Apr 1, 2009
I want to read your favorite poems.
It’s National Poetry Month.
To begin the festivities, how about linking to a favorite poem, poet, or poetry book in the comments?
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Related:
• 22 contemporary poets worth reading
• A lesson from Lewis on how to look at poetry
• Garrison Keillor likes my poem.
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T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men is mine for sure:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~richie/poetry/html/poem74.html
The sad thing is that reading a poem because it’s someone’s favorite doesn’t necessarily give you insight into why. But for what it’s worth: Love Calls Us To the Things of This World by Richard Wilbur.
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~richie/poetry/html/poem98.html
Shel Silverstein, is one of our most favorite authors!!
Dietrich Bonhoeffer- Who am I?
http://sojochick.blogspot.com/2005/09/who-am-i.html
For those of us who feel weakness that others don’t see.
I enjoy Naomi Shihab Nye’s poetry. My copy of Words Under the Words is well thumbed.
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/174
A couple classic favorites:
Love III by George Herbert
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16121
Holy Sonnet 14 by John Donne
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20308
http://books.google.com/books?id=GO1VK5Np29gC&printsec=frontcover&dq=babylon+in+a+jar#PPA59,M1
There is power in the everyday.
I would recommend The poet Odgen Nash. His poetry is unlike any that I have seen. Fun, thoughtful, lighthearted, witty, rhythmically without rhythm. in every way a delightful contradiction.
http://www.aenet.org/poems/ognash2.htm
enjoy
Our recent family favorite…Love That Dog by Sharon Creech. You can read the opening chapter (yes, chapter) here…
http://www.sharoncreech.com/excerpt/01.asp
This poem by George Herbert that Tony Reinke posted awhile ago has become my favorite poem. Enjoy it here: http://spurgeon.wordpress.com/2008/03/22/love-iii/
[For Orison]
SPRING by
Myra Cohn Livingston
Spring skips lightly
On a thin crust of snow,
Pokes her fragrant fingers
In the ground far below,
Searches for the sleeping seeds
Hiding in the cracked earth,
Sticks a straw of sunshine down
And whispers words to grow:
O seed
And root,
Send forth a tiny shoot!
Spring brings out her baseball bat,
Swings it through the air,
Pitches bulbs and apple blossoms,
Throws them where it’s bare,
Catches dogtooth violets,
Slides to meadowsweet,
Bunts a breeze and tags the trees
With green buds everywhere.
O April,
March and May,
Come watch us at our play!
Spring pipes at the peeper frogs,
mocks the mockingbird,
Hears a ring of harebells,
A mourning dove’s soft word,
Bubbles with stream waters,
Splatters with warm rain,
Listens to the rustling
A wakening breeze has stirred.
O Laugh
And sing,
Give welcome to Spring!
I love The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry!
Some Ogden Nash
The Hound and the Porcupine
A hound that a porcupine nudges,
Should not be blamed for harboring grudges.
Why, I know a hound who laughed all winter
At a porcupine that sat on a splinter.
And then Mr. Nash claimed this was the worlds’ shortest poem:
Fleas
Adam
Had’em
Robert Frost still makes me cry. Try reading “The Death of a Hired Man” out loud.
A recent favorite is Taylor Mali, “For the Life of Me”.
My friend Ashley is an amazing poet. Here is one on her blog.
http://ashleybbeck.blogspot.com/2009/03/irresolute-and-resolved.html
The Canadian poet Archibald Lampman
http://tinyurl.com/c5zag4
and particularly his wonderful Snow which so perfectly describes a snowy late afternoon
http://tinyurl.com/csms34
and The Child’s Music Lesson
http://tinyurl.com/cq5stt
Taylor Mali, slam poet extraordinaire.
http://www.taylormali.com/
Anything by George Herbert
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/herbert/
Your Dad’s Advent Poems
Richard Wilbur’s small book “Mayflies.”
Valley of Vision
http://www.banneroftruth.org/pages/dailydevotion_detail.php?898
I usually don’t write anything I think is worth putting out there. But, I did write this in college.
The assignment: A descriptive poem.
The result, as disturbing as it is:
http://basilicacommunity.com/joel/poem/
Herbert, Donne, and Neil Schindler
There Comes the Strangest Moment, by Kate Light
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2003/03/20
The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson.
http://www.bartleby.com/236/239.html
I love Wendell Berry , his poetry and his fiction.
“Walking Around” by Pablo Neruda. It took some time to find this particular translation. It’s from the Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry. I can’t remember the name of the translator and my copy is at home.
