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You are here: Home / Medium Cool / Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Poetry

Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Poetry

by WaterGirl|  March 28, 20216:00 pm| 173 Comments

This post is in: Guest Posts, Medium Cool, Popular Culture, Culture as a Hedge Against This Soul-Sucking Political Miasma We're Living In

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In case you’re new to Medium Cool, BGinCHI is here once a week to offer a thread on culture, mainly film & books, with some TV thrown in.

Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Poetry 1

For this week’s Medium Cool, let’s talk about poetry.

The recent death of Polish poet Adam Zagajewski (who I met once, and whose poetry I adore) reminded me that we haven’t had poetry as our subject here.

I’ll keep it simple. Whose poetry stays with you? Has there been a poet’s work that has moved you, obsessed you, changed the way you think about something?

I’d love to discover some new poets in this week’s edition.

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Reader Interactions

173Comments

  1. 1.

    Mo MacArbie

    March 28, 2021 at 6:13 pm

    No one hip, but Thomas Hardy is the one author I picked up from school and later read recreationally.

  2. 2.

    BGinCHI

    March 28, 2021 at 6:14 pm

    @Mo MacArbie:  Underrated as a poet.

  3. 3.

    billcinsd

    March 28, 2021 at 6:18 pm

    Rainier Marie Rilke

    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/rainer-maria-rilke

    The Beggars

    BY RAINER MARIA RILKE
    TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL HOFMANN

    You didn’t know
    what was in the heap. A visitor found
    it to contain beggars. They sell the hollow
    of their hands.

    They show the sightseer
    their mouths full of filth,
    and let him (he can afford it) peer
    at the mange eating away at them.

    In their twisted vision
    his stranger’s face is skewed;
    they are pleased with their accession,
    and when he speaks they spew.

  4. 4.

    debbie

    March 28, 2021 at 6:20 pm

    Wallace Stevens forever! Also Mary Oliver.

  5. 5.

    zhena gogolia

    March 28, 2021 at 6:21 pm

    Pushkin
    Lermontov
    Osip Mandelstam
    Sergey Gandlevsky
    Marina Tsvetaeva
    Delvig
    Baratynsky
    Do I need to go on? Do you have a few hours?
    Keats

  6. 6.

    laura

    March 28, 2021 at 6:26 pm

    Marge Piercy’s To Be Of Use is a poem I’d recite whenever I was invited to the retirement sendoff for the blue collar workers I represented- and always had a copy for the worker who’s rest was so well earned. I appreciate Philip Irvine’s poems for that same reason – work, those looking for work, the work and the end of work.

    Poems for pleasure or solace are wide and varied and picking one would be picking a favorite child Nicky Giovanni/billy Collins/w.s. Merwin/Richard Brautigan/Mary Oliver……

  7. 7.

    zhena gogolia

    March 28, 2021 at 6:29 pm

    Here’s a Gandlevsky (loses a lot in translation)

    Anthological

    Seneca teaches me

    that fear is unworthy of a man

    for saving face

    take the side of death

     

    the poplar colonel of the courtyard

    the feverish yakking of first friendship

    all night through

    the smell of the lindens

    that finds room for a whole life

     

    that is what I am leaving

    and Seneca teaches me

    2008

  8. 8.

    KSinMA

    March 28, 2021 at 6:30 pm

    Seamus Heaney, Emily Dickinson, Galway Kinnell, Geraldine Brooks— just a few at random.

  9. 9.

    Tehanu

    March 28, 2021 at 6:31 pm

    John Milton. I hated him when I was in school. Then I discovered that you need to be at least 50 before you can get him.

    John Ciardi, whom I loved in school and still love.

    “Night after night forever the dolls lay stiff
    by the children’s dreams. On the goose-feathers of the rich,
    on the straw of the poor, on the gypsy ground—
    wherever the children slept, dolls have been found
    in the subsoil of the small loves stirred again
    by the Finders After Everything. Down lay
    the children by their hanks and twists. Night after night
    grew over imagination. The fuzzies shed, the bright
    buttons fell out of the heads, arms ripped, and down
    through goose-feathers, straw; and the gypsy ground
    the dolls sank, and some—the fuzziest and most loved
    changed back to string and dust, and the dust moved
    dream-puffs round the Finders’ boots as they dug,
    sieved, brushed, and came on a little clay dog,
    and a little stone man, and a little bone girl, that had kept
    their eyes wide open forever, while all the children slept.”

    Eamon Grennan, “Chorus.” Claudia Burbank, “First Birth” and “Googling Myself I Learn I Am a Victim of Hurricane Katrina.” Henry Reed, “Naming of Parts.” Robert Nye, “On the Sea-Wall.” Harold Monro, “Overheard on a Saltmarsh.”​​​​​

  10. 10.

    dnfree

    March 28, 2021 at 6:33 pm

    My favorite poet since I was in college in the 1960s, and he continued to move me throughout life.  He died a couple of years ago.  This is from the Poetry Foundation website.

    William Stanley (W.S.) Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and raised in New Jersey and Scranton, Pennsylvania, the son of a Presbyterian minister. His numerous collections of poetry, his translations, and his books of prose have won praise over seven decades. Though his early poetry received great attention and admiration, Merwin would continue to alter and innovate his craft with each new book, and at each stage he served as a powerful influence for poets of his generation and younger poets. For the entirety of his writing career, he explored a sense of wonder and celebrated the power of language, while serving as a staunch anti-war activist and advocate for the environment. He won nearly every award available to an American poet, and he was named U.S. poet laureate twice. A practicing Buddhist as well as a proponent of deep ecology, Merwin lived since the late 1970s on an old pineapple plantation in Hawaii which he has painstakingly restored to its original rainforest state. Poet Edward Hirsch wrote that Merwin “is one of the greatest poets of our age. He is a rare spiritual presence in American life and letters (the Thoreau of our era).”

  11. 11.

    Another Scott

    March 28, 2021 at 6:34 pm

    I love Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (I suspect Albatrossity likes it too.)

    I was introduced to Edna late, but Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies has always stuck with me as well.

    Good poetry is very powerful. Bad poetry can be lots of fun.

    And Pete could write some very evocative lyrics. Sea and Sand:

    Here by the sea and sand
    Nothing ever goes as planned
    I just couldn’t face going home
    It was just a drag on my own
    They finally threw me out
    My mom got drunk on stout
    My dad couldn’t stand on two feet
    As he lectured about morality
    Now I guess the family’s complete
    With me hanging ’round on the street
    Or here on the beach

    The girl I love
    Is a perfect dresser
    Wears every fashion
    Gets it to the tee
    Heavens above
    I’ve got to match her
    She knows just how
    She wants her man to be
    Leave it to me

    My jacket’s gonna be cut slim and checked
    Maybe a touch of seersucker with an open neck
    I ride a G.S. scooter with my hair cut neat
    I wear my wartime coat in the wind and sleet

    […]

    Looking forward to the responses!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  12. 12.

    BGinCHI

    March 28, 2021 at 6:34 pm

    @debbie: ​
      I was obsessed with Stevens for several years and carried his Collected Poetry with me everywhere.

  13. 13.

    Mike J

    March 28, 2021 at 6:34 pm

    Speaking of poetry, I will not be going on vacation to Nantucket this year.

  14. 14.

    zhena gogolia

    March 28, 2021 at 6:35 pm

    I was once shocked to find that my students didn’t know Keats at all. Part of their priceless heritage.

    This living hand, now warm and capable
    Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
    And in the icy silence of the tomb,
    So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
    That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
    So in my veins red life might stream again,
    And thou be conscience-calm’d–see here it is–
    I hold it towards you.

  15. 15.

    BGinCHI

    March 28, 2021 at 6:35 pm

    @Mike J: I have a good friend who can compose a limerick on command and I have been secretly jealous of this for 30 years.

  16. 16.

    BGinCHI

    March 28, 2021 at 6:37 pm

    @dnfree: ​
      Merwin is a great poet.

    Those early books have really stayed with me.

  17. 17.

    zhena gogolia

    March 28, 2021 at 6:37 pm

    Mandelstam:
    As womanly silver shines,
    That has struggled with oxide and adulteration,
    So does quiet work turn silver
    The iron plow and the voice of the poet.
    1937

  18. 18.

