AG [to class]: Remember we filled out some forms originally? It turns out that, out of 49 people that filled out the forms, 13 had read Emily Dickinson.. I’m sorry 24, 24 people..
If you’re interested, almost everybody had read Shakespeare. 40 out of 49, 39 people said they’d read Williams and Eliot, 38 said they’d read Whitman and Kerouac, next Poe, 37 people, next Corso, 36 people, next Snyder, 35 – Ezra Pound 33, had read Blake, 32, Chaucer and Burroughs neck and neck at 29 (it’s out of 49 people). 27 people had read Keats which was a little over half, but that’s pretty (good), 26 had read Rimbaud (that’s great!) , Shelley, 25, Wordsworth, Dickinson and Wallace Stevens tied together at 24 people, 22 people read Creeley, 20 people had read Whalen, 17 Charles Olson, 16 Frank O’Hara 15 Marianne Moore, and then Andrew Marvell and John Ashbery were tied with 15 readers each. Kenneth Koch and Hart Crane tied at 12 readers each, Apollinaire, Artaud, and John Dryden had 10 readers, Christopher Smart had been read by 9, Ed Dorn read by 6, and Thomas Wyatt (who I think was one of the standard great Silver Poets), 5 people had read out of 49. That’s really interesting, what everybody’s into. I think the next time I teach, I’ll start with Wyatt, Dorn, Smart, and just move up that way. It’d be a great way to begin.