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seamus2389

Poetry suggestions

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I am looking for poetry suggestions because it is something I only ever read as part of studying English in secondary school. I just started a collection of Robert Graves poetry after his auto-biography being mentioned in the book Skippy dies. I don't care about time period or subject matter or type just poetry/poets ye read and really liked.

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Baudelaire is one of my favourites. There's a handy online version of his Flowers of Evil available (http://fleursdumal.org) with both the original French and English. In terms of something more modern, I really like Paul Celan, but, unless you're into high-Modernist reflections on the loss of meaning following the Holocaust, he's kind of hard to recommend. Rimbaud is also super cool and there's a really awesome collection (Rimbaud: Complete Works trans. Paul Schmidt) of his poems/fragments that weaves them in with letters and biographical details. 

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My taste in poetry is by no means refined, but I'll write down a few books I have enjoyed over the years.

 

  • Muriel Rukeyser, U.S. 1: A fascinating book of radical modernist poetry. Its most famous section "The Book of the Dead" mixes in found documents with original compositions to expose an industrial accident that lead to hundreds of deaths in the 1930s in West Virginia. Not exactly uplifting, but well constructed and original.
  • Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues: A really uneven collection of poems tonally that spans the author's late adolescence into early adulthood. Topics range from his time at sea to his better-known works about race relations. Overall, the work is beautifully simple and profound.
  • Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind: My favorite book of poetry as I was growing up, I think because it is playful in a way that a lot of poetry doesn't seem to be at first. I haven't read it in a few years, but I have fond memories.
  • Robert Frost, North of Boston: I read this a few months ago for my exams, and I was expecting to despise every moment of it. Robert Frost has a number of literary reputations, none of them too flattering. I was surprised how much I enjoyed it, especially in the context of the other modernist poetry of the time. 

That's a weird list.

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I second Langston Hughes' The Weary Blues. It's really, umm, rhythmic I guess. You can basically hear the music, which makes it really fun and easy to read. I also really like The Schooner Flight by Derek Walcott. It's a long poem about a guy sailing around the Caribbean after running out on his family. Keats, I find, is the only Romantic poet that is not a completely self-involved boner, and I really like his later works. Anything of his with "Ode" in the title is good, in my opinion. 

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I've got a copy of The Waste Land that's got more notes in the margin than text in the actual poem.  I've actually got a tattoo of the last line of the poem, "shantih shantih shantih", written on my forearm in Sanskrit.  I absolutely love T.S. Eliot's work; the moody and dark imagery captivated me as an angsty kid but as I got older it still held up and yielded nicely to increased study.  His work, The Waste Land in particular, is unbelievably dense with literary allusions and commentary and all sorts of tasty bits that a reader can uncover with time.

 

That said, when I want something a little lighter, I like Bukowski's poems as a palate-cleanser from the serious stuff.  Most of them are something like:

 

i got up

and then i went to the horse races

boy i got really drunk

my life is shit

 

...but there's an endearing quality to them that I really dig.

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I may have forgotten that I don't hate Wordsworth quiet as much as I do Shelley and Byron. And the thing about Keats is that he got really, really good and then died at like 23. So I'm sad for him and for what could have been if he had been able to kick out work until old age. For that he gets a bit of a pass. Also apparently he used to write stuff and then hide it away. One poem, I don't remember which, was found years later in the pages of a book on a friend's bookshelf. So I like to hold on to this ridiculous notion that there are books out there with unpublished Keats originals, just collecting dust in someone's attic.

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Wallace Stevens' stuff is great. I've always felt like his writing was a challenge in that it asked me to really think about form, ideas, and metaphor.

 

e.e. cummings also writes beautifully.

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I like Adrienne Rich's stuff from the 70's a lot, and 21 Love Poems is one of those works I find myself constantly returning to.

 

In Spanish, Roberto Bolano's poetry is excellent, and there is a bilingual edition that is decent.

 

I can't read Villon in medieval French unfortunately, but I really dig Villon tonally, there is this plainspoken quality that was kind of radical for his time and place, and it speaks to an aesthetic I enjoy in rap music.

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Also try some stuff outside of English lit canon (writers you won't hear about in most high school or 101 courses).

 

Larry Eigner was a revelation for me, personally:

 

http://www.concentric.net/~lndb/leigner1.htm

 

He's sometimes associated with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement but I really think he falls outside of most poetry schools of his time. I later discovered that he suffered from cerebral palsy and that each poem took substantial physical effort to compose, which is visible in the considered and spare quality of his form.

I've also been a fan of Li-Young Lee. A few of his poems are here:

 

http://www.indiana.edu/~primate/lee.html
 

I recommend following Ron Silliman's blog if you're interested in the contemporary poetry scene (lots of links to talks, events, etc):

 

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/

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I really like George Oppen, Lyn Hejinian, John Ashbery, and a lot of people loathe her, but I love Gertrude Stein as well.

Anyone who comes up with "sugar is not a vegetable" gets bonus points in my book.