    PJ

    March 28, 2021 at 6:38 pm

    @zhena gogolia: ​
      Poetry wasn’t taught in the public school I went to, I’m not sure if that’s true elsewhere.

  19. 19.

    brendancalling

    March 28, 2021 at 6:38 pm

    Charles Simic, “Crazy About Her Shrimp.” https://www.poeticous.com/charles-simic/crazy-about-her-shrimp

  20. 20.

    BGinCHI

    March 28, 2021 at 6:38 pm

    @zhena gogolia: ​
      “I am half in love with easeful death” pops morbidly into my head at least once a week.

  21. 21.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    March 28, 2021 at 6:39 pm

    I think my favorite poem is Housman’s “Loveliest of trees”. Frost’s “Fire and Ice”, Auden’s “Stop all the clocks”. I tend to like shorter poems, which I can memorize, like the first two I mentioned. But I also like story poems.

  22. 22.

    Phylllis

    March 28, 2021 at 6:40 pm

    I’m an Emily Dickinson & William Carlos Williams fan. There have been a couple of non-fiction books I’ve read in the past couple of years that had the feel of poetry to them–The Yellow House and The Fact of a Body. 

  23. 23.

    zhena gogolia

    March 28, 2021 at 6:40 pm

    @A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):

    That Auden poem plays a memorable role in Four Weddings and a Funeral!

  24. 24.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    March 28, 2021 at 6:43 pm

    @zhena gogolia: that’s where I first heard it and became obsessed with finding out the poet!

  25. 25.

    PJ

    March 28, 2021 at 6:44 pm

    Yeats is still my favorite, but this passage from Heaney’s Station Island gives me an impetus when I discouraged:

    Then I knew him in the flesh
    out there on the tarmac among the cars,
    wintered hard and sharp as a blackthorn bush.

    His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers
    came back to me, though he did not speak yet,
    a voice like a prosecutor’s or a singer’s,

    cunning, narcotic, mimic, definite
    as a steel nib’s downstroke, quick and clean,
    and suddenly he hit a litter basket

    with his stick, saying, “Your obligation
    is not discharged by any common rite.
    What you do you must do on your own.

    The main thing is to write
    for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
    that imagines its haven like your hands at night

    dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
    You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
    Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,

    so ready for the sack-cloth and ashes.
    Let go, let fly, forget.
    You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.’

     

    ETA: Those are three-line stanzas, but WordPress does something weird with them.

  26. 26.

    Benw

    March 28, 2021 at 6:47 pm

    LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

    I am Waiting could’ve been a critique of the TFG years, with everything bad being bigger and stupider.

  27. 27.

    zhena gogolia

    March 28, 2021 at 6:47 pm

    @A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):

    He’s great. John Hannah does such a good job with that scene.

  28. 28.

    A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)

    March 28, 2021 at 6:48 pm

    I always thought T.S.Eliot was too intellectual for me, but I find as I get older I like his stuff a lot.

  29. 29.

    zhena gogolia

    March 28, 2021 at 6:50 pm

    @A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):

    The Waste Land is amazing. I have an edition by Lawrence Rainey that has really good annotations.

  30. 30.

    PJ

    March 28, 2021 at 6:50 pm

    I had known Jacques Prevert from his screenplays to many great French films of the ’30s, but recently I started getting into his poems. This is from a collection called Preversities, translated by Norman Shapiro:

      Fiesta

    And the glasses were empty
    and the bottle was smashed
    And the bed was wide open
    and the door was shut tight
    And all the stars of shattered glass
    of happiness and beauty kept
    twinkling with their resplendent light
    over the dust of the room unswept
    I was dead drunk
    a bonfire flashing in the air
    and you were living drunk
    in my arms lying bare.

  31. 31.

    Mr. Prosser

    March 28, 2021 at 6:51 pm

    Everyone in my generation (born in the Forties) probably had to read The Red Badge of Courage in Junior High, but Stephen Crane’s poetry is marvelous:
    Should the wide world roll away
    Leaving black terror
    Limitless night,
    Nor God, nor man, nor place to stand
    Would be to me essential
    If thou and thy white arms were there
    And the fall to doom a long way.

  32. 32.

    zhena gogolia

    March 28, 2021 at 6:52 pm

    @PJ:
    RIP, Norman!

    Norman would have been a good jackal.

  33. 33.

    Princess Leia

    March 28, 2021 at 6:52 pm

    Joy Harjo, Mary Oliver, Seamus Heaney, David Whyte, Denise Levertov, Wislawa Szymborska, Naomi Shihab Nye are some of my favorites.

    Also love the Mystical poets like Rumi and Hafiz!

  34. 34.

    KSinMA

    March 28, 2021 at 6:54 pm

    Robert Hayden:
    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46461/those-winter-sundays

  35. 35.

    oatler.

    March 28, 2021 at 6:58 pm

    Always Marry An April Girl

    Praise the spells and bless the charms,
    I found April in my arms.
    April golden, April cloudy,
    Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy;

  36. 36.

    cope

    March 28, 2021 at 6:58 pm

    I went through phases in terms of my interest in poetry.  The first poets I remember finding interesting were Robert Service and Rudyard Kipling (I know, I know) in grade school.

    Later, in high school, I read Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” in my lit book.  This sent me after other WW I  poets including Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon.  In college while studying “Contemporary American and British Poets” as a freshman, I got into E. E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams.  Strangely, these were not the poets we studied in the class but I discovered them and other modern poets just browsing poetry anthologies.

    It was during this period that I suffered a short infatuation with Richard Brautigan, fortunately cured early on.  I spared myself indulging in any Rod McKuen or Kalil Gibran, thank goodness.  Ginsberg never did much for me either.  Of course I had a copy of the recently deceased Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Coney Island of the Mind”, a required prop for any ’60s college male taking English classes beyond the introductory.

    Later in life, I came to appreciate T. S. Eliot, Lewis Carroll, Dorothy Parker, Dylan Thomas, W.B. Yeats and some others whom I cannot remember.  I have to throw in Robert Burns for dramatic and entertainment value.

    Now in my dotage, I am exposed to poetry mainly at the 3 Quarks Daily website and The New Yorker.  I find occasional poems to which I take a shine but never sufficiently to track down anthologies by the authors.  Pity.

  37. 37.

    Nelle

    March 28, 2021 at 7:00 pm

    @laura: We read “To Be of Use” at our small wedding.

  38. 38.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 7:02 pm

    I’ve mentioned the Dickinson tv series that is on Apple TV at least three times and have not had so much as a comment. Well, I’m not a poetry person beyond the Beats but the series made me like her.

  39. 39.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 7:04 pm

    @cope: I saw
    Ferlinghetti recite from Tyrannus Nix at the U of I in 70 or so.

  40. 40.

    schrodingers_cat

    March 28, 2021 at 7:06 pm

    Amir Aziz : Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega   EVERYTHING WILL BE REMEMBERED (Nothing will be forgotten)

    https://youtu.be/PHk_5gEXDY0

    ETA Roger Waters has done a reading of the English translation but it was not as powerful

  41. 41.

    Citizen Scientist

    March 28, 2021 at 7:07 pm

    I’ve been reading Mary Oliver as of late. She has a way with nature-treated poems.

  42. 42.

    Haydnseek

    March 28, 2021 at 7:07 pm

    Charles Bukowski.  Just start anywhere.  But since so many of us here are cat lovers, as he was, might as well start with the poem “One Tough Motherfucker.”  Can’t link but it’s easy to find with a quick search.

  43. 43.

    rivers

    March 28, 2021 at 7:08 pm

    Philip Larkin. These lines from “Faith Healing” haunt me:

    ”            In everyone there sleeps /A sense of life lived according to love./To some it means the difference they could make/ By loving others, but across most it sweeps/ As All they might have done had they been loved. /That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,/ As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps . .  .”

  44. 44.

    schrodingers_cat

    March 28, 2021 at 7:08 pm

    @raven: I don’t know much about her but I am interested.

  45. 45.

    Nelle

    March 28, 2021 at 7:09 pm

    I love Dickinson’s ” A certain slant of light” in particular.

    Jane Kenyon on death, “Twilight After Haying” and “Let Evening Come” have been great comforts when dealing with the deaths of those I love.  Her “Peonies at Dusk” because peonies are the great fragrance of life.

