Does anyone here enjoy poetry? If yes, what are your gateway drug poems and what are your hidden gems?
So as an American whose love of poetry started in early childhood with A A Milne and Lewis Carroll, I have a theory that the teaching of poetry in typical schools (at least for my generation which may be 30 years out of date re what happens now) that poetry as taught is almost tailor made to destroy any interest in poetry. I like to compare it to introducing music by teaching music theory.
So, if anyone here reads poetry and is willing to talk about it, what poems would you use if you wanted to come up with a gateway drug. They should be easy to appreciate. And on the flip side, if you met someone who said they were really into poetry, are there sophisticated poems that you think are just cool and insightful and moving and impressive in some way? Please feel free to explain your choices or to talk about your experience with poetry in or outside of education.
For an accessible poet I think you can’t go past Mary Oliver. I have a quote from her prominently displayed on my phone which says “instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Which really comes across in her work. Most of her poems (I can’t claim to have read them all) are quiet musings on life from a person who obviously has a deep love and appreciation of the world, and it makes it very easy to understand what she’s saying. There’s not a lot of hidden meaning and metaphor to wade through, just beauty
I came here to say this. Mary Oliver writes with a clarity and brevity - saying just enough, never too much - that I find lacking in other poetry.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do, with your one wild and precious life?”
The Summer Day
That line is so so stunning isn’t it?! She’s a master of words
I enjoy poetry, but I don't have a brain for it. I can never seem to remember poets names, let alone explore their work.
I would like to get better at it. Perhaps I should pick up a collection of poems and just dive in.
Of the few poems I do know, I am a big fan of this poem by Joy Harjo that I find inredibly beautiful.
Thank you, that is an amazing poem.
I agree with all your sentiments about sharing poetry, but my solution has always been to focus on particularly good poems vs. universally good ones. My best results in sharing the love of poetry has been by tailoring my offerings to the specific tastes or personality of the person I'm engaged with. Naturally, this is impossible to do in this context, but I'll share a few examples of my touch-stone poets.
One of my favorite go-to poets is Arthur Rimbaud. I've noticed that people who are unfamiliar with Rimbaud are less likely to get caught up in his mythos and, ironically, tend to read his poems closer to the way they were intended. Rimbaud's words and imagery are raw, and he appeals directly to those nonconformists with a lust for life.
Evening Prayer by Arthur Rimbaud
I live my life sitting, like an angel in a barber's chair,
A big fluted beer mug in my hand, neck and hypogastrus
Arched, a cheap Gambier pipe between my teeth,
And the air above me swollen with sails of smoke.
Like steaming droppings in an old dovecote
A thousand Dreams within me gently burn:
And at times my sad heart is like sapwood
Bleeding dark yellow gold where a branch is torn.
Then, when I've methodically drowned my dreams
With thirty or forty beers, I pull myself together
And release my bitter need:
Sweet as the Lord of Hyssop and Cedar,
I piss into the brown sky, far and wide,
Heliotropes blessing me below.
Another favorite is Sylvia Plath—her contribution to the confessional style of poetry cannot be overstated and, hence, her poems still feel radically personal to the modern ear. Her voice and instincts for rhyme and sound is as it good as it gets in the English language.
Daddy by Sylvia Plath
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time——
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.
If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
One of the great tragedies of poetry, in my opinion, is that the great bulk of Sappho's poems have been lost to history. All we have are fragments preserved on things like recovered pottery, but Sappho still stands as a world-class poet. Her love poems are some of the best ever written.
‘He’s equal with the Gods, that man’ by Sappho
He’s equal with the Gods, that man
Who sits across from you,
Face to face, close enough, to sip
Your voice’s sweetness,
And what excites my mind,
Your laughter, glittering. So,
When I see you, for a moment,
My voice goes,
My tongue freezes. Fire,
Delicate fire, in the flesh.
Blind, stunned, the sound
Of thunder, in my ears.
Shivering with sweat, cold
Tremors over the skin,
I turn the colour of dead grass,
And I’m an inch from dying.
For a modern American poetry novitiate, Allen Ginsberg is surely a poet one must traverse sooner rather than later. The Beat Generation helped blow open poetry access to the masses in the age of prime-time television and golden-age cinema. Ginsberg remained relevant for decades thereafter, but few poems speaks to mental illness and creative vision better than his most famous work, Howl. This poem works best if you read it straight through, following the jazz-improvisation stream-of-consciousness style with an appropriate internal narrative. Sitting and pondering lines is best for a second or third read.
Disclaimer: This is a long read, and if you don't get into it in the first several stanzas, I wouldn't bother following it to the end unless you have time.
Howl by Allen Ginsberg
For Carl Solomon
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalogue a variable measure and the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
III
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 very 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 humor
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 the 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
San Francisco, 1955—1956
Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. As a kid I did love a lot of his sillier and more chaotic stuff, but something about that specific poem was so haunting and beautiful it influenced what I read and the way I wrote for years afterward. I still know it by heart and recite it to my baby to calm her down.
