The Norton anthology of poetry

I began reading this book as a detour to fill in some missing breadth between volumes of Jerome Rothenberg's Poems for the Millennium. I was waiting tables and apartment living with my girlfriend and two cats in Seattle. That was seven years ago. Today I finished the final page in my house while my wife, the same girlfriend from before, held our baby daughter and watched Beetlejuice with our son and two dogs. The cats are around but less interested in television than the aquarium. I'm not saying seven years of Milton and Auden and Hart Crane caused a life compounded with living beings but I'm not saying it didn't. This procreant era of my life happened with these poems and without them. Long stretches of not reading were as significant as the moments I would dive back in, remembering myself when I had forgotten crucial goals.

My copy is worn - reinforced with packing tape along the spine and cloudy white on the front and back pages where my hands held while I soaked in a bath; I do my best reading in water. So I lived through all these poems and I hardly remember them now but I didn't read them to have read them. My only takeaway is that I chose to live with poetry and I still like the choice. What I loved about this volume was how it generated a great to-read list of poets.