  46. 46.

    banditqueen

    March 28, 2021 at 7:09 pm

    Many greats already mentioned, so here’s another:
    <blockquote>What happens to a dream deferred?
    Does it dry up
    Like a raisin in the sun?
    Or fester like a sore–
    And then run?
    Does it stink like rotten meat?
    Or crust and sugar over–
    like a syrupy sweet?
    Maybe it just sags
    like a heavy load.
    Or does it explode? <em>Langston Hughes</em> </blockquote>
    AE Housman’s poems set to music

  47. 47.

    banditqueen

    March 28, 2021 at 7:10 pm

    Many greats already mentioned, so here’s another:

    What happens to a dream deferred?
    Does it dry up
    Like a raisin in the sun?
    Or fester like a sore–
    And then run?
    Does it stink like rotten meat?
    Or crust and sugar over–
    like a syrupy sweet?
    Maybe it just sags
    like a heavy load.
    Or does it explode? Langston Hughes

    AE Housman’s poems set to music

  48. 48.

    debbie

    March 28, 2021 at 7:11 pm

    @cope:

    Have you tried https://poets.org/poem-a-day ?

  49. 49.

    Jack Canuck

    March 28, 2021 at 7:11 pm

    I see someone mentioned Rilke already, but I’ll second the vote there. The translation makes a big difference too though, for non-English poetry. This is the Stephen Mitchell translation of the poem ‘Evening’; it’s probably not the widely preferred translation, but I find it to be so much more evocative than any other version I’ve found:

    The sky puts on the darkening blue coat

    held for it by a row of ancient trees;

    you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,

    one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

    and leave you, not at home in either one,

    not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,

    not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes

    a star each night, and rises;

    and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)

    your life, with its immensity and fear,

    so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,

    it is alternately stone in you and star.

    On another note, ee cummings is another poet that I’ve always loved. A previous partner loved his work and re-introduced me to it after initial exposure in high school.

    somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
    any experience,your eyes have their silence:
    in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
    or which i cannot touch because they are too near

    your slightest look easily will unclose me
    though i have closed myself as fingers,
    you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
    (touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

    or if your wish be to close me,i and
    my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
    as when the heart of this flower imagines
    the snow carefully everywhere descending;

    nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
    the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
    compels me with the colour of its countries,
    rendering death and forever with each breathing

    (i do not know what it is about you that closes
    and opens;only something in me understands
    the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
    nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

    There could be an interesting discussion about the difference between poetry and lyrics, too. Lots of similarities, obviously, but it seems to me that there’s a fundamental difference because of the pairing of the words with music for lyrics.

  50. 50.

    banditqueen

    March 28, 2021 at 7:11 pm

    @banditqueen:  sorry about the duplicate mixup–difference between visual and text when it comes to posting

  51. 51.

    TinRoofRusted

    March 28, 2021 at 7:13 pm

    Billy Collins. I first saw his poem To My Favorite Seventeen Year Old Girl and laughed because my daughter was 17. I started reading everything by him after that. My 17 year old went to a Poetry slam later that year and met him. I was jealous.

  52. 52.

    debbie

    March 28, 2021 at 7:13 pm

    @rivers:

    I love Larkin.

  53. 53.

    Princess Leia

    March 28, 2021 at 7:15 pm

    Burning the Old Year
    By Naomi Shihab Nye
    Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
    Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
    transparent scarlet paper,
    sizzle like moth wings,
    marry the air.

    So much of any year is flammable,
    lists of vegetables, partial poems.
    Orange swirling flame of days,
    so little is a stone.

    Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
    an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
    I begin again with the smallest numbers.

    Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
    only the things I didn’t do
    crackle after the blazing dies.

  54. 54.

    debbie

    March 28, 2021 at 7:15 pm

    @TinRoofRusted:

    He was on NPR a lot when he was poet laureate. I love his work, but I realized I liked it more when I heard it, as opposed to me reading it to myself.

  55. 55.

    Uncle Cosmo

    March 28, 2021 at 7:15 pm

    @dnfree: Dagnabittohell, you beat me to my Poifick Master & Hero Of The Zeitgeist!!

    I heard Merwin read 3 times, met him twice, had the chance to chat a bit with him the first time. I told him, Your poetry got me through some really rough times in 1973. He looked somewhere between stunned and pleased, and said, Thank you for telling me that.

    I told him I was a mathematician who was trying to write poetry and he said, Some of the most talented writers I’ve taught were scientists and mathematicians. I went on, I’ve been trying to write like you for years and can’t manage it and he shot back, Oh, don’t imitate! but then looked thoughtful: If you must imitate, imitate diction – the images should be your own.

    I said, Of course, and he smiled and said, Of course.

    Here is the poem that introduced me to his work & started the process of getting me through those rough times. Specifically, the last line:

    Look. This is the morning.

    Bleak acceptance. That was when I felt the benthos beneath my feet, after 18 months of one shipwreck after another, and pushed up the long way toward light and air.

    Every April 17 I post this one in honor of my father’s passing. And I will spend a good half hour to anyone who’ll sit still for it, deconstructing these deceptively simple six lines:

    THE POEM

    Coming late, as always,
    I try to remember what I almost heard.
    The light avoids my eye.

    How many times have I heard the locks close
    And the lark take the keys
    And hang them in heaven.

    And as for imitating his style, this was the best I could manage. It was dedicated to him, written not long after that first meeting in 1981 when he appeared all in black and a black cape, and published in the sadly defunct Baltimore City Paper:

    IRONWORKER

    This man has trained
    his eye for steel,

    learned to balance
    on I-beams bundled
    >under a crane’s long beak.

    He understands the flex
    in girders, catenaries
    sleeping in cables;

    It’s childsplay for him
    to catch glowing rivets
    in unhurt gloveless palms

    fashioning dull metal
    into tall storeys.

    On the graveyard shift
    he doffs hard hat and climbs
    rungs and ribs
    in the headless skeleton

    to where its last vertebra
    compasses toward midnight,

    unbuckles the tooled belt
    holding him to structure.

    In a black cape he reaches
    for silence, and falls

    upward, magical
    into the moon’s white smile.​​​​

    (NB I fucking HATEHATEHATE having to wrestle with this idiotic Text window!!! SEVEN EDITS and the goddamn text will not stay stable!!!!)​

  56. 56.

    MomSense

    March 28, 2021 at 7:16 pm

    Maria Howe.

  57. 57.

    West of the Rockies

    March 28, 2021 at 7:17 pm

    I love Evolution by Langdon Smith, an evolutionary biologist with literary inclinations. It straddles the funny territory between agnosticism and spirituality in a way I find moving and satisfying.

  58. 58.

    MomSense

    March 28, 2021 at 7:17 pm

    @MomSense:

    Stupid autocorrect – Marie Howe.

  59. 59.

    wataguy

    March 28, 2021 at 7:18 pm

    @Princess Leia:

    I wish Nye were better known. These lines will be with me as long as I live:

     

    One of these children will tell a story
    that keeps her people alive.
    We don’t know yet which one she is.

    — from Steps by Naomi Shihab Nye

  60. 60.

    West of the Rockies

    March 28, 2021 at 7:20 pm

    @Uncle Cosmo:

    I loved your whole comment.  I miss my own father.  13 years ago on Good Friday.

  61. 61.

    dexwood

    March 28, 2021 at 7:23 pm

    Poetey has never been near the top of things I love. Although I had two great high school English teachers and two great college instructors who loved poetry, it just never grabbed me, pulled me in like novels and music. Hell, I used to feel guilty, inadequate, unenlightened because I didn’t “appreciate” poetry. Got over that. Still, two New Mexico poets I know and like and have read are Larry Goodell and V. B. Price. Price is the son of Vincent Price the actor. Would make a link or two if not on my phone, but y’all have enough to go on.

  62. 62.

    Spanky

    March 28, 2021 at 7:25 pm

    @Uncle Cosmo:

    Zimmer’s Head Thudding against the Blackboard

    Paul Zimmer

    At the blackboard I had missed
    Five number problems in a row,
    And was about to foul a sixth
    When the old, exasperated nun
    Began to pound my head against
    My six mistakes. When I wept,
    She threw me back into my seat,
    Where I hid my head and swore
    That very day I’d be a poet,
    And curse her yellow teeth with this.

  63. 63.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 7:27 pm

    @schrodingers_cat:

    Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Little known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry.[2]

    Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts into a prominent family with strong ties to its community. After studying at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family’s house in Amherst.

