I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
While I shared many of the same emotions Bill describes, in no way did my experience ever degenerate into the grimness I find in his book - I didn't have to live with Don, and I think that made a big big difference.
He was certainly in a confused state. I used to go and visit him in Callan Park. They were really - to me they were the best poets those two writing in those days but it wasn't very encouraging because, well, they weren't getting far were they?
The more I read my poems, the more I find out about them. I still read them with the same passion I felt when I wrote them as a young man.
I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.
I can't stand Anne Tyler books, but I gobble them up. It's like Updike - I can't stand him either, but I read everything he writes.
I loved to read, still do, and it seemed that the writing was a result of the love of books and reading and libraries.
Dobie was so well written and so ahead of its time.
I read everything by Ian McEwan, he is so elegant. I love reading anything about Shakespeare, too. He is my first love. If I had a time machine, I would be hanging out with him.
Fred Moten is a poet I really love because he changes who is telling the poem all the time.
I read a lot of nineteenth-century French poetry. And Irish poetry from the ninth century on.