Who are everybody's favourite poets/poems? And THEN, what kind of mood makes you want to read them, and why? Because poetry is so moooody. (I find.)

I enjoy a nice round of Issa to make me chuckle, and to remind me of the silly little things in this world. (However, sometimes his little haiku can make me feel quite sad, as well.)

Oscar Wilde makes me feel alternately decadent, and downtrodden. (Depending on the date of the ditty.)

I like to read T.S. Eliot. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is my favourite. I'll admit that the Waste Land kills me - I can spend an hour on a sentence and still have no clue. I don't know if I'll ever try Four Quartets. But I like to read T.S. Eliot on Sundays in the afternoon. On a couch.

Sigh. I glance (apathetically) at Shelley, whilst alternately holding my head in my hands, and taking snuff. All this with the Smiths casually droning in the background. I read Shelley when I'm particularly angst-ridden, or happily lacking in mirth. I like to have candles lit and gladiolas in full view. I do admit, though, that the poems too obviously reeking and dripping with death imagery make me guffaw. (Which might make me a bad person.)

I like e.e. cummings, and Dorothy Parker (in small doses), a nice old Ezra here and there.

I know that my tastes are quite common, nor are they particulary learned, but I think why I like poetry so much (when I do feel like it), is because I avoided any poetry courses while I was in University. (My Aunt and Uncle both have PhD's in English, one specializing in the poetry of T.S. Eliot, and the other in this obscure Canadian poet whose name I can't remember, but whose poetry I don't really connect with. Anyhow, they drive me CRAZY trying to trip each other up over symbolic references and historical significance, and they forget COMPLETELY about the organic experience of just reading a fucking poem and enjoying it.)

Longish post. Excuse me. <p>"all my lies are always wishes/I know I would die/if I could come back new"</p>

Oscar Wilde!

<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END-->


My favorite poet, for sure.

Also, Edna St.Vincent Millay. That's all I can think of at the moment. <p><!--EZCODE HR START--><hr /><!--EZCODE HR END-->This was our cream-filled crumpet. I took a deep breath and prayed a little pray.</p>

EmberCat, you rule! What a great post, I could almost see you there.

I think I read a little more like your aunt and uncle.

I once wrote a Civil War exam paper and then only outside source I used was Whitman. I love Whitman. His poems still surprise me and just take me to the moment. Twain and Whitman: two best American writers of the 19th Century.

I love poetry for the support it both bettered and softened the rough edges of my history papers. I don't read for it, but I certainly see it in there. It pulls a complicated subject along nicely if you are lucky enough to find the right line with the unmistakable reference. I tend to work in labor and social politics and gender - it's nice to be able to give some of the unknown writers a forum, since probably hardly anyone listened the first, second, third time around.

I like the mission and I love traces of hesitant, ethereal thinking. It's like reading someone who's trying to find the word that's on the tip of their tongue, and they're almost afraid to let themselves understand it. I like the uncertainty it makes me feel - kind of keeps me company.

I really like the old epics, the stuff they make you read in the survey courses and as supplemental reading in the history courses. Chaucer. Dante. Chaucer more than Dante, because he's funnier.

Waste Land is incredible, I haven't read it in awhile. Lots of Eliot. He keeps me busy. I like Dylan Thomas, too.

And I think my favorite contemporary poet is Joy Harjo. <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>The Woman on the Thirteenth Floor</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> is great; so is her collection, <!--EZCODE UNDERLINE START--><span style="text-decoration:underline">The Woman Who Fell from the Sky</span><!--EZCODE UNDERLINE END-->. She's good.

I'm thinking I might read me some Harjo today! :)

As a writer, poetry is not my strong point; that said, my favorite poet is Wilfred Owen (1893-191 8) , a poet and pacifist who nonetheless died as a soldier in WWI

His poem "Dulce Et Decorum Est" is my favorite. Here are the last eight lines:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum Est
Pro Patria mori*

*The last two lines mean "Sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country."

'Dulce et decorum est' - we had to read this im my english class. It moved a majority of us, including myself. <p>-Brit-
- whats this outfit? this is like mad max..what is this leather? what is this concoction?-
</p>

yeah, that's where i first read it -- in my college English course. A lot of people were moved by it. Though it was about 10 years ago, I still remember exactly how I felt and what the room smelled like while the prof read it to us. It was the first and really only time so far that a poem has done something like that for me. Thanks for the post gonetobed!