    Evidence suggests that Dickinson lived much of her life in isolation. Considered an eccentric by locals, she developed a penchant for white clothing and was known for her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, to even leave her bedroom. Dickinson never married, and most friendships between her and others depended entirely upon correspondence.[3]

     

    The series is really different. All the young people speak in contemporary language and the old people in 1860’s. It is not for everyone and purists hate it. It rocks and Hailee Steinfeld is great

     

    Trailer

  64. 64.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    March 28, 2021 at 7:32 pm

    I’ve never really understood poetry. though there are a couple poems I’m fond of for reasons I can’t put my finger on.

    But as for new poets: A classmate in an online class I’m taking mentioned that her father just died, and that he was a well-known English poet. Then she read us one of his poems, a charming one about an elderly cat.

    I know nothing about him, but I give you Harry Guest.

  65. 65.

    TinRoofRusted

    March 28, 2021 at 7:34 pm

    @debbie:  I would agree. His poetry is written for the ear I think. And to me that is high praise. I read Beowulf in high school and college and was more interested in the historical aspects. Until I got the audiobook of Seamus Harney’s translation. I listen to it once a year. It is amazing.

  66. 66.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 7:34 pm

    I don’t see how music isn’t poetry.

  67. 67.

    BGinCHI

    March 28, 2021 at 7:37 pm

    @PJ: ​
      That’s a GREAT poem. Damn.

  68. 68.

    Josie

    March 28, 2021 at 7:38 pm

    It has been over 50 years since I first saw this poem and it still gives me chills.

    Crystal Moment

    by Robert P. T. Coffin (1892–1955)

    Once or twice this side of death
    Things can make one hold his breath.

    From my boyhood I remember
    A crystal moment of September.

    A wooded island rang with sounds
    Of church bells in the throats of hounds.

    A buck leaped out and took the tide
    With jewels flowing past each side.

    With his head high like a tree
    He swam within a yard of me.

    I saw the golden drop of light
    In his eyes turned dark with fright.

    I saw the forest’s holiness
    On him like a fierce caress.

    Fear made him lovely past belief,
    My heart was trembling like a leaf.

    He leans towards the land and life
    With need above him like a knife.

    In his wake the hot hounds churned
    They stretched their muzzles out and yearned.

    They bayed no more, but swam and throbbed
    Hunger drove them till they sobbed.

    Pursued, pursuers reached the shore
    And vanished. I saw nothing more.

    So they passed, a pageant such
    As only gods could witness much,

    Life and death upon one tether
    And running beautiful together.

  69. 69.

    laura

    March 28, 2021 at 7:38 pm

    @Haydnseek: oh that poem, that tough raggedy ass cat.

  70. 70.

    Robert Sneddon

    March 28, 2021 at 7:39 pm

    Rabbie Burns, because I’m Scottish. He was a rascal and over-fond of the ladies and he loved them all and worked as a Revenuer and wrote the original paean to the lower classes and the unity of mankind, “A man’s a man for a’ that”.

    Then let us pray that come it may,
    As come it will for a’ that,
    That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth
    Shall bear the gree an’ a’ that.
    For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
    It’s comin yet for a’ that,
    That Man to Man the warld o’er
    Shall brithers be for a’ that.

     

    But probably my favourite Burns is the wonderful ballad-verse Tam o’Shanter, a story of barely-dressed witches dancing before the Black Goat and a hairsbreadth escape from doom and destruction at the end to satisfy the entranced listeners, young and old.

    When chapman billies leave the street,
    And drouthy neebors, neebors meet,
    As market-days are wearing late,
    An’ folk begin to tak the gate;
    While we sit bousing at the nappy,
    And getting fou and unco’ happy,
    We think na on the lang Scots miles,
    The mosses, waters, slaps and styles,
    That lie between us and our hame,
    Whare sits our sulky sullen dame,
    Gathering her brows like gathering storm,
    Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.

     

    Scotland celebrates Rabbie Burns birthday every year with good whisky and good eating and good fellowship, toasts and boasts and recital of his poetry, accompanied by bagpipes at close range in more formal dinners.

  71. 71.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 7:39 pm

    Bein the son of a sailor’

    Sea Fever

    BY JOHN MASEFIELD

    I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
    And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
    And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
    And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

    I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
    Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
    And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
    And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

    I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
    To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
    And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
    And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

  72. 72.

    Uncle Cosmo

    March 28, 2021 at 7:40 pm

    @Spanky: HA! GOOD ONE!!!!

    Fortunately, I only had one encounter with the generic Sister Sadistica in my brief childhood flirtation with The One Holy Catholic And Apostolic Church – she swooped in on my blind quarter hidden in the sun & loosed an IHS-666 Infrared Homing Callused Palm’s Edge that caught me behind the right ear and had me seeing galaxies for a couple of minutes as the Polish refugee screamed STOOOPEEED!

  73. 73.

    debbie

    March 28, 2021 at 7:40 pm

    @raven:

    It is. Just look at Dylan. Listen to Emmylou sing Every Grain of Sand or Bruce sing Chimes of Freedom. Every bit as much poetry as any mentioned in this thread.

    Ozzy, on the other hand…

  74. 74.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 7:41 pm

    And then old Kipling after he sent his son off the meat grinder. (But, apparently, it wasn’t about his son.)

     

    “Have you news of my boy Jack?”
    Not this tide.
    “When d’you think that he’ll come back?”
    Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

    “Has any one else had word of him?”
    Not this tide.
    For what is sunk will hardly swim,
    Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

    “Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”
    None this tide,
        Nor any tide,
    Except he did not shame his kind—
        Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

    Then hold your head up all the more,
    This tide,
    And every tide;
    Because he was the son you bore,
    And gave to that wind blowing and that tide![3]

  75. 75.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 7:41 pm

    @debbie: Didn’t Zimmerman get some reward?

  76. 76.

    BGinCHI

    March 28, 2021 at 7:41 pm

    @cope: ​
      Cummings is an interesting example of a poet whose known work is not exactly representative of the whole.

    Reading recently back through his books I was reminded that those clever and lovely poems most of us know from anthologies are much more digestible than the politics, sexuality, and experimental ballistics of his other stuff.

    A poet to really study and linger over.

  77. 77.

    BGinCHI

    March 28, 2021 at 7:42 pm

    @raven: We are going to try it soon!! All cued up.

  78. 78.

    dexwood

    March 28, 2021 at 7:42 pm

    @raven: I gotta agree. My love of music, so many songs, go directly to the arrangement of words supported by the tune. That I get.

  79. 79.

    Original Lee

    March 28, 2021 at 7:43 pm

    Rainer Maria Rilke. I was a German language major in college, and felt as if I’d rolled down a steep grassy slope a la Princess Bride the first time I read one of his poems, Put Out My Eyes.
    Lösch mir die Augen aus

    Lösch mir die Augen aus: ich kann dich sehn,
    wirf mir die Ohren zu: ich kann dich hören,
    und ohne Füße kann ich zu dir gehn,
    und ohne Mund noch kann ich dich beschwören.
    Brich mir die Arme ab, ich fasse dich
    mit meinem Herzen wie mit einer Hand,
    halt mir das Herz zu, und mein Hirn wird schlagen,
    und wirfst du in mein Hirn den Brand,
    so werd ich dich auf meinem Blute tragen.

    His thing-poems remain some of my favorites.

  80. 80.

    BGinCHI

    March 28, 2021 at 7:44 pm

    @rivers: If I had to pick just one poet (not counting Shakespeare, cuz that’s different) as my favorite, who constantly surprises and amazes, who makes me laugh and cry and think, it would be that curmudgeonly old prick Larkin.

    I so, so, so love his work.

  81. 81.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 7:44 pm

    @BGinCHI: I can’t wait to see what you think!

  82. 82.

    dnfree

    March 28, 2021 at 7:45 pm

    We used to sing this by Rabindranath Tagore in the Unitarian church as a hymn.

    Now I recall my childhood when the sun
    burst to my bedside with the day’s surprise;
    faith in the marvelous bloomed anew each dawn,
    flowers bursting fresh within my heart each day.

    Then looking on the world with simple joy,
    on insects, birds, and beasts, and common weeds,
    the grass and clouds had fullest wealth of awe;
    my mother’s voice gave meaning to the stars.

