Hi
Here is an idea?
I am always interested in reading poetry but give more of my time to writing. Although I have quite a few poetry books you just can't cover it all can you??? I am also interested in what really turns others on poetically speaking.

What do you think of the idea of posting 'favourite' or most recent likes/ finds of already published poems and briefly saying why you like those poems in particular. This might be an opportunity to read new stuff that you wouldn't necessarily buy or seek on the electronic box??

Let me know what you think??

I look forward to hearing you all

Tina

I think that this is a great idea.

you should check out poetry groups 2's archive - paul attempted to start something like this.

jewelsx

keep me updated

<Added>

you will find it under the title of 'Personal favourites'

Hi Tina,

Perhaps as a poetry group host I should not admit this, but ...

I often pop into the local library and pick up a handful of poetry anthologies. Many of them get returned not having been given my full attention.

A poet either grabs you or leaves you cold. Sure, we can investigate technique and discover why they wrote as they did, and what they were trying to say, but it doesn't mean they will then "grab" you when they didn't before. Many historical poets still make me turn to the next page.

Poetry is so personal to the reader that giving out lists might have a counter-effect. I, for example, have a few poems I regularly return to. I have one poem that called me back to poetry after a decade and a half trying to be a fiction writer. If I named them, most will look them up and say: "Eh?"

If you want them anyway, here they are:

[q]Poems I keep returning to:
Osymandius of Egypt by Shelley
Marina by T S Eliot
Four Quartets by T S Eliot

Modern poets who get me to read the whole anthology:
Wendy Cope
John Hegley

Poem that made me return to poetry after years away [because it was different and vibrant]:
Out of the East by James Fenton [Out of Danger anthology][/q]

Paul
*

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OK Paul

Here is my contribution given on the understanding that if you don't put 'sommat' down you don't get any replies!! ANd I would really like some dialogue here .............

I agree with you about things having to grab you -it is that ten second thing - you read and just know - like visiting a house or looking at a painting you know right away.
For me it has to be about beauty so here is a poem which for me is just beautiful. I could mention many others but for this one I could use the word sublime........

Spring by Mary Oliver

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring,

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel
her tongue,

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else
my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

Tina,

Great poem. never come across it or her before. I'll bookmark her and look up more of her work as and when.

I'm glad you raised "that ten second thing". This is all an agent, publisher or editor is going to give the work of someone unknown. Hopefully if uploaded work grabs folk here within the "safe" confines of this site, it will also grab out in the shark-infested waters. Again, we can return to personal taste - and hope the big cheeses like our style, but most of them are canny enough to see potential, even if they act as tactfully as Simon Cowell.

Paul

http://cgee.hamline.edu/see/oliver/see_an_oliv.html

Hi Paul

use this link to read more of her poetry - American and a bit 60's but ownderful writing if you like - wilderness.

Seems this dialogue is turning into a two horse race - talking of horses - what about - this another American - (I do like a lot of English poets too but have a wonderful CD called - 3 Dozen Poems - read by Garrison Keillor - he of Lake Wobegon fame - wonderful - you can get it on Amazon - anyway hope you enjoy this one.


Names of Horses


All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul sledges of cordwood for
drying through spring and summer, for the Glenwood stove next winter,
and for the simmering range.

In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with
oats. All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the
mowing machine clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in
the morning;

and after noon's heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same
acres,gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,
and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn,
three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning.

Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load
a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns.
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.

When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending
to graze,one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed
you every morning,led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above
Eagle Pond, and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering
in your skin,

and lay the shotgun's muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your
ear,and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave,
shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,
where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.

For a hundred and fifty years, in the Pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground - old toilers, soil makers:

O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.


Donald Hall from Kicking the Leaves (1978)

Hi Tina, and Paul. Found my way to this discussion at last.

On 'a poet either grabs you or leaves you cold', it's true some poems/poets give you a bear-hug. But some are more subtle and slow in the way they win your friendship. I've actually found quite a lot of poets have grown on me, even from initial dislike to admiration or even love. When, as a student, I first came across Blake's Prophecies I thought they were awful gobbledegook - spectres, emanations, Golgonooza - and even after looking up notes and commentaries it was a case of 'So what?' But years later I came back to them. (My daughter decided to do Blake for her dissertation.) So then it was, 'I'll read this if it kills me.' That's when it started growing on me. After skimming pages of hard bits, you come to something like:

The night falls thick: I go upon my watch: be attentive: Listen to your Watchman's voice: sleep not before the Furnaces...

You start to get hooked - just one or two little hooks at first. Now, after some more years, I still don't understand the whole of Blake's Prophecies, but my second copy is starting to fall apart.

And I'm fairly sure there are one or two poets who would never have grown on me at all as Blake did if I hadn't (or hadn't been forced to as a student) investigate techniques. It's the technique that does it in some cases, not an emotional 'wow' at all. Milton's On His Blindness, for example, went in one ear and out the other until the prof did his brilliant analysis of the language and versification. (He wasn't especially into Milton's Christianity either.) With a poet as technically superb as Milton, you learn to respect his belief system but the 'wow' is mainly aesthetic.

Having said all that, there are still a few classic poets that make me 'turn to the next page'. Spenser. The prof didn't sell him hard enough.

James.

I'll post a favourite poem as soon as I've got my new computer.

