What is your favourite poem/poet?

What grade are you in? Have you been learning anything about poetic form and poetic meter? Do you have a length in mind? One of my favorite collections are poems about birds (Robert Frost, W H Auden, G M Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, Mary Oliver, for example.)

I’m a big fan of Emily Dickinson.

I love Pushkin, Neruda and Shakespeare.

Dylan Thomas’ “Poem In October” is just about my all-time favorite.

I love Elizabeth Bishop’s poems. It should be easy for you to find some of hers on the internet.

@aprilsimnel You beat me to it. (I love her. <3 I’ve said this a couple times on Fluther this week already, haha.)

Charles Bukowski is good for a laugh.

Emily Dickenson
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Edgar Allen Poe
Robert Frost

out of the cradle endlessly rocking by walt whitman

Wallace Stevens
e.e. cummings
William Blake
Emily Dickenson

Emily Dickinson and her poem “The Mystery of Pain”.

Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect when it began or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.

Outwitted by Edwin Markham

He drew a circle that shut me out—
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!

Ulysses by Lord Tennyson. It is long though, about one and one-half pages of single space text so make sure your teacher is okay with reading it, or maybe she or he will let you read the best parts.

One of my favorite poems of all time, written by a high school student:

REBEKAH LATOUR
TWISTED LIKE DOGWOOD

Mornings he lies under the bridge
pretending the sky is black—
and when boys stand atop the bridge, making wishes,
eyes pinched closed,
flicking pennies into ripples of the river,
he dips his hand into the water to catch them—
and when a penny slides
through his fingers, slinking into sand,
there is no going after it.
Sometimes he sits on the bench
and begs under the dogwood twisting
through the concrete. And a boy sits next to him.
He asks, got what you wanted, didn’t you?
(even when there is nothing worth looking for)
and the boy says mister?
and he says well, as long as you got what you wanted.
And, together, the two of them watch
a woman, tall and beautiful, walk into
the liquor store on the corner, and walk out
with a bottle of red wine:
and her hair—black as sky, twisted like dogwood,
her eyes glistening like pennies.
And he says, you know that lady in there,
what’s her name, that little lady from the liquor store?
and the boy says it’s all on the other side
but the wind carries her off.
And he rolls back his head, the sun shining in his eyes,
as if it were the only answer
the world could give.

@squidcake Bukowski wrote some sensible poetry:

Charles Bukowski – The House

They are building a house
half a block down
and I sit up here
with the shades down
listening to the sounds,
the hammers pounding in nails,
thack thack thack thack,
and then I hear birds,
and thack thack thack,
and I go to bed,
I pull the covers to my throat;
they have been building this house
for a month, and soon it will have
its people…sleeping, eating,
loving, moving around,
but somehow
now
it is not right,
there seems a madness,
men walk on top with nails
in their mouths
and I read about Castro and Cuba,
and at night I walk by
and the ribs of the house show
and inside I can see cats walking
the way cats walk,
and then a boy rides by on a bicycle
and still the house is not done
and in the morning the men
will be back
walking around on the house
with their hammers,
and it seems people should not build houses
anymore,
it seems people should not get married
anymore,
it seems people should stop working
and sit in small rooms
on 2nd floors
under electric lights without shades;
it seems there is a lot to forget
and a lot not to do,
and in drugstores, markets, bars,
the people are tired, they do not want
to move, and I stand there at night
and look through this house and the
house does not want to be built;
through its sides I can see the purple hills
and the first lights of evening,
and it is cold
and I button my coat
and I stand there looking through the house
and the cats stop and look at me
until I am embarrased
and move North up the sidewalk
where I will buy
cigarettes and beer
and return to my room.

from “All’s Normal Here” – 1985

I’m not big on poetry, but I love the darkness and mystery behind Sylvia Plath’s poems. I find her work bizarre and fascinating.
This is my favorite poem of hers.

A Life

Touch it: it won’t shrink like an eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.
Here’s yesterday, last year
Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast
Windless threadwork of a tapestry.

Flick the glass with your fingernail:
It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir
Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.
The inhabitants are light as cork,
Every one of them permanently busy.

At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file.
Never trespassing in bad temper:
Stalling in midair,
Short-reined, pawing like paradeground horses.
Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy

As Victorian cushions. This family
Of valentine faces might please a collector:
They ring true, like good china.

Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.
The light falls without letup, blindingly.

A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle
About a bald hospital saucer.
It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper
And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.
She lives quietly

With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,
The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture
She has one too many dimensions to enter.
Grief and anger, exorcised,
Leave her alone now.

The future is a grey seagull
Tattling in its cat-voice of departure.
Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,
And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,
Crawls up out of the sea.

….invigorating

Splash. Charles Bukowski.

the illusion is that you are simply
reading this poem.
the reality is that this is
more than a
poem.
this is a beggar’s knife.
this is a tulip.
this is a soldier marching
through Madrid.
this is you on your
death bed.
this is Li Po laughing
underground.
this is not a god-damned
poem.
this is a horse asleep.
a butterfly in
your brain.
this is the devil’s
circus.
you are not reading this
on a page.
the page is reading
you.
feel it?
it’s like a cobra. it’s a hungry eagle circling the room.

this is not a poem. poems are dull,
they make you sleep.

these words force you
to a new
madness.

you have been blessed, you have been pushed into a
blinding area of
light.

the elephant dreams
with you
now.
the curve of space
bends and
laughs.

you can die now.
you can die now as
people were meant to
die:
great,
victorious,
hearing the music,
being the music,
roaring,
roaring,
roaring.

I always enjoying reading Frost.

Edwin Arlington Rose’s Richard Corey

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.

Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.”

Did I seriously write “always enjoying”? Holy shit, it must have been late. I feel so dirty.

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Oh, bloody Daffodils!