    Now when I turn to think of coming death,
    I find life’s song in starsongs of the night,
    in rise of curtains and new morning light,
    in life reborn in fresh surprise of love.

  83. 83.

    cope

    March 28, 2021 at 7:48 pm

    @debbie: I’ll have a look at it, thanks.

  84. 84.

    zhena gogolia

    March 28, 2021 at 7:51 pm

    @raven: 
    I haven’t seen it — it gets great reviews.

  85. 85.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 7:51 pm

    @zhena gogolia: Apple TV is pretty obscure.

  86. 86.

    zhena gogolia

    March 28, 2021 at 7:53 pm

    @dexwood:

    Wow, interesting that Vincent Price’s son became a poet.

  87. 87.

    Scamp Dog

    March 28, 2021 at 7:55 pm

    @TinRoofRusted:  I have two editions of his Beowulf, one with his translation on one side and the Old English on the other. The second replaces the Old English with images of period artifacts, pictures of reconstructed buildings of that era, or landscapes of the area. I love them both.

  88. 88.

    schrodingers_cat

    March 28, 2021 at 7:57 pm

    @raven: I used to live less than a mile away from the Dickinson homestead. When I said I don’t know much about her, I was referring to her poetry.

  89. 89.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 8:00 pm

    @schrodingers_cat: Funny you would say that. This is an hour-long interview with the cast and the host is from Amherst!

  90. 90.

    Felanius Kootea

    March 28, 2021 at 8:01 pm

    Martín Espada

    Imagine the Angels of Bread 

    This is the year that squatters evict landlords,

    gazing like admirals from the rail

    of the roofdeck

    or levitating hands in praise

    of steam in the shower;

    this is the year

    that shawled refugees deport judges,

    who stare at the floor

    and their swollen feet

    as files are stamped

    with their destination;

    this is the year that police revolvers,

    stove-hot, blister the fingers

    of raging cops,

    and nightsticks splinter

    in their palms;

    this is the year

    that darkskinned men

    lynched a century ago

    return to sip coffee quietly

    with the apologizing descendants

    of their executioners.

     

    This is the year that those

    who swim the border’s undertow

    and shiver in boxcars

    are greeted with trumpets and drums

    at the first railroad crossing

    on the other side;

    this is the year that the hands

    pulling tomatoes from the vine

    uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,

    the hands canning tomatoes

    are named in the will

    that owns the bedlam of the cannery;

    this is the year that the eyes

    stinging from the poison that purifies toilets

    awaken at last to the sight

    of a rooster-loud hillside,

    pilgrimage of immigrant birth;

    this is the year that cockroaches

    become extinct, that no doctor

    finds a roach embedded

    in the ear of an infant;

    this is the year that the food stamps

    of adolescent mothers

    are auctioned like gold doubloons,

    and no coin is given to buy machetes

    for the next bouquet of severed heads

    in coffee plantation country.

     

    If the abolition of slave-manacles

    began as a vision of hands without manacles,

    then this is the year;

    if the shutdown of extermination camps

    began as imagination of a land

    without barbed wire or the crematorium,

    then this is the year;

    if every rebellion begins with the idea

    that conquerors on horseback

    are not many-legged gods, that they too drown

    if plunged in the river,

    then this is the year.

     

    So may every humiliated mouth,

    teeth like desecrated headstones,

    fill with the angels of bread.

  91. 91.

    The Fat Kate Middleton

    March 28, 2021 at 8:03 pm

    @KSinMA: 
    I have always loved that poem more than I can say,

  92. 92.

    dexwood

    March 28, 2021 at 8:04 pm

    @zhena gogolia: Journalist, college instructor, blogger. too.

  93. 93.

    Felanius Kootea

    March 28, 2021 at 8:07 pm

    Warsan Shire is another contemporary poet that I like. She was born in Kenya to Somali parents before moving to the UK and was the Young Poet Laureate of London from 2013 – 2014.

    Home
    no one leaves home unless
    home is the mouth of a shark
    you only run for the border
    when you see the whole city running as well

    your neighbors running faster than you
    breath bloody in their throats
    the boy you went to school with
    who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
    is holding a gun bigger than his body
    you only leave home
    when home won’t let you stay.

    no one leaves home unless home chases you
    fire under feet
    hot blood in your belly
    it’s not something you ever thought of doing
    until the blade burnt threats into
    your neck
    and even then you carried the anthem under
    your breath
    only tearing up your passport in an airport toilet
    sobbing as each mouthful of paper
    made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

    you have to understand,
    that no one puts their children in a boat
    unless the water is safer than the land
    no one burns their palms
    under trains
    beneath carriages
    no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
    feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
    means something more than journey.
    no one crawls under fences
    no one wants to be beaten
    pitied

    no one chooses refugee camps
    or strip searches where your
    body is left aching
    or prison,
    because prison is safer
    than a city of fire
    and one prison guard
    in the night
    is better than a truckload
    of men who look like your father
    no one could take it
    no one could stomach it
    no one skin would be tough enough

    the
    go home blacks
    refugees
    dirty immigrants
    asylum seekers
    sucking our country dry
    niggers with their hands out
    they smell strange
    savage
    messed up their country and now they want
    to mess ours up
    how do the words
    the dirty looks
    roll off your backs
    maybe because the blow is softer
    than a limb torn off

    or the words are more tender
    than fourteen men between
    your legs
    or the insults are easier
    to swallow
    than rubble
    than bone
    than your child body
    in pieces.
    i want to go home,
    but home is the mouth of a shark
    home is the barrel of the gun
    and no one would leave home
    unless home chased you to the shore
    unless home told you
    to quicken your legs
    leave your clothes behind
    crawl through the desert
    wade through the oceans
    drown
    save
    be hunger
    beg
    forget pride
    your survival is more important

    no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
    saying-
    leave,
    run away from me now
    i dont know what i’ve become
    but i know that anywhere
    is safer than here

  94. 94.

    marv

    March 28, 2021 at 8:09 pm

    Only because hasn’t been mentioned (and you made the Shakespeare exception, with which I agree): Gerard Manley Hopkins. And want to send a shout out to memorizing poems one loves – I’d rather have the few dozen I know by heart than all the others I’ve enjoyed. Hard to explain. Will add I’m back in a classroom at a too advanced age (middle schoolers!) and something came up a few weeks ago that got me going on Hamlet’s To be or not speech, and I committed to memory. However familiar I was with consummation devoutly to be wished and so on, it’s just a whole different animal to me to have it from start to finish

  95. 95.

    Yutsano

    March 28, 2021 at 8:11 pm

    Rumi.

    I also have a personal connection to Invictus.

  96. 96.

    The Fat Kate Middleton

    March 28, 2021 at 8:14 pm

    @raven: Listen to/read the lyrics of Leonard Cohen.

  97. 97.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 8:14 pm

    @Yutsano: I have a personal connection to Coleman Barks.

     

    Born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, poet and translator Coleman Barks received a BA from the University of North Carolina and an MA from the University of California, Berkeley, before returning to the University of North Carolina to earn a PhD.

    In 1976, poet Robert Bly introduced Barks to the work of 13th-century Sufi mystic poet Jalaluddin Rumi. Barks has since translated more than a dozen volumes of Rumi’s poetry, including The Illuminated Rumi (1997) and The Essential Rumi (1995), often in collaboration with Persian scholar John Moyne. Barks’s translation work was the focus of an episode of Bill Moyers’s PBS series The Language of Life, and he has collaboratively produced his Rumi translations with music and dance ensembles including the Paul Winter Consort and Zuleikha. In 2004 Barks received the Juliet Hollister Award for his work supporting interfaith understanding, and in 2006 the University of Tehran awarded Barks an honorary doctorate in recognition of his contributions to the field of Rumi translation. Barks’s translations are noted for their accessible lyricism.

  98. 98.

    debbie

    March 28, 2021 at 8:14 pm

    @raven:

    Nobel. Patti Smith accepted it for him.

  99. 99.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 8:14 pm

    @The Fat Kate Middleton: I remember you well from the Chelsea Hotel. . .

  100. 100.

    zhena gogolia

    March 28, 2021 at 8:14 pm

    @Felanius Kootea:

    Wow, that is powerful.

  101. 101.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 8:15 pm

    @debbie: I saw her at the Dali Lama gig at Emory.