 

I will also ditto T. S. Eliot. For a time, my own writing was my shoddy attempt to do my best Eliot impersonation, although I think Prufrock is better than The Waste Land.

 

If you're only going to read one of those I mentioned, go for the Oppen though. He's under-appreciated I feel. In particular, Of Being Numerous is utterly fantastic.

 

edit: here's a chunk from the beginning of Of Being Numerous

 

6.
 
We are pressed, pressed on each other,
We will be told at once
Of anything that happens

 

And the discovery of fact bursts
In a paroxysm of emotion
Now as always.   Crusoe

 

We say was
‘Rescued’.
So we have chosen.
 
...
 
19.
 
Now in the helicopters the casual will
Is atrocious

 

Insanity in high places,

If it is true we must do these things

We must cut our throats

 

The fly in the bottle

 

Insane, the insane fly

 

Which, over the city

Is the bright light of shipwreck

 
 
 


 

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I like G.K. Chesterton poems though, like all his stuff, it fluctuates wildly in terms of quality and carefulness. (Probably because many of the things he wrote had their beginnings as Newspaper Jokes). The Ballad of the White Horse is a good long poem, and A Ballade of Suicide is a good short one. (Also these

he wrote to Charles Darwin's granddaughter).

 

Alternatively: The Day They Make Me Gorgeous by a man named Rives, is a thing you could listen to.

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I like Abdul Wahhab al-Bayati, an Iraqi writer. I think his only English translation is pretty darn good (Love, Death and Exile)

Otherwise just the standards written above.

Random sad poetry story: I have never cared much for Frost but my grandmother really liked him. She couldn't talk when she was on her deathbed so I just read her Frost poems on the afternoon before the day she died. It seemed like it helped her some so the guy can't be all bad.

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Pablo Neruda is great. So is Rumi. Both wrote a lot about love and did it really well. Rumi can be very devastating to read if you think about it too much (Like This used to be a poem that cheered me up and now it's a poem that just makes me feel completely drained), but it's beautiful however you choose to think about it. The only Neruda collection that I can't recommend is Spain in the Heart. It's a collection of poems he wrote about/during the Spanish Civil War and it just feels rushed and lackluster, and requires too much study of his life to really get much out of it. It's maybe one of the most personal collections of his poetry for this reason, but it takes too much effort. One poem is just a list of cities/towns, which can be meaningful if you research it but on first read it's just tedious. I think the standard leaping point for Neruda is Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, which is a truly breathtaking work.

 

If you ever went through that goth phase in high school, Rimbaud's A Season in Hell always makes me think fondly of how ridiculous that time was.

 

Alexander Pope is a really fun read to me, but a lot of people consider him dry. He was a really fascinating guy who wrote really interesting poetry, though. An Essay on Criticism was the first poem I read by him and I think it's still my favorite.

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You can't go wrong with Yeats.  He wrote my favorite poem, The Cloths of Heaven, which Sean Bean reads in the movie, Equilibrium.  His character loves the poem as much as I do!

 

I don't know if anyone mentioned Poe already, but he's still a good pick.  He's not the best poet, but you can't go wrong with a twisted Poe poem.  Or maybe you can.  Whatever, man!

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Agree with everyone re Keats. The biography Posthumous Keats by Stanley Plumly is a -great- read if you are interested in his crazy short life, and To Autumn remains one of my favorite poems.

Seamus Heaney is great fun to read. His reputation and talent is well-deserved and I'm not sure you can go wrong with any of his collections. I'm quite fond of his later stuff in particular, including his last collection (Human Chain).

I've always loved Gerard Manley Hopkins, even beyond the requisite mention in English poetry collections.

More recent, I enjoy Robin Robertson. The Wrecking Light has some poems that leave me breathless.

If you're interested in diving into Japanese haiku, Matsuo Basho is as good as any to start. It can take a bit of time and developing of your sensibility to appreciate them, especially in translation, but it's well worth the effort. One of the joys I've experienced living in Japan is visiting some of the famous sites Basho composed certain haiku at. It's doubly satisfying when you see a monument erected in its and his honor at the site. How many US poets can say the same? Hah!

I used to spend hours sitting in front of the poetry section of B&N, flipping through books. Really glad to see this thread posted. Not familiar with Cloths of Heaven though, I'll check it out right now!

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I just started to get into poetry myself, and just begun to read Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil, a great read so far. I've very little knowledge and experience with other poetry, I've read some of H.P. Lovecraft's poetry and I really admire his work. Also read some Pushkin which I recommend. I think Baudelaire/Lovecraft is the kind of style of poetry I would like to read more of, so If anyone has any recommendations it would be very much appreciated. Haven't read much Poe so, maybe I will.  :P

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Not much help for your particular avenue of interest, Veckodag, but it just occurs to me that this thread has somehow improbably escaped any mention of ubuweb. It tends to be rather the deep end experimental stuff, but there is a lots to dig through (much of which I personally find fascinating, but it's certainly not everyone's cup of tea). There is a lot of video and audio on the site, but for textual stuff, the ubu editions publications might might be a reasonable place to start.

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