splittings by Adrienne Rich
wishes for sons by Lucille Clifton
Bay Poem from Berkeley by Sandra Cisneros
I Go Back to May 1937 by Sharon Olds
Persimmons by Li-Young Lee
In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver
Ellen West by Frank Bidart
Deepstep, Come Shining by C.D. Wright
When I Was a Lesbian by Denise Duhamel 
Sleeping with the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen

​

Michael Hathaway

if there are any heavens by E.E. Cummings
Domination of Black by Wallace Stevens
His Necessary Darkness by Nancy Sullivan
Renascence by Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Bells by Edgar Allen Poe
Four Little Foxes by Lew Sarett
Wuthering Heights by Sylvia Plath
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note by  Leroi Jones
Interlude III by Karl Shapiro
Taught Me Purple by Evelyn Tooley Hunt

​

Molly Peacock

Concerning a Young Woman by Sappho, 700-323 BC 
Adonis in the Underworld by Praxilla, 700-323 BC
Epitaph on a Bride's Tomb by Erinna, 323-31 BC
Wulf and Edwacer (Anglo Saxon), by Anonymous,10th Century
To the Tune Cutting a Flowering Plum Branch by Li Ch'ing Chao, 10th century
I Picked an Azalea by Izumi Shikibu, 10th century
Idleness by Lu Yu, 12th century
Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare, 16th century
Whoso List to Hunt by Thomas Wyatt, 16th century 
 Love III by George Herbert, 17th century

​
Sean Sexton

Loveliest of Trees by A E Houseman
The Harvest Bow by Seamus Heaney
Beauty by BH Fairchild
Anthem (A kind of preamble to his longer poem, “Grass”) by Buck Ramsey
Lilacs In the Dooryard Blooming by Walt Whitman
Asphodel that Greeny Flower by William Carlos Williams
The entire Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnell
Dearest M— by Hayden Carruth

White Egrets by Derek Walcott 
Preludes by TS Eliot



Lynne Viti

Sonnet  49 by William Shakespeare
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning by John Donne
Spring and Fall: to a Young Child by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Oven Bird or Design or Birches by Robert Frost
Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens
Church Going by Philiip Larkin
We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks
When all the Others Were Away at Mass by Seamus Heaney 
Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge by Martin Espada
Conflation by Andrea Cohen



Wandajune Bishop-Towle

The Odyssey by Homer
As the sweet apple blushes by Sappho
Odi et Amo (I love and I hate) by Catullus 
A charm invests a face by Dickinson 
Gato que brincas na rua" (Cat, you tumble down the street) by Fernando Pessoa
L'union Libre" (Free Union) by Andre Breton
To Autumn by Keats
Song of Myself by Whitman
To My Dear and Loving Husband by Anne Bradstreet
And senryu writer Dee Evetts



Jeff Santosuosso

Rime of the Ancient Mariner - by Coleridge 
The Deer Lay Down Their Bones  by Robinson Jeffers
The Seventh by Attila Jozsef
My Childhood Home I See Again - Abraham Lincoln (yes, that A Lincoln)
(so many by)  Edna St. Vincent Millay
Alicante Lullaby by Sylvia Plath 
The Raven by EA Poe
Self-Portrait as Mae West One-Liner by Paisley Rekdal
Chicago by Carl Sandberg
Track by Tomas Transtromer



Gianna Russo

A Bird Came Down the Walk by Emily Dickinson
Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
Elegy for Jane by Theodore Roetke
The Truth the Dead Know by Anne Sexton
Facing It by Yusef Komunyakaa
Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Gluck
Incident by Natasha Trethewey
When My Brother was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay



Bruce Weber

Woman From Starlake by Lenny DellaRocca
Naima by Steve Dalachinsjy
Tomatoes by Steven Dobyns
Il Pleut by Guilaume Apollonaire
Almost any of the later poems of Ryuichi Tamura
Crowds by Charles Baudelaire
Drunken Morning by Rimbaud
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d byWalt Whitman
Visions of Johanna by Bob Dylan
Asphodel, That Greeny Flower by William Carlos Williams,
Requiem by Anna Akmatova



Caron Andregg

Be advised, there will be inevitable conflation between "Greatest"  and “Favorite-est.”