  102. 102.

    lowcountryboil

    March 28, 2021 at 8:16 pm

    On January 20, 2021, I posted “Ozymandias” by Percy Blythe Shelley.  It seemed appropriate for the former guy.

    “Ozymandias” — Percy Blythe Shelley
    I met a traveller from an antique land,
    Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
    Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
    Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
    And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
    Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
    Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
    The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
    And on the pedestal, these words appear:
    My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
    Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
    Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
    Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
    The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

  103. 103.

    The Fat Kate Middleton

    March 28, 2021 at 8:18 pm

    @BGinCHI: He’s my man, too. There isn’t a poem of his I don’t love.

  104. 104.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 8:20 pm

    @The Fat Kate Middleton:

    If you want a boxer
    I will step into the ring for you
    And if you want a doctor
    I’ll examine every inch of you
    If you want a driver, climb inside
    Or if you want to take me for a ride
    You know you can
    I’m your man

  105. 105.

    The Fat Kate Middleton

    March 28, 2021 at 8:24 pm

    @raven: Yes! You seem to know him.

  106. 106.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 8:29 pm

    @The Fat Kate Middleton: Oh yea, very much so. The last scene of McCabe and Mrs Miller is stunning.

  107. 107.

    debbie

    March 28, 2021 at 8:30 pm

    If you set his voice aside, Tom Waits is a poet.

  108. 108.

    Kim Walker

    March 28, 2021 at 8:33 pm

    I quite love Theodore Roethke. I marked out one of his poems (The Waking) to be read at my funeral. Whenever that may be. Also Walt Whitman – my husband and I had one of his poems read at our wedding.

  109. 109.

    Princess Leia

    March 28, 2021 at 8:34 pm

    @Felanius Kootea: ​

    @Felanius Kootea: ​
      So, so love that poem- thank you!

  110. 110.

    BGinCHI

    March 28, 2021 at 8:36 pm

    @marv: Margaret, are you grieving. Over Goldengrove unleaving?

  111. 111.

    BGinCHI

    March 28, 2021 at 8:37 pm

    @The Fat Kate Middleton: ​
      GMTA!

  112. 112.

    cope

    March 28, 2021 at 8:38 pm

    @BGinCHI: “It took a Nipponized bit of the old 6th Avenue El…” might be my most favorite line he wrote

  113. 113.

    Geoduck

    March 28, 2021 at 8:41 pm

    I won’t pretend the man was deeply profound or anything, but if you ever want a chuckle or two, try reading one Shel Silverstein’s poetry collections.

  114. 114.

    citizen dave

    March 28, 2021 at 8:43 pm

    @debbie: Tom Waits for sure; and as Haydnseek checked upthread, Charles Bukowski.  Was going to say poetry is not my thing, but putting forward Waits makes me realize that many songwriters are poets of some sort.

    Minnesota’s Mr. Zimmerman: “Yippee! I’m a poet and I know it/Hope I don’t blow it” he wrote in “I Shall Be Free No 10” in 1964.

  115. 115.

    AWOL

    March 28, 2021 at 8:43 pm

    Poets: A few good souls, a few fascist souls, a few infantile souls, and one damn funny soul:

    Ars Poetica

    The goose that laid the golden egg

    Died looking up its crotch

    To find out how its sphincter worked.

     

    Would you lay well?  Don’t watch.

     

    X.J. Kennedy

    And another classic from X.J.:

    In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus One Day (ronnowpoetry.com)

  116. 116.

    dexwood

    March 28, 2021 at 8:45 pm

    Have always loved this succinct poem though.

     

    Fleas.

    Adam had ’em.

     

    Night all.

  117. 117.

    Shane in SLC

    March 28, 2021 at 8:49 pm

    I’ll come out of lurking for this one; I’ve been reading a lot of great contemporary Black poets lately.

    Evie Shockley’s semi-automatic is a book-length excavation of the history of violence against African American bodies. It’s a harrowing read; it’s taken me forever to get through it because I can’t take in more than a poem or two at a time.
    https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/151252/anti-immigration-

    Roger Robinson is a Trinidad-born British poet; his Portable Paradise is inspired by the Grenfell Tower fire, but delves more deeply into the Windrush scandal and the whole experience of Caribbean immigrants in London.
    https://rogerrobinsononline.com

    Jamaican-born Shara McCallum’s Madwoman weaves Greek myth with Caribbean folklore in an extended meditation on madness and history.
    https://sharamccallum.com/poems-online/

    South African poet Gabeba Baderoon is a long-time favorite of mine. The personal and the political have never been woven together more seamlessly than in her poetry.
    https://poets.org/poem/green-pincushion-proteas

    I’ve also been teaching St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott this semester, and it’s a treat to get back in touch with his work.
    https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/atpoem/28371/auto/0/29735/Derek-Walcott/THE-LIGHT-OF-THE-WORLD/en/tile

  118. 118.

    EthylEster

    March 28, 2021 at 8:50 pm

    Ò@Mo MacArbie:

    My favorite is about the Titanic.

  119. 119.

    Jean

    March 28, 2021 at 8:50 pm

    @debbie: Yes to Wallace Stevens (and I’d add W. H. Auden) and surely, Mary Oliver.  So many contemporary poets to include. I’ve used so many in classes over the years, I wouldn’t know when to end the list of poets students loved as much s I did.

  120. 120.

    BGinCHI

    March 28, 2021 at 8:50 pm

    @cope: Terrific.

    I’m gonna do a deep dive into his work soon.

  121. 121.

    marv

    March 28, 2021 at 8:52 pm

    @BGinCHI:

    O man – that poem and Ode to a Nightingale got me started on memorizing poetry way back when. I was in college, making long road trips in the 70’s when the speed limit was 55, which I observed, and seemed safe to go for it then. I’ll have to be pretty far gone to lose Spring and Fall from memory. But the most fun Hopkins poem to me to recite – The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo – I wouldn’t have thought to memorize in a hundred years if I hadn’t stumbled across a killer recitation by Richard Burton on youtube

  122. 122.

    Falling Diphthong

    March 28, 2021 at 8:52 pm

    Christina Rossetti, particularly for The Silent Land.

    I went back to the Odyssey after reading a travel book from an author who had “loved” The Odyssey as a teenager, ran into it again as a 40-year-old, and was like “Whoa, this isn’t about the thrill of adventure, this is about wanting to stop being shipwrecked on these damn magical islands and just stay home already.”

  123. 123.

    BGinCHI

    March 28, 2021 at 8:53 pm

    @Shane in SLC: Shockley is tremendous. So powerful.

    Have you gotten to Claudia Rankine’s latest?

    I taught Natasha Trethewey’s book Native Guard in the fall for the 3rd or fourth time. It’s such an amazing book, and much more than the sum of its parts.

  124. 124.

    BGinCHI

    March 28, 2021 at 8:54 pm

    @marv: ​
      Wow. Very cool.

    I’ve never been much of a memorizer. Though by accretion I have a ton of poetry in my head.

  125. 125.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 8:55 pm

    @EthylEster: Ever heard this
    Jaime Brockett – Legend of the USS Titanic (FULL)
    “It was midnight on the sea, the band was playin’ “Nearer My God To Thee” Fare thee well Titanic, fare thee well

  126. 126.

    Shane in SLC

    March 28, 2021 at 8:56 pm

    @BGinCHI: Does Rankine have a new one since Citizen? If so, no, I haven’t read it yet. I like Trethewey a lot as well.

  127. 127.

    rivers

    March 28, 2021 at 8:57 pm

    @raven: This was the first poem I ever read. I was 9 and I remember the excitement of realizing that language could do this.

  128. 128.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 8:59 pm

    @rivers: Cool!

  129. 129.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 8:59 pm

    @BGinCHI: Did you know Coleman?

  130. 130.

    BGinCHI

    March 28, 2021 at 9:00 pm

    @Shane in SLC: ​
      Yep. Called Just Us.

  131. 131.

    BGinCHI

    March 28, 2021 at 9:02 pm

    @raven: ​
      Billy Ray Valentine’s butler in Trading Places?

    Or someone in Athens…..

  132. 132.

    Zelma

    March 28, 2021 at 9:02 pm

    Thank you for this thread.  Poetry has never grabbed me; too literal minded, I think.  But I read all of the above and appreciate poetry’s power more for the reading of them.