Best when read out loud:
http://orade.blogspot.com/2005/04/walking-around-p-neruda.html
Even better when read out loud AND standing up.
the darkling thrush by thomas hardy
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15506
Mine is Li-Young Lee and you can watch this for a good introduction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQG_vHjhYv8&feature=related
C. S. Lewis:
Joys that Sting
http://conqueringpoet.blogspot.com/2004/09/joys-that-sting.html
As the Ruin Falls:
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/as-the-ruin-falls-2
George Herbert::
Jordan
http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/george-herbert/jordan/
John Donne:
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/mourning.php
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Lantern Out of Doors.”
http://www.bartleby.com/122/10.html
I wrote this for my wife (then fiancee) for Valentines Day two years ago. She liked it.
“The screen door, cranky from cold
slams behind me
I navigate the icy stone steps
Bracing myself for the wind’s punch
Naked trees set against dreary clouds
Flat white snow and dirty cars
Dead streets with no songbird welcome
All drowned in dull darkness
But there you are
Soft blue eyes
Sunny curls
With your kiss
The steely chains of Winter fall
From your smile springs Summer”
The poem my husband wrote to propose to me with. It’s 96 lines of Iambic Tetrameter in Rhyming Couplets, so says my husband. It will always be my favorite poem, not just due to sentimentality but because it is so beautifully written.
http://tristanandmelissa.com/Site/The_Proposal.html
As an English Major and a future English educator, I’ve read quite a few poems. It takes a lot to get on my ‘favorites’ list because of this. There is one poem, however, that gets to me every time I read it. I feel that it greatly expresses how it feels to be captured by something, specifically expressing how I’ve felt when I’ve been caught in sin. It is also a reminder that better days are still to come- Praise the Lord! That poem that is closest to my heart is Sympathy by Paul Laurence Dunbar. I hope you like it as much as I do.
http://www.dunbarsite.org/gallery/Sympathy.asp
(Apparently Maya Angelou liked it too, because this is where she got “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” from.)
i love E.E. Cummings with an undying love, but i think i’ve expressed this too many times in general. i tend to like 20th century stuff.
but today, in the spirit of spring (and people who like rhyming poetry):
Ogden Nash – “Always Marry an April Girl”
William Wordsworth – “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
The Journey of the Magi T.S. Eliot
Had to learn it in college 25 years ago and still love it.
http://www.blight.com/~sparkle/poems/magi.html
Also love ; THE TYGER (from Songs Of Experience) By William Blake
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~keith/poems/tyger.html
I second Andy’s selection of Wendell Berry. his latest book of Poems: The Mad Farmer Poems, I highly recommend.
Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass!
“I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died” by E. Dickinson grabbed my attention as a teenager and has not let go.
I’ve been told that many people used to gather around the dying one to watch their exit from this world. One example is the famous painting of Abraham Lincoln on his deathbed.
That’s the context of this poem with the writer being the one who is dying. But in the midst of death, she notices a fly buzzing around the room.
How bizarre is that?
PS How’d you like my use of singular “their”? I tried other options, but they just didn’t seem as effective.
“Every Time I Climb a Tree” by David McCord
Orison will love this!
http://www.strangelove.net/~kieser/Poetry/tree.html
Also:
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost
http://www.online-literature.com/frost/751/
There are more–I’ll have to dig them up and stop back later…
Since it’s poetry month, you’ve got to check out the website “random haiku”–especially this video:
http://randomhaiku.wordpress.com/2008/09/20/kids-canucks-and-haiku/
I’m not sure where I found this originally–it might have been here!
I do love The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock by T. S. Eliot.
Do I dare to disturb the universe? Prufrock didn’t. (He wasn’t Prince Hamlet.) But I plan to be a little more bold than that.
[...] is national poetry month. HT twenty two words Prose don’t tell the story nor the squawking of birds PG is a prose kind of guy a tall gray [...]
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/note.php?note_id=59917327049
“Heavenward” by Thomas Lynch
A triplet of sonnets on John 14:6 by DA Carson
this is the only place I could find it online.
http://cbumgardner.wordpress.com/2007/12/09/d-a-carson-sonnets-and-john-146/
Messenger by Mary Oliver:
http://longonstaying.blogspot.com/2009/02/messenger.html
As Kingfishers Catch Fire by Gerard Manley Hopkins that I found in Eugene Petersons writings (Christ plays in ten thousand places)
http://liambyrnes.co.uk/2008/06/20/as-kingfishers-catch-fire/
The Cross by Stewart Henderson
http://liambyrnes.co.uk/2006/03/22/the-cross/
[...] Abraham Piper is asking to read his readers favourite poems as part of National Poetry Month (in the US), so I submitted a couple that I have featured on this blog before that have an impact on me. [...]
