1. King Lear, Edmund’s soliloquy (Act 1, Scene 2) by William Shakespeare. Edmund was my Shakespeare villain crush, and his soliloquy lives permanently in my head. Hear the crescendo: “villains by necessity; fools by / heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and / treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, / liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of / planetary influence”—who couldn’t love him? Reading Shakespeare taught me that truly powerful poems create a synergy beyond their actual words.
2. “Somebody’s Gone” from (Penguin, 1978) by Charles Henri Ford. Ford used his