    I have just two books of poetry on my shelves: The Complete Poems of Andrew Marvell and The Collected Poems of A.E. Houseman.  Why these two I have no idea.

  133. 133.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 9:03 pm

    @BGinCHI: Coleman Barks, UGA Poetry Prof and Rumi translator. I posted about him above.

  134. 134.

    AWOL

    March 28, 2021 at 9:05 pm

    Two I’ve always loved from Cummings.

    The former was misinterpreted in an infamous editorial by the NYT three decades ago (it was praised for its innocence by the Times wanker, which it is not).

    [in Just-] by E. E. Cummings | Poetry Foundation

    Leonard Bernstein, on weekend daytime TV giving his Harvard Lectures, introduced me to this poem almost fifty years ago:

    E. E. Cummings – My sweet old etcetera | Genius

  135. 135.

    BGinCHI

    March 28, 2021 at 9:09 pm

    @raven: Nope. I was probably there before he got there.

    The Marilyn Brownstein years.

  136. 136.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 9:12 pm

    @BGinCHI: Oh no, he taught here for 30 years. He’s quite infirm now but I hung with him in the early 80’s

    Coleman Barks is a renowned poet and the bestselling interpreter of Sufi poetry with his books The Essential Rumi, The Soul of Rumi and Rumi: The Book of Love. He was prominently featured in both of Bill Moyers’s PBS television series on poetry, “The Language of Life” and “Fooling with Words.” He taught English and poetry at the University of Georgia for thirty years, and now focuses on writing, reading, and performances.

  137. 137.

    Benw

    March 28, 2021 at 9:19 pm

    Music is definitely poetry. Leave Ozzy alone.

  138. 138.

    Yutsano

    March 28, 2021 at 9:22 pm

    @Benw:  Some music is poetry. But not all.

  139. 139.

    MagdaInBlack

    March 28, 2021 at 9:22 pm

    @raven: “The Essential Rumi” is here on my side table, well worn.

  140. 140.

    Ripley

    March 28, 2021 at 9:24 pm

    I have a terrible time remembering any of the poetry I’ve found interesting, but I’ve long been a fan of Robinson Jeffers.

  141. 141.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 9:25 pm

    @MagdaInBlack: I have a really good story about that.

  142. 142.

    MagdaInBlack

    March 28, 2021 at 9:29 pm

    @raven: Do tell?

  143. 143.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 9:30 pm

    @MagdaInBlack: I gotta watch the end of this game!

  144. 144.

    HinTN

    March 28, 2021 at 9:30 pm

    @raven: Late to the party but I agree.

  145. 145.

    billcinsd

    March 28, 2021 at 9:31 pm

    @Yutsano: Pretty much all music is poetry, but there is much bad poetry

  146. 146.

    PaulB

    March 28, 2021 at 9:33 pm

    I’m not much of one for poetry, alas, but a few poems over the years have moved me. I loved how much is said in this short poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, for example:

    “My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends— It gives a lovely light!”

    The last lines of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” also said something to me:

    The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
    But I have promises to keep,
    And miles to go before I sleep,
    And miles to go before I sleep.

  147. 147.

    Benw

    March 28, 2021 at 9:34 pm

    @billcinsd: For example,

    “Not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good!”

    Is bad poetry!

  148. 148.

    MagdaInBlack

    March 28, 2021 at 9:36 pm

    @raven: Tease.

    Eta: Thank you, go see the game ?

  149. 149.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 9:36 pm

    @MagdaInBlack: I had known him from bars and parties for a number of years. I had been sober for a few years and I went to see him do a reading in Atlanta. I talked to him after the show and he was delighted to know I’d developed an interest in spiritual matters. The next day I went to the big Barnes and Noble on Peachtree and looked all over for the Essential and other of his books and I came up dry. I was pretty disappointed and, three days later, a package came and he sent it to me along with a DVD of the Moyers shows!

  150. 150.

    PaulB

    March 28, 2021 at 9:36 pm

    “Richard Cory,” by Edwin Arlington Robinson has a deeper meaning for me and it’s one I cannot read without pain, precisely because of the personal experience that gives that meaning.

    Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
    We people on the pavement looked at him:
    He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
    Clean favored, and imperially slim.

    And he was always quietly arrayed,
    And he was always human when he talked;
    But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
    “Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

    And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
    And admirably schooled in every grace:
    In fine, we thought that he was everything
    To make us wish that we were in his place.

    So on we worked, and waited for the light,
    And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
    And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
    Went home and put a bullet through his head.

  151. 151.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 9:37 pm

    And Bama ties it on a bomb at the buzzer!!! OT.

  152. 152.

    PaulWartenberg

    March 28, 2021 at 9:44 pm

    April is National Poetry Month.

    Anyone want to do poetry submissions here?

  153. 153.

    AWOL

    March 28, 2021 at 9:45 pm

    @PaulB: Set to music by Simon & Garfunkel. 1967?

  154. 154.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 9:47 pm

    @AWOL: zactly

  155. 155.

    Emma

    March 28, 2021 at 9:49 pm

    By Warsan Shire (video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI9D92Xiygo&ab_channel=GarrettMogge):

    Home
    no one leaves home unless
    home is the mouth of a shark
    you only run for the border
    when you see the whole city running as well

    your neighbors running faster than you
    breath bloody in their throats
    the boy you went to school with
    who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
    is holding a gun bigger than his body
    you only leave home
    when home won’t let you stay.

    no one leaves home unless home chases you
    fire under feet
    hot blood in your belly
    it’s not something you ever thought of doing
    until the blade burnt threats into
    your neck
    and even then you carried the anthem under
    your breath
    only tearing up your passport in an airport toilet
    sobbing as each mouthful of paper
    made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

    you have to understand,
    that no one puts their children in a boat
    unless the water is safer than the land
    no one burns their palms
    under trains
    beneath carriages
    no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
    feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
    means something more than journey.
    no one crawls under fences
    no one wants to be beaten
    pitied

    no one chooses refugee camps
    or strip searches where your
    body is left aching
    or prison,
    because prison is safer
    than a city of fire
    and one prison guard
    in the night
    is better than a truckload
    of men who look like your father
    no one could take it
    no one could stomach it
    no one skin would be tough enough

    the
    go home blacks
    refugees
    dirty immigrants
    asylum seekers
    sucking our country dry
    niggers with their hands out
    they smell strange
    savage
    messed up their country and now they want
    to mess ours up
    how do the words
    the dirty looks
    roll off your backs
    maybe because the blow is softer
    than a limb torn off

    or the words are more tender
    than fourteen men between
    your legs
    or the insults are easier
    to swallow
    than rubble
    than bone
    than your child body
    in pieces.
    i want to go home,
    but home is the mouth of a shark
    home is the barrel of the gun
    and no one would leave home
    unless home chased you to the shore
    unless home told you
    to quicken your legs
    leave your clothes behind
    crawl through the desert
    wade through the oceans
    drown
    save
    be hunger
    beg
    forget pride
    your survival is more important

    no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
    saying-
    leave,
    run away from me now
    i dont know what i’ve become
    but i know that anywhere
    is safer than here

  156. 156.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 9:51 pm

    And if California slides into the ocean
    Like the mystics and statistics say it will
    I predict this motel will be standing until I pay my bill
    Don’t the sun look angry through the trees
    Don’t the trees look like crucified thieves
    Don’t you feel like Desperados under the eaves
    Heaven help the one who leaves

  157. 157.

    BGinCHI

    March 28, 2021 at 9:52 pm

    @raven: ​
      Well damn. No, I didn’t know him.

    Sounds like an amazing guy.

  158. 158.

    raven

    March 28, 2021 at 9:54 pm

    @BGinCHI: He was on the road a great deal, big time literary superstar in his area. I just figured he was well known in the department.

  159. 159.

    laura

    March 28, 2021 at 9:57 pm

    I love this post and every comment. Poems so evanescent and lasting and so many unknown ones to seek and so many reasons a poem is the right measure of a moment. Crushing on this post.

  160. 160.

    BGinCHI

    March 28, 2021 at 10:05 pm

    @raven: ​
      I did my MA there in Political Philosophy, so I was technically in the Political Science Dept. I did a lot of courses in English, and my thesis advisor was from English (Vinay Dharwadker), but I didn’t know everyone.

  161. 161.

