Favorite Poems/Poets

[Robin Of House Hill]

William Butler Yeats: The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[Angalin]

In memory of Adrienne Rich, who died yesterday.

XIII Dedications

by Adrienne Rich

from "An Atlas of the Difficult World"

I know you are reading this poem

late, before leaving your office

of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window

in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet

long after rush hour.

I know you are reading this poem

standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean

on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven

across the plains' enormous spaces around you.

I know you are reading this poem

in a room where too much has happened for you to bear

where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed

and the open valise speaks of flight

but you cannot leave yet.

I know you are reading this poem

as the underground train loses momentum

and before running up the stairs

toward a new kind of love

your life has never allowed.

I know you are reading this poem by the light

of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide

while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.

I know you are reading this poem in a waiting room

of eyes met and unmeeting,

of identity with strangers.

I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light

in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,

count themselves out, at too early an age.

I know you are reading this poem through your failing sight,

the thick lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning

yet you read on

because even the alphabet is precious.

I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove

warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder,

a book in your hand

because life is short and you too are thirsty.

I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language

guessing at some words while others keep you reading

and I want to know which words they are.

I know you are reading this poem listening for something,

torn between bitterness and hope

turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.

I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else

left to read

there where you have landed

stripped as you are.

[TomBombadil]

J.R.R. Tolkien

[Sci-2]

"I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair

streams black, the merman in his armored body

We circle silently about the wreck

we dive into the hold. ...

We are, I am, you are

by cowardice or courage

the one who find our way

back to the scene

carrying a knife, a camera

a book of myths

in which

our names do not appear."

-Adrienne Rich

Thanks to Angalin for showcasing this beautiful woman. In case you are as ignorant as I am, here is an article on the work and life of Adrienne Rich.

ETA:

....Ms. Rich was far too seasoned a campaigner to think that verse alone could change entrenched social institutions. “Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy,” she said in an acceptance speech to the National Book Foundation in 2006, on receiving its medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. “Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard.”

But at the same time, as she made resoundingly clear in interviews, in public lectures and in her work, Ms. Rich saw poetry as a keen-edged beacon by which women’s lives — and women’s consciousness — could be illuminated.

She was never supposed to have turned out as she did....

[Contrarius]

Hey, interesting thread.

I am NO kind of poetry expert, but here is the poem that I have thought about the most over the years:

Root Cellar -- Theodore Roethke

Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,

Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,

Shoots dangled and drooped,

Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,

Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.

And what a congress of stinks!

Roots ripe as old bait,

Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,

Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.

Nothing would give up life:

Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.

[Sci-2]

Thanks to Larry & Weird Fiction Review for putting me onto this guy:

Villa of the Mysteries

what I could feel on my eyes

blank spatulate tips of stone

cold against the heaviness of the lids

hands caked with coal slivers and dust

and no ointment to salve the horror

of the haunting ground below

I entered by way of the lowest gallery

was interred in the well of the underlings

stretched out on tufts the earth grows for hair

shading its worms with a bone garden

the darkness licking at my tongue

the ebb of the heart’s cage murmuring

blue mountains beyond the crumbling colonnade

calm sea and not a single sail to shatter

the monotony of the curtain in the web

my face behind a thousand fading mirrors

from the first to the last unrecognizable

open the books and the pages will fall away

the woman held a gram of stardust

in her palm the glitter of forgotten eyes

more moist and naked than her flesh

green against the hedge she was lying

on her belly arched her haunches and smiled

as though no one were there to see

none but she to peruse these antiquities

cenotaphs with turning heads the glances

of sepulchral monuments embedded in

the lawns the tiles the terraced flagstones

where lizards cooled themselves beneath willows

and dreamed the dream of the dragon’s doom

dream of the monster Blindness

that creeps through the pillared halls

stops for the echo of its breath off the walls

to tell the distance it has yet to cross

to find the bleeding core of the Villa

and wipe death’s glaze from its eyelids

Tiresias in rags sifting the volcanic ash

for buried centaurs found a hoof

tugged at the desiccated fetlock

till a flank emerged and the face

came up black its eyes the sightless rubies

he could touch but never see the blindness of

the rest of the unhealed prophets lay

four to a room with the unforgiven

the olympians and the dead messiahs

chained to their bedposts clothed

as the tree is in high summer

crowned like the goat-footed god

over cavernous noises their screams

carried far into the woods

unlocked the oblong doors to the trees

the upright tombs whose rusted hinges sighed

to find a voice through the red dust

a lying-place under the silence of the moon

this forest of women their bodies

half transformed like mermaids

made of flesh and tree bark

warms at the pale loins where

the brown moss merges with the trunk

and the sap flows into the roots

their life’s blood meanders below ground

beneath the silt and through the ocher weeds

to drench the Villa’s ancient voices in the night

and there the toothless mouth will yawn

at the blade’s edge of sleep the eyes

will roll before they open on the blackness

bard in the boreal night bearded and strange

a glass moon hangs above your stubbled head

flakes of brittle snow shuddered by wind

cry farewell to the land of the sun

that spirals over the eucalyptus tree

farewell to swamps and their slithering venoms

this is not mine but the dream of another

who has never seen my face or heard my voice

but whom the womb separated before birth

when I too was breathing water and mist

gilled for an eternity in the grotto where no sound

could reach him untranslated by these liquid depths

Eric Basso, May 1988

ETA: line breaks.