Whoso List to Hunt by Thomas Wyatt  
Paradise Lost by John Milton  
To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell 
The Vanity of Human Wishes by Samuel Johnson  
Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats     
Orpheus Euridyce. Hermes by Rainer Maria Rilke
I Knew a Woman by Theodore Roethke   
Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas     
Woodchucks by Maxine Kumin*     

Study for the World's Body by David St. John   

*Definitely a "favorite-est."


Steve Klepetar

The Spring Song from the prologue to The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Sonnet 130 My Mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun by Shakespeare
Sailing to Byzantium by Yeats
Wild Nights by Emily Dickinson
Riddle by Sylvia Plath
The World is too much with us by William Wordsworth
The Twelve Dancing Princesses by Anne Sexton
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
Saturday’s Child by Countee Cullen
The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens



Catherine Mazodier

Digging by  Seamus Heaney 
Le bateau ivre by Rimbaud 
One Art by  Elizabeth Bishop
Atemwende by Paul Celan
Advice to Myself by Adrienne Rich
The Waking by Theodore Roethke
This Be the Verse by Phillip Larkin
Eclats d'Août by Philippe Jaccottet
Als das Kind Kind war by Peter Handke
Snow by Archibald MacNeice



Melissa Fite Johnson

I Go Back to May 1937 by Sharon Olds
Daystar by Rita Dove
Loading a Boar by David Lee
Gate A-4 by Naomi Shihab Nye
A Small Needful Fact by Ross Gay
25th High School Reunion by Linda Pastan
Tea by Leila Chatti
moonchild by Lucille Clifton
For Eleanor Boylan Talking with God by Anne Sexton
The Yellow Dot by Robert Bly



Kathleen Hellen

Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke
Spring and Fall by Gerald Manly Hopkins
jasper texas 1998 by Lucille Clifton
The Tomb At Akr Çaar by  Ezra Pound
A Winter Night by Tomas Tranströmer
The Night of the Shirts by W.S. Merwin
The Idea of Ancestry by Etheridge Knight
Under One Small Star by  Wislawa Szymborka
Romance Sonámbulo by Federico Garcia Lorca
The Anactoria Poemby Sappho



Angela Torres

A Brief for the Defense by Jack Gilbert
First Thanksgiving by  Sharon Olds
When I Am Asked by Lisel Mueller
Poetry by Pablo Neruda
Persimmons by Li Young Lee
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt by Ross Gay
When You Are Old by W.B. Yeats
The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry
Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem by Matthew Olzmann



Yaddyra Peralta

The Bight by Elizabeth Bishop
This Morning I Pray for My Enemies by Joy Harjo
Wigphrastic by Terrance Hayes 
Samurai Song by Robert Pinsky
Candelabra with Heads by Nicole Sealey
Ode to Eating Pomegranates in Brooklyn by Patrick Rosal
My Music by Campbell McGrath
Rain Effect by Mary Ruefle 
Ending the Estrangement by Ross Gay
Our Lady of Suyapa by Roy G. Guzman



John King

The Manor Garden by Sylvia Plath
Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk by Charles Simic
Pegasus by Joy Priest
Ourselves or Nothing by Carolyn Forché
Looking for the Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
Layover by Ericka Dawson
Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins
The Rape Joke by Patricia Lockwood
Poem to the Reader by Sharon Olds
Deaf Girl Playing by James Tate



David Trinidad

At the Fishhouses by Elizabeth Bishop
I watched the Moon around the House by Emily Dickinson
G-9 by Tim Dlugos,
On My Way Out I Passed Over You and the Verrazano Bridge by Audre Lorde
Ode to the Dead Millionaire (trans. Ilan Stavans) by Pablo Neruda,
A Step Away from Them by Frank O’Hara
The Moon and the Yew Tree by Sylvia Plath
This Dark Apartment by James Schuyler
Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound by Anne Sexton
The Pink Locust by William Carlos Williams



Yvonne Zipter

The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop
In Each Other's Arms, Lightning by Minnie Bruce Pratt
Morning Song by Sylvia Plath
Do You Love Me? by Robert Wrigley
History Lesson by Natasha Trethewey
When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving by Reginald Dwayne Betts
My Life by Somebody Else by Mark Strand
The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
Bullet Points by Jericho Brown
The Kingfisher by Mary Oliver
​

​
Linda Pastan

I am NOT going to list the ten top poems "of all time" but ten of "my favorite" poems, at the moment. 

