Those of you who warned me this little ten item list would be difficult? You were absolutely right.
The idea is to choose 10 poems that serve as an introduction to my work. 
In my diplomatic approach to crisis of any kind, I ended up with 2 lists. One recounts poets who influenced me over the many years. This one is a group of poems that I felt might help a new reader to my work understand it a little better.
- "Five Years Old" by James Tate
- Black Holes, Black Stockings by Jane Miller and Olga Broumas
- "Insomnia" by Elizabeth Bishop
- "Snow Line" by John Berryman
- "I Know a Man" by Robert Creeley
- The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford
- "Fission" by Jorie Graham
- Anne Carson, "The Life of Towns"
- Lynn Emmanuel, "Inside Gertrude Stein"
Since I put eleven items on my last list of ten, it’s okay for this one to have only nine, right?
I want to add to this — may I? — because I feel like, in the case of the first 6 on your list, I may have been around you when you read them, they were very much ‘in the air’ circa 1985, a poem I remember being discussed at a party one night, great discussion, it may have been on such a night that I realized that conflicting energies could be marshalled by a poem, Larry Levis’ “The Wish to Be Picked Clean.”