[Sci-2]

HAD I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet,

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams

W.B. Yeats

[Sci-2]

Howl:

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland

where you're madder than I am

I'm with you in Rockland

where you must feel strange

I'm with you in Rockland

where you imitate the shade of my mother

I'm with you in Rockland

where you've murdered your twelve secretaries

I'm with you in Rockland

where you laugh at this invisible humour

I'm with you in Rockland

where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

I'm with you in Rockland

where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio

I'm with you in Rockland

where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses

I'm with you in Rockland

where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica

I'm with you in Rockland

where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx

I'm with you in Rockland

where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of actual pingpong of the abyss

I'm with you in Rockland

where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse

I'm with you in Rockland

where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

I'm with you in Rockland

where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha

I'm with you in Rockland

where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb

I'm with you in Rockland

where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale

I'm with you in Rockland

where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep

I'm with you in Rockland

where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free

I'm with you in Rockland

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

[Sci-2]

The true poem

though spoken in

human tongue

is pronounced

with the lisp

of a fox growling

over a dead rabbit.

The true poem,

even when typed

on a computer,

is inscribed

in the rabbit’s blood

by a quill

from a crow’s wing.

Its letters are read

not by the eyes

but by the ends

of the nerves,

as Braille is read

by fingertips.

The Lady

and Her lover

trail through the poem,

their footprints

fading in drying dew.

They pass

the crossroads

under the beam

of the Hanging Tree.

The white doe

watches from hedges

of wild roses.

The true poem

may seem slight

but the must of

wild mushrooms

and leaf mold

worm through the lines.

As if Grandmother Spider

crawled over his nape,

the reader shivers.

Serena Fusek, who reads this poem here has her poem read here:

http://www.mythicdel...dex.htm#feature

(Her soundfile follows Valente's poem on mecha driving girls, which is also awesome)

[ZombieWife]

I'm also a big fan of Yeats. The Second Coming is pretty damn remarkable.

I love me some T.S. Eliot as well. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is one of my favorite poems to this day.

I've also been reading a lot of Billy Collins. Whenever my prose starts turning to mush, I read some poetry.

Introduction to Poetry

Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

[Contrarius]

Ha! I love that one, thanks for posting it. :)

[Sci-2]

Rain and Sound

by Sergio Ortiz

Listen to me as one listens to the rain:

we are distracted once again. Night

approaches with its dense cloak of fear,

an assault for which there is no cure.

It is never winter here,

yet the hibiscus have been censored

like men trying to show their affection

for each other. Air, water, and flower —

there is no weight in these words.

Night has the figurations of mist.

Listen to me as one listens to the rain:

(Censor my desire for writing you poems.)

Not attentive, not distracted, only as if

I were the rain. Hear me out until

the asphalt is wet. You are you

in night steam. You enter my eyes

as your steam crosses the street.

We are both steam. Steam of another

censored flower.

[Teng Ai Hui]

About 7 or 8 years ago, I was a "para-professional" at a high school in the U.S. My job was to aide a boy in the junior class who had Muscular Dystrophy. He showed me several poems that he had written. The poem below was his favorite, and he asked me to read it for him during the English department's Poetry Day.

“I AM”

by William Thorne Jr.

I am a boy in a wheelchair that writes poetry

I wonder if I will ever walk on my own two feet.

I heard life before I took a breath

I see life flash before my eyes.

I want the world to be as one

I am a boy in a wheelchair that writes poetry.

I pretend to walk across the floor

I feel God’s hand taking mine.

I touch heaven up above

I worry that I might not get to walk.

I cry when someone dear to me passes away.

I am a boy in a wheelchair that writes poetry.

I understand that Muscular Dystrophy is tough

I say that it will be all right.

I dream that there will be a cure.

I try to make the best out of my life.

I hope that time will be on my side

I am a boy in a wheelchair that writes poetry

[Ylva]

Langston Hughes - No Regrets

“Out of love,

No regrets--

Though the goodness

Be wasted forever.

Out of love,

No regrets--

Though the return

Be never.”

Matthew Arnold - Dover Beach

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Alfred Lord Tennyson - Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;

Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;

Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font.

The firefly wakens; waken thou with me.

Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,

And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,

And all thy heart lies open unto me.

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves

A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,

And slips into the bosom of the lake.

So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip

Into my bosom and be lost in me.

Edna St. Vincent Millay - I, Being Born a Woman

I, being born a woman and distressed

By all the needs and notions of my kind,

Am urged by your propinquity to find

Your person fair, and feel a certain zest

To bear your body's weight upon my breast:

So subtly is the fume of life designed,

To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,

And leave me once again undone, possessed.

Think not for this, however, the poor treason

Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,

I shall remember you with love, or season

My scorn wtih pity, -- let me make it plain:

I find this frenzy insufficient reason

For conversation when we meet again.

Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village, though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

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.

(Most of Frost's poems are really great. I also recommend "The Mending Wall" and "The Road Not Taken")

Walt Whitman's - Leaves of Grass, especially this part from 'Song of Myself':

Do I contradict myself?

Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

There's tons more (Dickinson, H.D., Stevie Smith, some of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Pope's 'The Rape of the Lock', Claude McKayy,....)

[Apoapsis]

The Second Coming, quoted earlier in the thread, is a favourite of mine. In general I prefer poetry with a mystical feel to it, ranging from abstract to simple metered verses. Here's another one that I really like (34 verses so I'm not quoting it):

Robert Browning -Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (Wikisource)

And here's one that literary snobs probably wouldn't touch with a ten feet pole, but which, in my mind, is almost as enjoyable as the ones above:

H. P. Lovecraft - Festival (or Yule Horror, I've seen both titles)

There is snow on the ground and the valleys are cold,

and a midnight profound blackly squats o'er the wold;

but a light on the hilltops half-seen hints of feastings unhallowed and old.

There is death in the clouds, there is fear in the night,

for the dead in their shrouds hail the sun's turning flight

and chant wild in the woods as they dance round a Yule-altar fungous and white.

To no gale of Earth's kind sways the forest of oak,

where the thick boughs entwined by mad mistletoes choke,

for these pow'rs are the pow'rs of the dark from the graves of the lost Druid-folk.

And mayst thou to such deeds be an abbot and priest,

singing cannibal creeds at each devil-wrought feast

and to all the incredulous world shewing dimly the sign of the beast.

[Sci-2]

, by Jill Scott

I had been turning tricks longer than I actually knew it.

Being whatever they wanted me to be whenever they wanted me to be it.

A freak, inside, outside kitchen counters, laundry mats, hotels, motels, and backseats of leased cars, vans and jeeps.

Made myself like it 'cause they liked it and I liked that they liked it and so I continued being the perfect image of a wet dream.

Nasty, wild, exotic, erotic, freak was they wanted so freak was who I was and everybody was walking around talking about me.

Like teenage pregnancy wasn't becoming synonymous with being black and woman like America wasn't suffocating our thoughts.

Like there was nothing to talk about what was doing or screwing and I thought the whole damn thing was ridiculous, which it was.

'Cause I was content giving my men a little heaven between their struggle to breathe and their contemplation of suicide.

Wasn't I good for the cause?

Closed mind, open legs, making niggers forget why they're so damn angry.

Wasn't I good?

Then the mood swung as well the tempo and I became an ideal.

They want her pretty and docile, caring and stupid and there I was on your Mark Seth Joe and I was Suzy homemaker on the hunt for love; cooking and cleaning, ironing and faithful and a freak cause that's what they liked and I liked being what they liked so that's what I was.

A prostitute, selling my soul for emotional gain, struggling not to be the third generation of lonely women in my family.

Struggling to gain but gaining nothing but confusion, frustration, illusion, 'cause there was no love, just empty condom wrappers on the floors to be discarded like me.

A prize performer long before I actually knew it too, 'cause I was faking me out of the me I would become.

The me that I see now.

The me that holds onto herself with both hands and all feet.

The me who must have love and give it.

The me who brings more to the table than good looks and a wet hole.

The me that is confident, and intelligent and filled to the brim with respect for me and a freak 'cause that's what I like and I like being what I like and what I like is all a part of what I am.

[JohnWitch]

Many of my favourite poets are Portuguese, like me, and I can't find decent translations to show you guys.

That said, here comes the clichéeeeee: Robert Frost. I seriously love most everything Frost has written.

[Sci-2]

"the oak tree bears its brown of death

beside its bud of green

the livery of breezes north

into the easting spring.

on bare boughs the sentries stand

all papery and dry

the granddad husk remains

to show that all must die.

but to the granddad husk is revealed

the soft vermillion stem

to show that life shall conquer death

and love rule in the end."

-j.r. king

[Sci-2]

A Geology Lesson

Here, the sea strains to climb up on the land

and the wind blows dust in a single direction.

The trees bend themselves all one way

and volcanoes explode often.

Why is this? Many years back

a woman of strong purpose

passed through this section

and everything else tried to follow.

– Judy Grahn, from She Who

[Contrarius]

Another one of my all time favorites, also one that may be scorned by poetry snobs, but I don't care. In the "olden days" when TV stations went off the air for a few hours at night, or at least *signed* off the air (some would then sign right back on), one of the stations I listened to regularly would play this poem every night as their sign-off.

The poet, John Gillespie Magee, was an American pilot who was serving with the Royal Canadian airforce during WWII. He was killed while flying, at age 19. If he could produce this beautiful poem at 19, just think of all the wonderful poetry we lost with his death.

"High Flight"

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air....

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.

Where never lark, or even eagle flew —

And, while with silent lifting mind I have trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

- Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

edited to add -- oh wow, I found the exact video that my station used. I musta seen this about a bazillion times while I was growing up. I think I'm imprinted on this poem --