73rd sonnet, That time of year… by Shakespeare
Jerusalem, by William Blake
Spring and Fall by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold
The Cricket sang and set the sun... by Emily Dickinson
Musee Des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden
The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
Heroic Simile by Robert Hass




David Kirby

The Metamorphoses, Book 4 ("The Transformation of Cadmus”) by Ovid
The Inferno, Canto I ("The Dark Wood of Error”) by Dante
Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats
Be Drunk by Baudelaire
The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
Failing and Falling by Jack Gilbert
What I Want by George Bilgere
Fubar by Lucia Perillo
Mambo Cadillac by Barbara Hamby



Babara Hamby

Metamorphoses by Ovid
The Song of Solomon
Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats
Hamlet's "What a Piece of Work is Man" speech or the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
Wild Nights by Emily Dickinson
A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud
Bee Poems by Sylvia Plath
Dear Lovely Death by Langston Hughes
Ode to the Maggot by Yusef Komunyakaa


Traci Brimhall

I definitely can't say these are of all time! But when I started to handwrite poems in a journal, these are some of the first:


Robert Frost's "Directive"
Brigit Pegeen Kelly's "Song"
John Donne's "Holy Sonnet XIV"
Emily Dickinson's #405
Frederico Garcia Lorca's "Ghazal of Dark Death"
Dylan Thomas's "Poem in October"
Rainer Maria Rilke's Third Duino Elegy
Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay"
Galway Kinnel's "Little Sleeps'-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight"
Adrienne Rich "Diving Into the Wreck"


Shiva Bhusal

Boast of Quietness by Jorge Luis Borges
If by Rudyard Kipling
The Second Coming by W.B Yeats
If you forget me by Pablo Neruda
Paagal, a Nepali poem by Laxmi Prasad Devkota
Mero Chowk, a Nepali poem by Bhupi Sherchan 
The end and the beginning by Wisława Szymborska
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
The Genius of the Crowd by Charles Bukowski 
No man is an island by John Donne 



Ann Pedone

Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth 
A by Louis Zukofsky 
Sea Rose by H. D.
The Rain by Robert Creeley
Canto XIII by Ezra Pound
The Albertine Workout by Anne Carson
I’m Reading Your Mind by Jorie Graham
Dream by Eileen Myles
46 by Sappho
37 by Catullus



Brendan Walsh

Ode To Kanye West In Two Parts, Ending In A Chain Of Mothers Rising From The River by Hanif Abdurraqib
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
The City in Which I Love You by Li-Young Lee 
Standing on Earth, Among the Cows by Malena Morling
How to Like It by Stephen Dobyns
Otherwise by Jane Kenyon
Late Fragment by Raymond Carver
Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass
Questions of Travel by Elizabeth Bishop
A Blessing by James Wright



Alison Stone

The Duino Elegies by Rilke 
Snapshots of a Daughter in Law by Adrienne Rich
Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart 
A Dedication to Hunger by Louise Gluck 
Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath
After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes by Emily Dickinson 
The Art of Losing by Elizabeth Bishop 
Motown Crown by Patricia Smith
Brutal Imagination by Cornelius Eady
Not Waving But Drowning by Stevie Smith





Lola Haskins

Sonnet on his Blindness by Milton
Batter my Heart by John Donne
Because I could not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson
Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight by Vachel Lindsay
The Second Coming by WB Yeats  
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
My Last Duchess by Robert Browning
The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes
The Ballad of William Sycamore by Stephen Vincent Benet