I will start. Some poems I would happily share with non poetry lovers are Auden's Funeral Blues, Dylan Thomas Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, Alfred Noyes the Highwayman, Elizabeth Bishop One Art, Many by Robert Service including the Cremation of Sam McGee, the Shooting of Dan McGrew, The Men Who Don't Fit In, The Spell of the Yukon, Wilfred Owen Disabled, and that's enough to start.
A couple I think are less well known and special, maybe sophisticated, are E L Mayo the Questioners and Adrienne Rich Transcendental Etude.
I feel like I'm taking a risk, but we have more than 20,000 users here. Is anyone interested?
https://allpoetry.com/Funeral-Blues
https://poets.org/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43187/the-highwayman
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47536/one-art
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45081/the-cremation-of-sam-mcgee
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45082/the-shooting-of-dan-mcgrew
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58012/the-men-that-dont-fit-in
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46643/the-spell-of-the-yukon
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57285/disabled
https://uuwestport.org/transcendental-etude/ (this one is long)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/y45moj/poem_the_questioners_by_e_l_mayo_published_in/
Sorry for the reddit link, the search results for the Questioners online seem to be dead which is a shame. I love this poem.
My grandfather used to love reading The Cremation of Sam McGee to my cousins and I, in his deep baritone voice. I grew up on Robert Service, Dennis Lee, and Shel Silverstein.
More recently, the stuff by Shane Koyczan has been particularly accessible.
Two of my favourites are Bukowski poems, namely ‘Bluebird’ and ‘Roll The Dice’, the latter being one that always gives me huge motivation when standing on the precipice of change, but both elicit a deep melancholy that sits closely to my heart.
This reading of Bluebird is particularly moving as well.
Bluebird
Roll The Dice
I don't know too much about poetry but there are two which I love and feel very "accessible" to me:
The first is from Abarat by Clive Barker
Witch, do this for me,
Find me a moon
made of longing.
Then cut it sliver thin,
and having cut it,
hang it high
above my beloved's house,
so that she may look up
tonight
and see it,
and seeing it, sigh for me
as I sigh for her,
moon or no moon.
The second is from Laura Gilpin
The Two-Headed Calf
Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.
But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.
One of my favorites is Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens
Some excerpts:
My favorite poem that I share with everyone was one that I was introduced to in high school English class: O Me! O Life! By Walt Whitman. I feel like it was a good gateway poem, so to speak, because it presents a relatively simple viewpoint. When confronted with the question many of us ponder at some point (how can I find life valuable in an uncertain and harsh would?) Whitman also spells out an answer that anyone can unpack. As the historian behind one of my favorite podcasts says: throughout history, when humans find their lives tough they tend to write poetry. O Me! O Life! introduced me to that way of sharing a struggle through poetry.
For a slightly alternative take I enjoy Loyle Carner who has some spoken word stuff. I usually cringe at spoken word but the two paired songs one from him and one from his mother are really enjoyable to me
Dear Jean (from him to his mum) opens the album: https://youtu.be/OBXzY2W0iJ8
Dear Ben (from his mum to him) closes the album: https://youtu.be/SWurekfWpuU
Dear Ben is amazing, a really incredible close to a great album.
I'm not someone who knows too much about poetry. But there is something I love about evocative prose, something I wish I could emulate. Even with my limited knowledge and (as you aptly mentioned) despite the public school system, I do have a poem that has always stuck with me and influenced a lot of my interests and creative pursuits. That would be Samuel Taylor Coleridge's epic The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
The feelings of isolation and desolation he provokes in describing the particular madness of the sea that so many others have written about completely swept me away the first time I read it. The story pulled me through time and space and trapped me on that ship with the Mariner. So many lines from it live rent-free in my head, too ("water, water, everywhere..."). It likely singlehandedly instilled in me a love of the eldritch lore of the open ocean, and the tales of the sailors who sail it. It's truly a classic for a reason.
One of my favorites is Song of Myself, 7 by Walt Whitman:
One of my favorite collections is The Branch Will Not Break, by James Wright. I think it's very accessible, and it's a great combination of Americana and zen. (FWIW, I don't love the "empty grave extended edition" version.)
Robert Frost was one of my early favourites, and that got me into the transcendentalists.
A more recent one I've really enjoyed is Wendell Berry. He got a lot of exposure through Parks and Rec (a show I hate-watched), and he deserves every bit of acclaim he's received.
I’m not too into poetry, I think just because I have to be in a specific mood for it. And I take the poetry books in as a whole rather than poem by poem.
That being said, I adored Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing. I’ve been a big fan of him my whole life (thanks mom) so it was a natural sell for me. He was a true word weaver, that much is certain. I definitely intend to check out some of his other works when the mood strikes again.
I've always loved High Flight by John Gillespie Magee Jr., a pilot during WWII describing the joy of flight. Goosebumps every time.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/157986/high-flight-627d3cfb1e9b7
I love poetry. I think the gateways for me as a child were probably the collection "A Child's Garden of Verse" and also the cautionary tales by Hilaire Belloc.