Muriel Rukeyser's The Life of Poetry and Richard Hugo's The Real West Marginal Way are extremely interesting if you like those poets, and would probably be inspirational even if you didn't. A New England Girlhood, Outlined from Memory by Lucy Larcom is a fascinating narrative of a poet's struggling against the backdrop of life in a nineteenth-century mill town. And John Clare By Himself is as astonishing as his poetry. Hm, do Emily Dickinson's letters count?

Mark Doty is a successful contemporary poet memoirist, but I am pretty sure Mary Karr takes the "most successful" cake on this one: LIARS' CLUB was a NYT bestseller for over a year.

Ah, how could I forget the inimitable Mary Karr, THE LIAR'S CLUB and its sequel CHERRY. Indeed, the multi-talented and lovely Ms. Karr deserves a special mention here!

I usually prefer quasi-autobiographical poem-cycles to prose memoirs (some examples: Lyn Hejinian's My Life, Ted Berrigan's Sonnets, Alice Notley's Mysteries of Small Houses, Andrew Hudgins's The Glass Hammer, Kenneth Koch's New Addresses, David Shapiro's House poems) but Juliana Spahr's The Transformation is extraordinary, as are Ron Padgett's Ted and Joe.

This brings us right up to the border with the Beats and the Confessionals, who probably share credit and blame for this being a subject of discussion at all.

Adding to what Jordan says, we might want to add Whitman, Olson, Lowell, and Williams to a more expansive sort of list!

and Alberto Ríos’ Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir, about his childhood along the Arizona/Chihuahua international border.

The memoir might fill in gaps. I look at two of my favorite Ríos poems: "The Purpose of Altar Boys" and "The Gathering Evening." The later, written when Ríos is about thirty, has all the charm of growing up and investigating the purpose of youth, learning and desire. But the second poem, written about twenty years later, just a few years after Capirotada, has further insight and greater universality. There is an obvious difference in content but also a more illuminating investigation of something so mundane. - Thank you Rigoberto!

If you are talking quasi-autobiographical poem-cycles, The Dream Songs are imperative. In some ways Huffy Henry is more John Berryman than John Berryman was. In fact, recent research in microchimerism carves lots of interesting philosophical room for what our notion of the "self" is when what we are made of isn't really us in a classically biological sense.

Ok, now you've done it: Wordsworth's various attempts at "The Prelude"!

I think it would be very interesting to read Jimmy Santiago Baca's "A Place to Stand" right after reading "Martín & Meditations on the South Valley"

Thanks for the other great reading suggestions.

Thanks for the rich discussion Rigo. I'm looking forward to picking up some of these titles. Let’s add Nick Flynn’s ANOTHER BULLSHIT NIGHT IN SUCK CITY.

Personally, I've always delighted in Adam Zagajewski's prose, particularly - if we're speaking of memoirs - in his lovely 'Two Cities'.

Also, does 'Goodbye To All That' count?

Poor old Stephen Spender's mysteriously lovely World Within World stays with me, some of the scenes (Auden in his darkened room; worshipping the sun in Weimar Germany) as vivid in my mind more than 15 years after reading it.

Hey, maybe even The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle, by um, Palinurus!

Two more worth a look: Jacques Roubaud's Some Thing Black and Richard Emil Braun's Last Man In.

I loved Gary Soto's first prose collection, which I dare say he hasn't equaled:
LIVING UP THE STREET. I haven't read it in years and years and wonder
what I would think of it now. But I do recall enjoying both the early poetry
and this books of personal essays very much.

This is a recently read favorite. It's a poetry memoir YOU REMIND ME OF YOU by Eireann Corrigan.

A Family of Strangers by the late Deborah Tall is a moving memoir/book-length lyric essay that I highly recommend.

Sarah Manguso's memoir, The Two Kinds of Decay, which focuses on her health problems and recovery, will be out next year... Oh, and there's Lavinia Greenlaw's The Importance of Music to Girls!