Stop! Look! Listen! Dawn MacDonald's Book Recommendation
The literary lives of us rural folks can be overly shaped by whatever happened to be available at our local library, or that one random anthology we found in a "free books" pile. I was extremely fortunate to have that anthology be The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, edited by Donald Allen. What a revelation! Kenneth Koch's sense of play, Frank O'Hara's "I do this I do that" poems, the whole New York School in general -- the Beats -- it just blew my head off. I had no idea you could do this stuff.