________________________________________________
"No I didn't, and don't tell anyone you saw us."

You know, why don't we get it? Why don't we get war, yet? I think you should send that poem to people who are in charge of sending other people out in potentially lethal situations. It is as though people in charge forget that they're actually sending out human beings when they start wars.

Poems are so great because they can encompass an entire essay in a few short lines. I love haiku for this reason. We could talk for hours about how the spring reminds us, all at once, of what we once were and what is to come. Or, we could read a haiku by Issa and understand it instantly. Instantly and viscerally. <p>"all my lies are always wishes/I know I would die/if I could come back new"</p>

I often vacillate about my feelings on war. However, after hearing some people talk about it so glibly, I'm reminded of Hitler's reply when told that many of his junior officers would die if one of his particular battle plans was carried out.

"But then again, that's what junior officers are for."

<!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.nealpollack.com/letters/">www.nealpollack.com/letters/</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END-->

Embercat,

check out the link -- after reading your post I thought I'd at least send that poem out to Austin author Neal Pollack, who just posted it on his website. I mentioned something a while back under Wes's post about fans of Wes liking certain authors (before I figured out there was a BOOKS thread!) and Pollack was one of those authors I recommended. He's really funny and very, very Anti-War. He's been published in "Esquire" and "The New York Times" and performs around Austin (punk rock/literature combo) a lot. He apparently used to date Liz Phair. Thanks for the inspiration!

David

Mods, please delete this. I hit the wrong thread. Ta. <p><!--EZCODE HR START--><hr /><!--EZCODE HR END-->Did they live happily ever after?

I don't know. They didn't make a 'Graduate II.'</p>Edited by: highwaters at: 3/22/03 11:40:09 am

My favorite poet choices will reveal that I am truly a child at heart. I love ee cummings, Shel Silverstein, and Kenn Nesbitt. Although I'm a Robert Frost fan as well. Nothing too deep or symbolic for me when it comes to poetry. I read it purely for escapism.

Edited by: Wanderlust at: 3/22/03 4:16:30 pm

I like wallace stevens.

this is a poem by my friend David Roderick, I love this man and his words.

flood

The water smells like everything the soil held
yesterday, flesh that climbed out of it and flesh
that couldn't, ashes and milk and straw.
Suddenly, everywerhe to go. No fence or roads.
Bugs hatch from its surface and orbit our heads
as we watch it unrear chassis, dross the silent foam.
At our graveyard, the water pauses for a moment
as if in reflection, then pours over a stone wall,
rucking tombstones, raising boxes from the ground.
Purveyor of secrets. rainflattered carder of bones
that absolves itself by bathing us in muck.
It chokes engines. It rots our chattel and cows.
And the trees are shocked, their trunks swollen,
their bark flayed to the water like tiny rafts.
At least they put up a fight. Their limbs tickle
the water, trying to coax it back to its sluice.
But the river is mouthless, its only manner of speech
an effluvium that thieves into our noses
even though we punch them, we in the barnloft,
we on the3 factory roof waiting for skiffs to arrive.
Soon we will step onto boats and row across the water,
scratch our names on its face, float to canteens,
where folks will open cots for us, heat soup,
hand us bottles of water that our mouths cannot sip.
And a deacon's wife will greet us, a woman saved
in the very river that rummaged through our homes.
She will pour us cups of coffee, and sit opposite,
and watch us search for words for the rising water.

and DMX is pretty good too:
Y'all gonna make me lose my mind up in here up in here.

Nice, pete. I enjoyed that. Thanks. <p><!--EZCODE HR START--><hr /><!--EZCODE HR END-->Well it's 1, 2, 3, What're we fightin' for? </p>

he's awesome, wanderlust! i memorized "Paul Bunyan" when i was a kid! the one that killed me was the one about the boy who kept saying "I love you" in sign language to the girl who liked him but she left b/c she never realized what he was telling her. brutal.

Yeah that stuff's all right, but everybody knows what Shel Silverstein is most famous for, right? A Boy Named Sue! Yee-haw!