In no particular order:

Paul Simon, Ogden Nash, T. S. Geisel

Song of Hiawatha

WC Williams
Bob Hicok
James Tate
Margaret Atwood
Seamus Haeney
Elizabeth Bishop
Kim Addinizio (spelling?)
TS Eliot

To name a few...

Why do you ask?

Lord Byron, Dylan Thomas, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edgar Allen Poe.... oh, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Wordsworth, among many of the other greats from the Romantic era and early American. Kahlil Gibran another, and Antoine du Saint-Exepery'.

I enjoy Maya Angelou's somewhat. She's been gone for almost one year already.

Love Pearl Buck's prose style writing.

Don't care as much for what passes as modern poetry. Styles do change with the times!

Shel Silverstein, Bob Dylan, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman.

Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley,Homer, Sappho, Virgil, Horace, Catullus,and Ovid.

Billy Collins, poet laureate from 2001-2003 (for his humor).

Mary Oliver ("House of Light")

Mark Doty

Hafiz (ecstatic Sufi poetry)

Pablo Neruda

Jack Marshall

Victor Jara

mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful. . ."

I've loved those images for decades, plus the fact that he got away with not using capital letters in his name.

Walt Whitman, Rumi, Hafiz, Dickenson, Tennyson

Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur" "The Windhover"
T.S. Eliot, "J.Alfred Prufrock", "Ash Wednesday"
Muriel Rukeyser. "Rotten Lake Elegy"
John Keats, "Eve of Saint Agnes" "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"
Mathew Arnold, "Dover Beach'
William Butler Yeats, just about everything, especially "Song of the Wandering Aengus", "The Two Trees"
Allen Ginzburg, "Kaddish"
Emily Dickinson "The Soul Selects its Own Society", many others
Stephen Vincent Benet, "Skater of Ghost Lake"
Mary Oliver, "The Journey" and just about everything I have read by her
e.e. Cummings, "All In Green Went My Love Riding"
Alfred Noyes "The Highwayman"
Ezra Pound "In A Station of the Metro"
Wifred Owen "Dulce et Decorum Est" "Strange Meeting"
William Blake "Jerusalem" "The Tyger"

May Swenson.

She was a lesbian.

She was raised a Mormon and left TSCC the second she could. She was a foremost poet in lesbian circles.

She was also my Aunt. I wrote to her partner a number of years ago, and even though she was advanced in years at the time, she answered my letter with a handwritten one. I never met her partner, and for that, I'm sad.

I love the great poets, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, e.e. Cummings, Bill Shakespeare, et al. But sometimes, a poem from an obscure poet really strikes me. Check out this one written by Anselm Parlatore in 1971:

The Field Witch

Often the mountain gorilla
is seen leaning out of the mist
huge and curious
like an old field witch
her shack a protective cave
the smoke there sweet
and strange.

My eyes leave footprints
on the underside
of leaves.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/17/2015 10:38AM by donbagley.

Lovely poem, Don. I like some obscure stuff too, just could not think of it offhand.
Levi, I like May Swenson , some things she wrote about cats. How cool that she was your aunt!

I forgot to add to my previous list; Dylan Thomas, "Fern Hill" and "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"

Shakespeare's Sonnets, especially the one with the line about "bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang"

Also one the censor would not let through due to naughty word:-)
"The Owl and the "Kittycat" by Edward Lear. My favorite since age 4!

ee cummings:

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]
BY E. E. CUMMINGS
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Charles Bukowski

Dylan Thomas

Langston Hughes

And a cast of thousands

For all of us who know what it is to become the book on quiet nights when the world is calm:


The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

--Wallace Stevens--

Robert Service

Roethke, Bukowski, cummings, Hughes, Waits, zevon

Waits and Zevon.... How could I forget?

Many of those listed.

Musicians are some of the most powerful poets: Bono/U2...

We should compile exmo poems, a mix of grief, shunning, freedom...

A lot of what is on the list already, thus far already, plus...

Wendell Berry (born August 5, 1934) is an American novelist, poet, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. A prolific author, he has written dozens of novels, short stories, poems, and essays.

http://brtom.typepad.com/wberry/

Many others, including Kahlil Gibran,

Edward Abby [POET ENOUGH]

"When Edward Abbey died in 1989 at the age of sixty-two, the American West lost one of its most eloquent and passionate advocates. Through his novels, essays, letters and speeches, Edward Abbey consistently voiced the belief that the West was in danger of being developed to death, and that the only solution lay in the preservation of wilderness. Abbey authored twenty-one books in his lifetime, including Desert Solitaire, The Monkey Wrench Gang, The Brave Cowboy, and The Fool's Progress. His comic novel The Monkey Wrench Gang helped inspire a whole generation of environmental activism. A writer in the mold of Twain and Thoreau, Abbey was a larger-than-life figure as big as the West itself."

and Mowlānā Jalāloddin Balkhi, known in Persia as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī, and in the West simply as (Jelaluddin) Rumi.

A good Rumi resource (of many): http://peacefulrivers.homestead.com/rumipoetry1.html

Try some of these out:

My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there.

Either give me more wine or leave me alone.

Set your life on fire. Seek those who fan your flames.

The wound is the place where the Light enters you.

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.

You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life.

Listen, because you're drunk
and we're at the edge of the roof.

The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.

When I am with you, we stay up all night. When you're not here, I can't go to sleep.
Praise God for those two insomnias!
And the difference between them.

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.

Travel brings power and love back into your life.

Forget safety.
Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation.
Be notorious.

Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.

Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought!
Why do you stay in prison
When the door is so wide open?

Listen! Clam up your mouth and be silent like an oyster shell, for that tongue of yours is the enemy of the soul, my friend. When the lips are silent, the heart has a hundred tongues.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/17/2015 02:25PM by moremany.

I loved that. Thank you.

One of my favorites:

A Poem,

Thoughts Are Things.
"I hold it true that thoughts are things;
They're endowed with bodies and breath and wings;

And that we send them forth to fill
The world with good results, or ill.

That which we call our secret thought
Speeds forth to earth's remotest spot,

Leaving its blessings or its woes
Like tracks behind it as it goes.

We build our future thought by thought,
For good or ill, yet know it not.

Yet, so the universe was wrought.
Thought is another name for fate;

Choose, then, thy destiny and wait,
For love brings love and hate brings hate."

~ Henry Van Dyke 1852-1933

Mary Oliver. I started a Intro to Poetry class at community college, but for health reasons, had to get an AW.

cricket Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The deepest verbal imagery of .... and Dr Suess

Right! That's what I said, T.S. Geisel!!

Check out his hilariously grim description of the decline of western civ:

I am a moron and this is my wife
She's frosting the cake with a paper knife
All that we got here's American made
It's a little bit cheesy, but it's nicely displayed
Well, we don't excited when it crumbles and breaks
We just get on the phone and call up some flakes
They rush on over and wreck it some more
And we are so dumb, they're lining up at our door
The toilet went crazy yesterday afternoon
The plumber he says, "Never flush a tampoon"
This great information cost me half a week's pay
And the toilet blew up later on the next day

We are millions and millions, we're coming to get you
We're protected by unions, so don't let it upset you
Can't escape the conclusion, it's probably God's will
That civilization will grind to a standstill



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/18/2015 10:56AM by donbagley.