Jennifer Martelli

Poem by Elizabeth Bishop
Carrowmore by Lucie Brock-Broido
Victoria Chang—died unwillingly on by Victoria Chang
jasper texas 1998 by Lucille Clifton
It Was the Animals by Natalie Diaz
Low Tide, Late August by Marie Howe
Kitchen by Laura Jensen
Dothead by Amit Majmudar
The Bee Meeting or The Hanging Man by Sylvia Plath
Gods by Anne Sexton





Bruce Bond

At the Fishhouses by Elizabeth Bishop
The Peacock Room by Robert Hayden
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven by Wallace Stevens
Trilogy by H.D.
For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell
Midsummerby Derek Walcott
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery
The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley
The Last One by W.S. Merwin
Saint Judas by James Wright



Doug Ramspeck

Averno by Louise Glück 
Song by Brigit Pegeen Kelly 
The History of the American West by Kevin Prufer 
summer, somewhere by Danez Smith
Winter Stars by Larry Levis 
Scheherazade by Richard Siken 
Religion by Robert Wrigley 
Bowl of Lilacs by Henri Cole 
Telemachus by Ocean Vuong 
A Story About the Body by Robert Hass  


Steve Kronen

To Autumn by John Keats
There's a Certain Slant of Light by Emily Dickinson 
Desert Places by Robert Frost  
A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy's Day by John Donne
The Moose by Elizabeth Bishop
This Anxious Pleasing Being by Richard Wilbur
Psalm and Lament by Donald Justice
A Birthday Poem by Anthony Hecht
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
To Postumus - ii.14  by Horace (the David Ferry translation)



Holly Iglesias 

New Year’s Eve Letter to Friends by Jean Follain
Signs for Travelers by David Clewell
St. Kevin and the Blackbird by Seamus Heaney
The Gift by Li-Young Lee
When Giving Is All We Have by Alberto Ríos
Para Hablar con los Muertos (To Talk with the Dead) by Jorge Teillier
Sorrow’s Flower by Christian Wiman
The Box This Comes In by C.D. Wright
A Cradle Song by William Butler Yeats
A Flame by Adam Zagajewski



Stephen Gibson

By W. H. Auden:

Musée des Beaux Arts
In Memory of W.B. Yeats
In Praise of Limestone
The Shield of Achilles
September 1, 1939
Woods
Volcanoes (from the Russian of Akhmadulina)
By John Keats: Ode to a Nightingale  & 
Ode on a Grecian Urn
By William Butler Yeats: 
Sailing to Byzantium



Peter Grandbois                                                                                                                             

The Envoy by Jane Hirshfield  
Keeping Things Whole by Mark Strand
The Infinities by Joanna Klink
Like an Angel by Nin Andrews
Animism by Joshua McKinney
Dancing by Robert Hass*
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
Daybreak by Galway Kinnel
Seen from Above by Wislawa Szymborska
The Same Inside by Anna Stir

* Click here to see Robert Hass read "Dancing" during the SoFloPoJo Miami Book Fair interview


Ernesto Cepeda

Gate A-4 by Naomi Shiab Nye’
She Being Brand by e.e. cummings 
The Journey Has Always Been by Jimmy Santiago Baca
Mexican American Sonnet by Iliana Rocha
What Do Women Want by Kim Adonnizio
Nashville by Tiana Clark 
Half Mexican by Juan Felipe Herrera
The Wild Divine by Ada Limón 
Drought by Sandra Cisneros
Anthem with Emerald and Gold by Jessica Abughattas



Virgil Suarez

Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich
Death of the Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrel
Howl by Alen Ginsburg
Warnings by Nicanor Parra
Walking Around by Pablo Neruda
O Taste & See by Denise Levertov
We Be Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks
The Colonel by Carolyn Forche
Adultery  by James Dickey
The Raven by Edgar A. Poe



Terese Svoboda

Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich
Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold
Musée des Beaux Arts by Auden
Meeting the British, Madoc: A Mystery by Paul Muldoon
Sun-up by Lola Ridge
Crucifixion by Langston Hughes
black herman’s last asrah levitation at magic city, Atlanta 2010 by Latasha Nevada Diggs
MDCCCL by Caroline Knox
Red by Anne Carson
I Love to Singa by Paul Beatty



