Reddit mentions of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 1: Modern Poetry

1. The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry 1 -
   
   This book is heavy, so it doubles as a brick for smashing in the windows of capitalist bourgeois pigs. Reading it is like taking a shot of tabasco sauce and injecting it into your eye with a hypodermic needle.
   
   
2. Surrealist Poetry in English 2 -
   
   I had to buy this one on ebay, but it's a damn fine collection. Makes me want to hand out LSD-laced lollypops to schoolkids, then piss on the grave of H.W. Longfellow.
   
   
3. Norton Anthology of Modern & Contemporary Poetry 3 -
   
   These two have all the good ones of the 20th century, a clean layout, and a fine selection. Good for reading beneath a tree in the autumn, in a graveyard.
   
   
4. Penguin Anthology 4 -
   
   It's edited by Rita Dove, so you know this collection has good taste. The poems are from a wide spread of poetry movements, but personally, I find a lot of the pieces in it to be a little too 'delicate'. But very good for reading naked in bed, while softly stroking the hair of your sleeping lover.
   
   
5. English Romantic Poetry 5 -
   
   Got all the biggies like Byron, Shelly and Keats. I fuckin love Keats. This book is a great introduction to 19th century poetry. This is good for reading on a bus while driving past a field of flowers on a humid summer evening with the windows open, reminiscing about your high school crush.

If you really have no idea where to start, anthologies can easily become your best friend. There are many, many out there, but the idea is that you will have a large selection of stories by different authors who can give you quick exposure to different styles, themes, techniques, etc. Then, when you find an author you enjoy / want to learn more from, you can go looking for them. This will also let you dive into different genres quickly and give you starting points. As for what genres: read everything. And I don't mean everything as in "Mystery, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Romance, etc etc" - I mean read fiction (both short stories and novels), essays, and poetry. Even if you have no interest in writing poetry, for example, it can teach you more about how language sounds and how it can affect speed of reading than many pieces of fiction can ever hope to do.

As to how to read: read carefully and closely. Don't rush through it. You're not necessarily reading for pleasure any more (though you still can - consider reading stuff that really hits you twice or more). How does the story arc go? How does the author create a sense of each character? How does his sentences make you read faster or slower? What details doesn't he say? See how the story works as a whole, and on a sentence by sentence level. (This is assuming fiction - reading poetry means focusing on line breaks, imagery, the sound of language, how do the line breaks affect how fast the eye reads.) It takes a lot of work, but it gets easier the more you do it.

A few suggestions:

Fiction:

You could try the "Best American Short Stories" series that is put out every year. It will give you a good thirty or so stories that are considered exceptional from small print journals from the corresponding year. I've found a lot of amazing writers in them. I also suggest The Best American Short Stories of the Century. I also recommend listening to the New Yorker Fiction Podcast as a way to find new authors - when you find a story you enjoy, track down the written version and tear it apart, and certainly read other works by the same author.

Essays:

Again, a nice easy lead in that I've found is the "Best American Essays" series. Same as before: each year, some thirty or so essays from small journals from that year. Maybe not the most wide-ranging sample, as it focuses on American writing, but there is always a surprising breadth of voices and subject matter in them. There are also a ton of essay anthologies, but I haven't gone through any of them completely enough to make a suggestion.

Poetry:

If you have a decent amount of money to throw away, I'd recommend the Norton Anthology set on modern and contemporary poetry. Volume 1 focus on modernism, and Volume 2 focus on contemporary. They have such a huge collection of different poets that there is something in there for everyone, and can set you off chasing down other poets easily. If you are also rolling in money, you might like Strong Measures, which examines a wide swath of formal poetry, but probably doesn't have much use outside of poets wanting to learn about specific forms. Otherwise, there's The Poetry Foundation where you can listen to a monthly podcast that might turn you on to some different poets, as well as a huge resource of free poetry and essays about poetry.

For a new poet, I highly recommend the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. It will not only give you a wide array of poets and poetry styles, but will help teach you how to analyze.