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Each year I teach a course called “One Hundred Poems.” Many students take it, I suspect, because they see the title and think, “How hard could it be to read 100 poems over a semester? Heck, it couldn’t be that hard to read a 100 poems over a weekend.” It’s designed for non-majors, for people who have committed to another course of study, neuroscience say, or philosophy, and the course always enrolls many students from Oberlin’s great conservatory, opera singers, and bassoon players, and composers of electronic music. Some students are first-years, others just about to graduate. Some are Turkish, some Taiwanese, some are from Cleveland or Silver Spring. In short, the course is composed of a jumble of students who take the course for a jumble of reasons, and the syllabus itself is a jumble of poems. That syllabus changes every year, and it expands and contracts too, so I should probably call the course “100 or so poems,” or better yet, “Actually, Nowhere Near 100 Poems, if We’re Being Honest.”

I choose the poems we discuss according to two criteria. The poem should be in English. The poem should become a friend for life. How do I know if a poem can become a friend for life? It has to have proved this capacity to me. I teach, in short, poems that have demonstrated faithful friendship to me for many years. Teaching these poems is a way of offering young people similar friendships, and it is a way I can pay back these friends for all that they have given me over my life.

When I developed the course the first time, I just sifted through all the poems I’ve read and thought about, and chose the hundred that best fit this description. 100 seemed like a nice round number. So for poetry month, I’ve sifted through that 100 to come up with 10. Like all friendships, these poems require patience, forbearance, and good will, and like the best friendships, they will repay whatever you give them with a lifetime of surprise, encouragement, reproof, and love.

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