Amy Poague

Famous by Naomi Shihab Nye
The Gate by Marie Howe
Aerialists by Mary Oliver
Fragment Thirty-Six by H.D. 
Alla Tha's All Right, but by June Jordan
To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall by Kim Addonizio
won't you celebrate with me by Lucille Clifton
Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars) by Muriel Rukeyser
In the Morning, Before Anything Bad Happens by Molly Brodak
To Be Posted on 21st Street, Between Eye and Pennsylvania by Minnie Bruce Pratt



Carmine Di Biase

Hero and Leander by Christopher Marlowe
The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray
The Deserted Village by Oliver Goldsmith
Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking by Walt Whitman
Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
Night Mail by W. H. Auden
Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen
Summoned by Bells by John Betjeman



Alan Catlin

Haydn’s Skull Returning by David Chorlton
The Colonel by Carolyn Forche
Howl by Allen Ginsberg
A Valedictory: Forbidding Mourning by John Donne
The Incantation of Frieda K by Kate Braverman
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner- by Randall Jarrell
Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London by Dylan Thomas
A Bummer by Michael Casey
Adonais: An Elegy on the death of John Keats by Percy B. Shelley
Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen



Sarah White

Safe in their alabaster chambers by Emily Dickinson
I'll tell you how the sun rose by Emily Dickinson
The American Sublime by Wallace Stevens
As Kingfishers catch fire by G.M. Hopkins
In Beauty Bright by Gerald Stern
The Farewel (for Philip Levine) by Gerald Stern
 Filling Station by Elizabeth Bishop
The Good Morrow by John Donne
Things Shouldn't be So Hard by Kay Ryan
Zone by Guillaume Appolonaire



Hillary Sideris

Musee des Beaux Arts by WH Auden
Dream Song 14 by John Berryman
American Sonnet 61 and American Sonnet 70 by Wanda Coleman
Dockery & Son by Philip Larkin
The Rain Streaked Avenues of Central Queens by D. Nurske 
The Dead Remember Brooklyn by D. Nurkse

My Weariness of Epic Proportions by Charles Simic
Prodigy by Charles Simic

Listen, Daisy, When I'm Dead, Although by Fernando Pessoa



Laurie Byro

Traveling Through the Dark and A ritual to read to one another by William Stafford
 Making a Fist by Naomi Nye
 From a Window by Christian Wiman
 The Lammas Hireling by Ian Duhig
 A Blessing by James Wright
 Daddy by Sylvia Plath
 The Tempest by William Shakespeare
 The Love Song of J. A . Prufrock by TS Eliot 
The River Merchant’s Wife by Ezra Pound



Jesse Glass

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell  by William Blake
The Mental Traveler  by William Blake
The Grey Monk  by William Blake
The Book of Urizen  byWilliam Blake
Milton by William Blake
Jerusalem by William Blake
The Four Zoas by William Blake
Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart
In Parentheses by David Jones
Thunder, The Perfect Mind by Anon.



Norman “Buzz” Minnick

The Merchant's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer,
Sonnet 23 (As an unperfect actor on the stage) by William Shakespeare
Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats
Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
76 (Exultation is the Going…) by Emily Dickinson
We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Second Coming by W. B. Yeats
Let American Be America Again by Langston Hughes
High Windows by Philip Larkin
Feeling Fucked Up by Etheridge Knight


Some SoFloPoJo Editors List Their picks for the Top 10 Poems of All Time
Jennifer Greenberg

By Fire by Sharon Olds
For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash by Joy Harjo
So Penseroso by Ogden Nash
How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This by Hanif Abdurraqib
Listen by e e cummings
The Cows on Killing Day by Les Murray
The Sounds of the Universe Coming in my Window by Jack Kerouac 
Ode to My Socks by Pablo Neruda 
Duende by Tracy K Smith
Berck-Plage by Sylvia Plath 



Nicole Tallman

Her Kind by Anne Sexton
Tulips by Sylvia Plath
Les roses sont entrées by Renee Vivien
Chanson d’automne by Paul Verlaine
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
What the Living Do by Marie Howe
Je t’aime by Paul Eluard
Rain by Jack Gilbert 
Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda
The Snowman by Wallace  Stevens