    AWOL

    March 28, 2021 at 10:06 pm

    @raven: Thanks. Taught to me and 29 others by a liberal JHS English teacher in Trumplandia in 1972 or so.  On glorious vinyl.

  162. 162.

    Inspectrix

    March 28, 2021 at 10:08 pm

    I go to the Poetry Foundation poem of the day regularly. I started writing free verse last summer but I haven’t shared any pieces with another living soul yet.
    I am happy to see many Mary Oliver fans here.
    This is a poem about words that I bookmarked recently:
    Words are Birds
    BY FRANCISCO X. ALARCÓN
    words
    are birds
    that arrive
    with books
    and spring
    they
    love
    clouds
    the wind
    and trees
    some words
    are messengers
    that come
    from far away
    from distant lands
    for them
    there are
    no borders
    only stars
    moon and sun
    some words
    are familiar
    like canaries
    others are exotic
    like the quetzal bird
    some can stand
    the cold
    others migrate
    with the sun
    to the south
    some words
    die
    caged—
    they’re difficult
    to translate
    and others
    build nests
    have chicks
    warm them
    feed them
    teach them
    how to fly
    and one day
    they go away
    in flocks
    the letters
    on this page
    are the prints
    they leave
    by the sea

  163. 163.

    Kattails

    March 28, 2021 at 10:15 pm

    Shite.  working at a deadline all day, missed both the mysteries and the poetry. Bah.

    Robert Frost: Two Tramps in Mud Time; A Considerable Speck.

    Someone I would like to look up, an Englishman, Edward Thomas. I have a bit of his done in a calligraphy anthology–calligraphers live and breathe this stuff of course. The poem “Sowing”, visually evocative of the end of the day:

    “I tasted deep the hour

    Between the far owl’s chuckling first soft cry

    And the first star”

    Don’t know how to get out of the automatic double spacing.

  164. 164.

    Jazzman

    March 28, 2021 at 10:25 pm

    Kay Ryan.  I discovered her by accident when one of her poems, “Patience”, was quoted some years ago in (of all places) the comic strip “Boondocks” by Aaron McGruder.  Here’s an excerpt:
    Who would
    have guessed
    it possible
    that waiting
    is sustainable—
    a place with
    its own harvests.
    Or that in
    time’s fullness
    the diamonds
    of patience
    couldn’t be
    distinguished
    from the genuine
    in brilliance
    or hardness.
    I also like the Beat poets, especially Ferlinghetti (who never claimed to be “beat”) and the underrated Gregory Corso.  Here’s the beginning of Corso’s funny and touching poem “Marriage”:

    Should I get married? Should I be good?
    Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood?
    Don’t take her to movies but to cemeteries
    tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets
    then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries
    and she going just so far and I understanding why
    not getting angry saying You must feel! It’s beautiful to feel!
    Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone
    and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky…

  165. 165.

    Benw

    March 28, 2021 at 10:30 pm

    @raven: crazy game!

  166. 166.

    Nelle

    March 28, 2021 at 10:47 pm

    @Kattails: Robert MacFarlane refers to Edward Thomas a lot, particularly in The Old Ways, but also The Wild Places and Underland.  MacFarlane is a master in prose, but it times. on poetry at times.

  167. 167.

    hitchhiker

    March 28, 2021 at 10:48 pm

    Gary Snyder, Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems.

    I had an English teacher in 1968 who was determined to haul us Traverse City kids into the world of the mind. She somehow arranged to have Snyder come and speak to us; he wore sandals and jeans, and read to us in a public school that was just filled with ignorance. At that time every girl still had to come to school in a dress or skirt, no matter how cold it was, and we stupidly did.

    Snyder was a revelation, as my English teacher (Mrs. Bade, if you want to know) had hoped. She wrote out this poem on the back chalkboard in our classroom, and without intending to, I memorized it. Riprap is what they call loose stones gathered and used to form a foundation for a breakwater.

    Riprap
    Lay down these words
    Before your mind like rocks.
                 placed solid, by hands
    In choice of place, set
    Before the body of the mind
                 in space and time:
    Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
                 riprap of things:
    Cobble of milky way,
                 straying planets,
    These poems, people,
                 lost ponies with
    Dragging saddles—
                 and rocky sure-foot trails.
    The worlds like an endless
                 four-dimensional
    Game of Go.
                 ants and pebbles
    In the thin loam, each rock a word
                 a creek-washed stone
    Granite: ingrained
                 with torment of fire and weight
    Crystal and sediment linked hot
                 all change, in thoughts,
    As well as things.

  168. 168.

    randy khan

    March 28, 2021 at 10:59 pm

    I don’t know nearly enough about poetry. I have been delighted that the New York Times Magazine has been publishing a poem every week for the last several years, chosen and introduced by poets.  I’ve read a lot of really fascinating works as a result.

    I have bits and pieces of many poems that have caught my eye in my head, but not a lot in the way of complete poems.

    Things that have stuck with me:

    Frost’s Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening – those last three lines:

    But I have promises to keep,

    And miles to go before I sleep,

    And miles to go before I sleep.

    Seemingly more fun, until the end, e.e. cummings:

    Buffalo Bill’s

    defunct

    who used to

    ride a watersmooth-silver

    stallion

    and break onetwothreefourfivepigeonsjustlikethat

    Jesus

    he was a handsome man

    and what i want to know

    is

    how do you like your blueeyed boy

    Mister Death

    Check this link to see how it’s supposed to be typeset.  One thing I love about this poem is how it tells you how to read it.  He did that a lot.

  169. 169.

    the pollyanna from hell

    March 29, 2021 at 1:09 am

    White light bright gaw green youngling slight/ And aye the son of morning/ And aye that light aborning
    Grin chagrin nor wit nor win/ Find in me a willing spirit/ Grin chagrin nor wit nor win/ Find in me a willing spirit
    Red fire grew on the green wild green/ And aye the fleeting pronghorn/ And aye the green wild hartshorn
    Grin chagrin nor wit nor win/ Bring to me a broken spirit/ Grin chagrin nor wit nor win/ Bring to me a broken spirit
    Smoke ash blew on the green wild green/ And aye the captive turkey/ And aye the green wild savory
    Grin chagrin nor wit nor win/ Dawn for aye that burning spirit/ Grin chagrin nor wit nor win/ Dawn for aye that burning spirit
    I’m not scared, I’m not mad anymore/ My thoughts have settled surely/ To apprehend life purely

    Lullaby for a Sleepless Parent, maybe 1990? Pandemic threat to my kids brought it back to me.

  170. 170.

    Albatrossity

    March 29, 2021 at 8:10 am

    I’ve lived with a poet for the past 20+ years. One of the perks is that, through her, I’ve been able to hear about poets that are amazing. One of them is Michelle Boisseau. Sadly, she is no longer with us, but here is a sampling of some of her work.

  171. 171.

    Uncle Cosmo

    March 29, 2021 at 8:28 am

    @billcinsd: ​Pretty much all music is poetry, but there is much bad poetry

    Which is merely to say music (and poetry) obey one of the (if not the) fundamental laws of the multiverse, Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap.

    (Originally formulated by SF titan Theodore Sturgeon in the form “90% of science fiction is crap,” subsequently extended to everything else because obviously, amirite??)

  172. 172.

    Uncle Cosmo

    March 29, 2021 at 8:42 am

    @Jazzman:  I saw Corso read at Goucher College in IIRC 1968. The place was packed. He delivered a whole passle of rather, um, non-descript verse. And at the end he asked if anyone had any requests.

    The crowd rose as one and in chorus demanded the single poem they had come to hear – the one that he had left out:

    “Marriage!” Read us “Marriage!” You must read “Marriage!”

    He replied mildly, “I can’t.” And when the crowd roared Why not?!?!?, simply pointed to the first row … where sat his wife and child.

    Subsequently I memorized that poem, and would deliver dramatic readings to whoever would sit still for one. I’ve forgotten a lot in the intervening decades, but I have to recover it – because once we have hammered Thuh Varss into the turf and I finally get up to Wellesley to visit my best-buddy astronomer and finally meet his current better half, he will demand a performance for her, and I am not about to disappoint!
    ​

  173. 173.

    Miss Bianca

    March 29, 2021 at 11:01 am

    @Josie: Late to the party, but I loved that poem. Thanks for that!

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