my pantheon
the writers who made me
A note about a few upcoming events this month and next:
First of all, this week (!) on November 9 at 8 p.m. Irish time (note time change; doors at 7:30) in the Classical Museum at UCD, Jeanne Tiehen will direct a staging of my work An Archaeology, for which I’m making costumes and props. In-person only; tickets are free but very limited. Email sasha.smith@ucd.ie to book.
On November 19 at 2 p.m. US Eastern I will give the first of two lectures as the Annulet Inaugural Linkages Lecturer. I will give a talk entitled “When you get someplace new, learn to read the landscape like an alphabet”. This talk will be broadcast online, for free. To register, please click here.
On November 21, I will read and talk with Majed Mujed and Hua Xi as part of the Trinity College Literature & Resistance Series, in the Trinity Long Room Hub. You can book a place here (in-person only).
On December 10 at 2 p.m. US Eastern I will give the second of the Linkages Lectures. I will give a talk entitled “On the line”. This talk will be broadcast online, for free. To register, please click here.
Once these are done, I am never doing anything in public again. For at least a month. But I’m sure by the start of the new year I will be full of vim again. If you’d like to have me to read or speak at your university, school, class or organization in 2024, please drop me a line.
For the first time in my adult life, I have bookshelves that aren’t made of bricks or crates and boards. And for the first time in almost four years, I also have all my books with me, out of boxes, and on those shelves.
Looking at my books, I realized how clearly they hold the history of my learning and thinking. I wasn’t able to name that fact until recently. Between 2017 and 2022, I moved house seven times. Two of those moves crossed the Atlantic. A lot of books flowed out of my possession across those years—books I often find myself searching for, only to conclude that I must have thought at one point that I’d never want to read that book again, or that I could easily get ahold of another copy if I did. (These are both fallacies.) In addition to the fact that moving = shedding books, most of the books I held onto across moves stayed in boxes between May of 2020 and August of 2023. When I finally was able to receive and then open those boxes this summer, it was like seeing myself in a mirror for the first time in a long time. Oh—this is why I am the kind of writer I am. This is the frame within which my work makes sense. This is where I get my understanding of the world and of how things fit together. Books are the thinking apparatus we carry outside of ourselves.
I thought I would make a list: books and poems and essays that have been central to my life as a person-in-the-world as well as to my thinking about writing and art, my teaching, and my ethical/religious formation. (These aren’t exclusive categories—most, probably all, of these texts cross them multiple times.) Some of these texts are recent encounters. Some of them have been with me for decades. Some fall in between. I find them beautiful, moving, stirring, intellectually and humanly rousing. They have given me ideas and given me language, taught me to make art and taught me to make a life.
As I made the list, I tried to think about categorizing the works on it—how could I make my list and its elements legible to a reader, one who didn’t know a work, or wanted to know what kind of book a given work was? But the categories I came up with didn’t make sense to me because they suggested things like genre (but that’s not why I read or how the books I love teach me) and theme (my least favorite way of categorizing). My books are shelved sometimes roughly by genre (poetry together—but plays and some teaching books are there with the poems—and art books together, because they are the same size) but more often by what I’d call texture and color, a synesthetic experience that underlies much of how I think and learn to think.
It feels unnatural to use external guides to divide the books and poems and essays I love by type, kind, subject, or ‘lesson’—because so many of these cross my artistic life, my teaching life, my life in the world (which are all one life, after all), and also because the books/poems/essays are whole things, irreducible to one facet, and finally because that latter way of categorizing—the ‘lesson’, or the ‘what-it’s-aboutness’ of a work—feels reductive to me. So I’m presenting them to you as they came to mind, together and in no particular order, and quite certainly with titles left off the list. Some links go to individual essays or poems online. Most go to an independent bookshop in the city where I grew up—if you find yourself on a different landmass, or near a different bookshop, I hope you will be able to find a copy there. WorldCat will also provide in most cases.
So here is my list of some (definitely not all of the) books, poems, and essays that have taught me to write, think, live, ask questions. If you are looking for something to read over the coming darker months (in the northern hemisphere), I hope it will suggest itself here. And in the comments, I’m more than happy to make recommendations if you’re looking for something specific, and to answer questions about what, why, when, and how these books entered and changed my writing and my life.
Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women and A Handbook of Disappointed Fate
Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes and In The Wake: On Blackness and Being
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (especially “Letter To My Nephew…”)
Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal
W.H. Auden, “A Summer Night”
Ntozake Shange, Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo and For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas
Natsume Soseki, The Three-Cornered World
Simone White, “Flibbertigibbet in a White Room / Competencies”
Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease To Understand the World
Carolyn Forché, Blue Hour
Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
Brian Friel, Translations
Kimiko Hahn, The Narrow Road to the Interior
Kiese Laymon, Heavy
Anne Truitt, Daybook
Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here
Lucille Clifton, The Book of Light
Li-Young Lee, Rose
W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
William Kentridge, with Rosalind C. Morris, That Which is Not Drawn
Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai
Corita Kent and Jan Steward, Learning by Heart
Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation
Hilton Als, White Girls
Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn
June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die and Affirmative Acts
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” and “Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord, If I Contend” and “Pied Beauty”
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text and A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress
Adrienne Rich, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics
Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry
Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness
Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat
Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
Laressa Dickey, Roam
James Elkins, Pictures and Tears
W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry
Juliana Spahr, The Transformation and This Connection of Everyone with Lungs
Hiromi Kawakami, The Nakano Thrift Shop
Thomas A. Clark, Farm by the Shore
Toni Morrison, Sula, The Bluest Eye, and Beloved
Gary Young, No Other Life
Lucy Sante, The Factory of Facts
Robert Hass, Summer Snow
Craig Santos Perez, from UNINCORPORATED TERRITORY [guma']
E. Ethelbert Miller, How We Sleep on the Nights We Don’t Make Love
I would also love to know what appears in your pantheon—the poem whose lines are always on your mind, the book you’ve read a dozen times, the text that taught you, the essay you will never come to the end of trying to understand—and why.
And finally—
Let all beings be free, safe, beloved, and well.
Stop the bombs. Swords into ploughshares. Free Palestine.
See you in a week.
Love this exercise! Your recommendation of Berger’s Ways of Seeing was wonderful, so I look forward to diving into more of your list. And Ah! The fallacy of giving away books that I “won’t want anymore.” How it plagues me. Even now that I’ve left academia I still want those books near.
My list has been shaped by a long focus on British and Victorian Studies, as well as translation, but a love of crafting (words and things) and medieval history (real and imagined) suffuses many of my influences. Also an abiding interest in travel and domesticity, and the condition of modernity.
As a young person, pre-college: Miss Rumphius; The Once and Future King (so much Arthuriana); Laura Ingalls Wilder; The Search for Delicious (which sadly didn’t make my heart sing as it once did when I re-read it recently, but it sparked a love for searching for the “right” word); The Phantom Tollbooth (which does make my heart sing, every time); “The Raven”; Alice’s adventures in wonderland & through the looking glass, especially the poetry; “The Devil and Daniel Webster” by Stephen Vincent Benet; and above all, the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit accompanied by the 1970s animated films. Peter Jackson’s films were also formative but the books and my dad’s love for them pervades it all.
As an adult: Middlemarch; William Morris’s socialist writings and News from Nowhere; Dombey & Son and David Copperfield; The Ties that Bound by Barbara Hanawalt; The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery reawakened my love of Japan and cracked my resistance to “hard” theory and philosophy; Marilynn’s Robinson’s essays, The Givenness of Things and What Are We Doing Here?; Bernadine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe; Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South; Umberto Eco, Experiences in Translation; Borges, “The Translators of the Thousand and One Nights”; Howl’s Moving Castle and the works of Diana Wynne Jones; A Secular Age by Charles Taylor; Waverley by Sir Walter Scott; Macbeth; Cræft by Alexander Langlands; The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin; “Prosaics” by Gary Saul Morson.
Wow! Great list, Éireann!
My own is much less impressive. The two writers who made me pay attention to what you can do with a sentence were P.G. Wodehouse and James Herriot. I started reading Herriot in fourth or fifth grade and just read and reread those books. I discovered Wodehouse in high school. I also loved LM Montgomery and Betty Smith. I imagine that without those four writers, I would be doing something else.
I sometimes think about what books my daughter will reach back toward. She really loves graphic novels.