​

Susannah Simpson

Sonnet 17 by PabloNeruda
Now Is The Time by Hafiz
The Panther by Rainer Maria Rilke
Eagle Poem by Joy Harjo
The Guest House by Rumi
Otherwise by Jane Kenyon
Ah, Ah by Joy Harjo
Wild Swans at Coole by W.B. Yeats
The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry


​

Barbra Nightingale

The Colonel by Carolyn Forche
Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
The Man with the Blue Guitar by Wallace Stevens
The Idea of Order in Key West by Wallace Stevens
Tonight I Write the Saddest Lines by Pablo Neruda
Daddy by Sylvia Plath
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
Song of the Shirt by Thomas Hood
Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich


​

Gary Kay

Dream Song #5  by John Berryman
I Knew a Woman by Theodore Roethke
Emperor of Ice Cream by Wallace Stevens        
The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens
Leda and the Swan  by W.B. Yeats
The Art of Losing  by Elizabeth Bishop
My Last Duchess by Robert Browning
Harlot's House by Oscar Wilde
Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy
Aunt Jennifer's Tigers by Adrienne Rich 


​

Meryl Stratford

Sestina by Elizabeth Bishop: 
note, passed to superman by Lucille Clifton 
My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun by Emily Dickinson 
Rant by Diane di Prima 
Fragment Thirty-six  by H.D
The Arrival of the Bee Box by Sylvia Plath
Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich 
Not Waving, but Drowning  by Stevie Smith
In Praise of My Sister by Wislawa Szymborska
We Shall Not Escape Hell  by Marina Tsvetaeva    
Stacie Kiner

The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
Ash Wednesday by T.S. Eliot
From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning by John Donne
The Sensual World by Louise Gluck
Daffodils by Ted Hughes
For My Lover Returning to His Wife by Anne Sexton
What Work Is by Philip Levine
I Am On My Way to Oklahoma to Bury the Man I Nearly Left My Husband For  by Sandra Cisneros



​Lenny DellaRocca

Soldier Asleep at the Tomb by Gjertrud Schnackenberg
Black Mare by Lynda Hull
Mistral by John Koethe
Prayer for Sunlight and Hunger by Traci Brimhall
The Sheep Child by James Dickey
High Windows by Philip Larkin
Howl by Allen Ginsberg
Bulimia by Denise Duhamel
Waiting for the Barbarians by Constantine P. Cafavy
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Goodnight by Dylan Thomas



Caridad Moro Gronliere

The River Merchant’s Wife by Li Po (Translated by Pound)
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
Daffodils by Ted Hughes
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
Double Image by Anne Sexton
Warming Her Pearls by Carol Ann Duffy
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
To The Harbormaster  by Frank O’Hara



Michael Mackin O'Mara

Dinosaurs in the Hood by Danez Smith
Have You Prayed by Li Young Lee
Thinking of the Lost World by Randall Jarrell
When the Burning Begins by Patricia Smith
When I Have Fears by John Keats
Magdalene – The Seven Devils by Marie Howe
Order No 2 to the Army of the Arts by Vladimir Mayakovsky
Harmonie Du Soir by Charles Baudelaire
Fugue of Death by Paul Celan
Of the Dark Doves by Federico Garcia Lorca
 






Patricia Whiting

The Second Coming  by W.B. Yeats
Easter 1916 by W.B. Yeats
Under Ben Bulben by W.B. Yeats
The Waste Land  by T.S. Eliot
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock  by T.S. Eliot
Digging by Seamus Heaney
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a  Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
A Book Full of Pictures by Charles Simic   
The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins   
No Man Is an Island by John Donne



Don Burns

The Second Coming  by W. B. Yeats
After a Journey by Thomas Hardy
Ithaca by C. P. Cavafy
Deception Island by W. S. Merwin
The Laughing Thrush by W. S. Merwin
The Lost Land by Eavan Boland
Any and all by by Matsuo Basho
The Gift by Li-Young Lee
Poetry Reading by Anna Swir
Sonnet 116 (Let me not...) by William Shakespeare