There’s a lot to be asked, and a lot to be said, about a poet’s first book. Poets can agonize over whether to go one way or another, whether to publish with a smaller press or hold out for a larger and more prestigious one, whether to play the contest game or go another way, whether to write a manuscript that’s got a “theme” or “angle” or “project” or instead to put together something that at once is more eclectic and more indicative of a “voice.” And readers learn a great deal about a poet from his or her first book, even though there are some long-established poets—like Seamus Heaney, W. S. Merwin, and Adrienne Rich, just to name a few—whose first books were not very reliable in suggesting what would come later on.
When we ask such questions, when we answer them, when we examine poets’ first books, we’re looking for the seeds or principles of the art, but as well many of us are trying to understand the book of poems, or more specifically the first book of poems, as a genre in itself, a genre whose realization and execution are conditioned by ever-shifting contexts.
But what about the first books poets’ read, or the first books they bought?
The first book of poems I read was surely a Mother Goose book—I’d still credit “The House That Jack Built” as both a favorite and a foundational poem—though that may not count as it’s a book of children’s poetry. The first “serious” or “adult” book of poems I read all the way through was probably, instead, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, the Johnson edition with 1776 (or so) poems, because it was one of the ones I could actually find and recognized in the stacks of the Gadsden Public Library.
The first book of poems I bought, however, with my own money, was Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems. (Incidentally, the first book of any kind I remember buying with my own money was Yeager, Chuck Yeager’s autobiography, which I got because my mom said I didn’t read enough and in 9th grade, I imagined I wanted to be a pilot.)
This was the Spring of 1990. I was a senior in high school on the school trip to England. The tours of the Lake Country, the visit to Shakespeare’s house, the stop in Poets Corner, all these amplified a certain romance about poetry, which I was starting to tinker with in moments of boredom in senior English—and though I was already slated to begin college in the Fall as a student of Architecture, I was interested in some way in the possibility of writing, and I was sure that learning to read more seriously, or at least more deliberately, was a test to see if that was possible. In a book shop in Covent Garden, I found this book, probably because I recognized the name, having read “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” in my textbook, and offered over my ?3.95.
The only poem in the whole book I could actually understand, besides “Do Not Go Gentle” was “The Conversation of Prayers,” which has a wicked crossing rhyme pattern and is, basically, a ghost story. The rest was almost impenetrable, and I had to work at it for years before I could understand it. I carried the book around, for the challenge of the poems, but also for the pictures in the section of notes added by editors Walford Davies and Ralph Maud, which included a still from Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou.
I carried it around until the binding was ready to give, until it was giving.
Now, I keep the book on my “high rotation” shelf, but I don’t carry it out of the house very much, for fear that it will fall apart. Though I’m not sure I’d count Thomas as the poet whose style or influence is most important to my writing, the fact that I bought this book with my own money remains an important and almost sacred moment in which, I like to think, even though I was supposed to become an architect, I was already thinking of going in another direction entirely.
Over the coming months I hope to share with you here the stories other poets may offer about the first books of poems they remember buying, and maybe these anecdotes will say something too about reading and writing poems.