Too Difficult?

Perhaps my readership has a patchy history with poetry. I just consulted google analytics to confirm I wasn't the only person reading myself, and I'm not. So I'm revising my assignment. How about ANY kind of writing?

Here's a draft of my own poetry-that-fed-me chronology chart... Beginning with Wordsworth when I was, what, eight maybe? and going up to present, with Booth...

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud - William Wordsworth
Ode to the Storm - Pablo Neruda
Grits Ain't Groceries (first verse) - Little Willie John(?)
Butterflies Under Persimmon - Mark Jarman
Bucolic (eek, the moss one, which number?) - Maurice Manning
Wild Geese - Mary Oliver
From Blossoms - Li-Young Lee
The Peace of Wild Things - Wendell Berry
First Lesson - Philip Booth

Of course, to include stories, nonfiction, the whole gamut, hm, that would be a very different list. I'll have to think about that.

Novels that fed me... the books seem strange to me, now. Some I have reread and haven't appreciated so much the second time. But which ones have fed me, at least once?

Miss Rumphius - Barbara Cooney
Anne of Green Gables - Lucy Maud Montgomery
Narcissus and Goldmund - Herman Hesse
To the Lighthouse - Viginia Woolf
The Summer Book - Tove Jansson

There -- the slimmest list possible, representing childhood, youth, high school, college, and post-college.

Nonfiction.... this is the hardest list. But of the dozens petitioning me for a spot, one stands out head and shoulders above the rest: The Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing.

So there. There's mine.