Hi James,
You're right about some poets growing on you. I had the same discussion recently with Fevvers about Robert Frost, how after years I got a mini "satori" and the only comparison I can think of is when [more usually if] you suddenly realise what all the fuss about Captain Beefheart's music was all about. Bad comparison, but just got in from shooting.
Paul

Don't think poets grow on me they just hit me and then I begin a lasting relationship - a sure fired sign is that I can remember their work; snatches of it or the sentiment of a poem and that I can recall that - and with all the total **** buzzing around in my head for the majority of the time this is quite an achievement - still remember lots of bits from school etc things that linger in the mind like fraganrces. This must surely be a sign that a certain poets 'voice' has 'spoken' to me. Sorry about the deranged babbling but its Friday evening!!!

Didn't anyone like the poem about horses??

I liked the poem about horses, just a bit concerned - as a shooter - that a shotgun [even with a solid slug] was used rather than a rifle.

Hi, Tina. Yes, I meant to say I do like the Donald Hall poem very much, for its compassion, the accuracy of its observation, and the slow rhythm and balance of its long lines. It makes a good link too, as broadcasters say, to the poem I'm posting now.

It's hard to choose a favourite poem 'of all time'; I could probably list 20 but would never be able to put them in any kind of ranking order. This one - which has a little bit in common with Donald Hall's poem - is a favourite of mine for more than one reason. I used to teach poetry in secondary school, for much of the time in the kind of school that's described as 'front line' - deprived area, high truancy etc. The kind of poem that was usually thought suitable for our pupils was something modern and gritty by, say, Vernon Scannell. But the following poem, 'As the team's head-brass...' by Edward Thomas - gritty enough in its way perhaps, but not at all modern - is one I especially remember enjoying with classes of 14/15 year olds. It's a tribute to Edward Thomas that this rural poem from my pupils' great-grandparents' time should make the impact that it did.

As the team's head-brass flashed out on the turn
The lovers disappeared into the wood.
I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed the angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock. Every time the horses turned
Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
Upon the handles to say or ask a word,
About the weather, next about the war.
Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,
And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed
Once more. The blizzard felled the elm whose crest
I sat in, by a woodpecker's round hole,
The ploughman said. 'When will they take it away?'
'When the war's over.' So the talk began -
One minute and an interval of ten,
A minute more and the same interval.
'Have you been out?' 'No.' 'And don't want to, perhaps?'
'If I could only come back again, I should.
I could spare an arm. I shouldn't want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more...Have many gone
From here?' 'Yes.' 'Many lost?' 'Yes, a good few.
Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him. It was back in March,
The day of the blizzard, too. Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.'
'And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.' 'Ay, and a better, though
If we could see all all might seem good.' Then
The lovers came out of the wood again:
The horses started and for the last time
I watched the clods crumble and topple over
After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.

Edward Thomas.

Dear All,
Hope I'm not too late. I agree that poems can just grab you - and in any anthology there are some I just don't get started on - long ones in particularly have to grab me if I'm to finish - I liked the Edward Thomas one - I think because it is a story - many of the best poems tell a story or contain a story in a few words.
But there has to be rhythm and good language as well.
Have you read the anthologies Being Alive and Staying Alive from Bloodaxe? They have lots of excellent contemporary poetry and you can always find something - really good buys because you will go back to them again and again.
One poet I like who you rarely seem to hear about much is DJ Enright - perhaps because like me he spent many years in Asia
- but also because he has a clever take on things.
I like this one:

Blue umbrellas
by D. J. Enright

'The thing that makes a blue umbrella with its tail -
how do you call it?' you ask. Poorly and pale
Comes my answer. For all I can call it is peacock.
Now that you go to school, you will learn how we call all sorts of things;
How we mar great works by our mean recital.
You will learn, for instance, that Head Monster is not the gentleman's accepted title;
The blue-tailed eccentrics will be merely peacocks; the dead bird will no longer doze
Off till tomorrow's lark, for the latter has killed him.
The dictionary is opening, the gay umbrellas close.
Oh our mistaken teachers! -
It was not a proper respect for words that we need,
But a decent regard for things, those older creatures and more real.
Later you may even resort to writing verse
To prove the dishonesty of names and their black greed -
To confess your ignorance, to exiate your crime, seeking one spell to
life another curse.
Or you may, more commodiously, spy on your children, busy discoverers,
Without the dubious benefit of rhyme.


Not exactly an endorsement of poetry though is it??
Apsara

HI James and Apsara

Thanks for posting these poems which I liked very much.

It is interesting that I think we come to find out what kinds of poems we most like to write by reading

Is it because of the writing we read or because of the reading we write ???

Both I guess - I particularly like poems which tell a story - have a message - and ones with an emotional impact - and am not a great fan of rhyming except in exceptional cases by 'genius'.

Ayway here is another poem to keep the forum going:


What I Learned from My Mother"
by Julia Kasdorf

I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand
in case you have to rush to the hospital
with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants
still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars
large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole
grieving household, to cube home-canned pears
and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins
and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.
I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’t know
the deceased, to press the moist hands
of the living, to look in their eyes and offer
sympathy, as though I understood loss even then.
I learned that whatever we say means nothing,
what anyone will remember is that we came.
I learned to believe I had the power to ease
awful pains materially like an angel.
Like a doctor I learned to create
from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once
you know how to do this, you can never refuse.
To every house you enter, you must offer
healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself,
the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.



I think this is in the Boodaxe books you mentioned.
Another great poetry book for returning to is
Poems that Last a lifetime - compiled by Daisy Goodwin
Look forward to your responses


Tina