Oh, so many, and some have been mentioned, and I am a big fan of Christina Rossetti and especially Monna Innominata. But here is a simple modern one that takes my fancy – Red Bird by Mary Oliver (it’s a link to my blog cause I can’t find it elsewhere).
http://mannainomers.blogspot.com/2008/08/poetry-anyday-red-bird.html
Eliot’s Four Quartets, especially “East Coker” and most especially the fourth movement/part:
http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/coker.html
Just one?
“The Sacrifice” – George Herbert
http://www.ccel.org/h/herbert/temple/Sacrifice.html
“The Convert” – GKC
http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/convert.html
And also “Americanisation”
http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/americanisation.html
I’m having a hard time picking a favorite, but one that I like is Robert Frost’s – Nothing Gold Can Stay. Take it away Pony Boy…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwJ-ppxCGPk
Abraham, when did you start modeling for Qwest? http://room34.com/wp-content/uploads/img_0821.jpg
Haunting…but great.
ALONE by Edgar A. Poe:
http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/poe/alone.html
I know, you said to “link” it, but I’m not aware of any link and it’s worth typing out:
PRAYER
by C.S. Lewis
Master, they say that when I seem
To be in speech with you,
Since you make no replies, it’s all a dream,
-One talker aping two.
They are half right, but not as they
Imagine; rather, I
Seek in myself the things I meant to say,
And lo! the wells are dry.
The, seeing me empty you forsake
The Listener’s role, and through
My dead lips breathe and into utterance wake
The thoughts I never knew.
And thus you neither need reply
Nor can; thus, while we seem
Two talking, thou art One forever, and I
No dreamer, but thy dream.
How about my favorite poem written by me?
http://jamsco.wordpress.com/2007/03/18/saturday-poem-3/
“somewhere i have traveled,gladly beyond”
by e.e.cummings
http://poetry.eserver.org/somewhere.txt
oops. forgot a key word!
–> “somewhere i have never traveled,gladly beyond”
“Wild Nights” – My favorite poem, by the incomparable Emily Dickinson.
http://www.bartleby.com/113/3025.html
It’s hard to determine who is the greater 20th century American poet:
Wallace Stevens
or
William Carlos Williams
But one of them
is
the greatest.
“The Lamb” by William Blake
http://poetry.about.com/od/poems/l/blblakelamb.htm
Anything by Anthony Hecht. Or Auden.
I agree with Jennifer on T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, although Little Gidding is my personal favorite.
But possibly more favorite is this:
The Risk of Birth, Christmas, 1973
[by Madeleine L'Engle, in The Weather of the Heart]
This is no time for a child to be born,
With the earth betrayed by war & hate
And a comet slashing the sky to warn
That time runs out & the sun burns late.
That was no time for a child to be born,
In a land in the crushing grip of Rome;
Honour & truth were trampled by scorn–
Yet here did the Saviour make his home.
When is the time for love to be born?
The inn is full on the planet earth,
And by a comet the sky is torn–
Yet Love still takes the risk of birth.
olena kalytiak davis’ _and her soul out of nothing_ is the most amazing collection of poems i’ve ever read. it took me days to digest. her writing is cheeky and richly evocative.
I love the following poem by Pablo Neruda, although it’s not quite the same in translation as in Spanish. (It’s recited by Andy Garcia in the soundtrack to the movie “Il Postino/The Postman”). It’s so sad, but many who have had their heart broken can probably identify with it:
“Tonight I can write the saddest lines”
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example,’The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.’
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another’s. She will be another’s. Like my kisses before.
Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
“In The City of Light” – Larry Levis
“Language Lessons” – Heather McHugh
“The Blossom” – Eavan Boland
“Tagging the Stealer” – Greg Delanty
“Kicking the Leaves” – Donald Hall
“What I Learned from My Mother” – Julia Kasdorf
“The Ball” – Wislawa Szymborska
“”The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart” – Jack Gilbert
“The Silence” – Philip Schultz
“To the Sorrow String” – W.S. Merwin
“After Disappointment” – Mark Jarman
http://pastoralmusings.com/2009/01/22/blessed-hope/