• Charles “Bad Boy” Baudelaire, mad druggie of 19th century Paris, the discoverer of Poe... Who else would write Flowers of Evil?
  
  
• Geoffrey “Jolly Forth” Chaucer... yup, he started it: English, of the oldye variety. Canterbury Tales crosses geography, sociology and literary genres -- and bawdy?! Read Wife of Bath!
  
  
• Emily “The Virgin” Dickinson, or as Susan Howe says, “My Emily Dickinson.” As Edward Hirsch pointed out, she bound the poems into fascicles... even as a private silence she was a book person.
  
  
• Li “Wiseguy” Po, out of the T’ang Dynasty, the maestro himself. Author of 100,000 poems, all of them better than anything you’ll ever write, he died jumping into the moon (late, drunk, in canoe, caught sight of the moon’s refection, plop).
  
  
• Edgar “Nevermore” Allan Poe, was not yet three when his mother died. He was in the room, with his little brother, when she died. He spent over two days with the corpse before someone else showed up, had an intimate relationship with death throughout his life. Catch Dr. John reading the little-known story, “Bereneice,” on Hal Willner’s unsung genius Closed on Account of Rabies: Poems & Tales of EAPoe CD.
  
  
• Ezra “The Genius” Pound, genius, anti-Semite, author of Cantos, Translations, Personae and “Jefferson & Mussolini.” He single-handedly forced Modernism into vaudeville USA, spun language on ear, cut words to bone, edited T.S. Eliot till he said “Truth.”

Use the voting form below to vote two of these remaining six off. This week we'll be accepting votes until 6 pm Pacific time on Thursday, April 26, at which time the votes will be tallied & two more poets will say bye bye.

Bob Holman & Margy Snyder