And for comic relief, Ogden Nash.
Norman Dubie is one of the greatest living American poets. I especially recommend “A Parallax Mongraph for Rodin” and “City of Oshea Fruit,” but there are literally dozens of other poems by him that are certified masterpieces.
Dubie’s sensibility reminds me of the great Wallace Stevens, although on the surface their work is very different.
And let me add a plug for my mentor and hero, Rich Lyons, without whom I would not be aware of either Stevens or Dubie.
ee cummings’ “somewhere i have never traveled” is one of my all-time faves, and I’ve read thousands of poems.
WS Merwin is brilliant.
Li-Young Lee is an amazing young poet.
Mary Oliver writes gorgeous stuff, like this.
Yusef Komunyakaa is one of the best war poets of our time.
There are so many more. Of all the loves of my life, poetry – which is perhaps my first love – is the most enduring, the most secret, and still the most elusive.
Garrison Keillor has a radio program and web site “The Writer’s Almanac” on which he reads a poem every day and then gives some things literary that happened on this date in history. The poems run a very wide gamut and let you see lots of poets. Some NPR radio stations broadcast this, but in my town no one seems to think poems are important, so I get the text e-mailed to me every day. Sometimes I log on to the site to hear Garrison read as I like his voice but most of the time I just read the text. Try it, you’ll like it. http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/
Wow, what a goldmine! Thank you, everyone, for your recommendations. These will keep me going for months. Most of these selections are amazing - even the “sappy” one 
and Bukowski, who reminds me of dirt under my fingernails - or what it would be like, anyway .
I’m so excited. Thanks, again!
I have Sin by the same author.
I’ve always assumed it’s a woman, but that could be due to my own personal bias.
I forgot to include ** Frederico Garcia Lorca ** for his incredible imagery and haunting stories in poetry. The Gypsy And The Wind
I wish I could read it in the original.
I’ll take this thread as an opportunity to sing the praises of a home-spun poet named Byron Herbert Reece.
He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and was poet in residence (at various times) at UCLA, Emory and Young Harris College. For most of his short life, though, he resided on his family farm in north Georgia. Reece definitely lived the poet’s tragic life, contracting tuberculosis and dying by his own hand at age 37. I get the impression that he was underappreciated in his time (the 1940s) because his poetry was not modern. He hewed to traditional forms. Favorite themes are nature, the simple life, death and love.
Google his name and you’ll see that he has a devoted following.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Start with God’s Granduer.
Then, once you’ve caught your breath, read Pied Beauty.
And if you’re still able to see through the tears of happiness welling in your eyes, read Spring and Fall.
And what the heck - top it off with a reading of Inversnaid.
They’re all good.
That one was good, this is better
I can see I have a lot of reading to do. This thread is definitely being bookmarked so I can keep the names in mind.
My recommendations? I’m rather fond of Stephen Crane and Yehuda Amichai.
As a small hijack, I’ve been trying to remember the authors and titles of a couple poems I read many years ago. Both are very short.
One (sorry, don’t remember the exact wording) had lines to the effect that when the tyrant laughed, the whole country laughed with him, but when he wept, children bled in the streets. I thought it was Stephen Crane, but I have a book that (claims to) contains all his poetry and it isn’t in there.
The other was a woman telling her ex that he’d (essentially) killed her when he said something during their break-up, ended with something like:
“You do not know life from its ghost.”
Anyone know who wrote these, and what they’re called?
(Ending my hijack. No, really)
Don’t forget The Windhover. Very tight and can be hard to parse at first, even for Hopkins, but one of the most beautiful poems in the language, I think.
Lesser known poets whose work is worth finding:
Judson Mitcham – Somewhere in Ecclesiastes is brilliant.
T. R. Hummer – Love his rural mail carrier poems
Richard Shelton – Cool surreal stuff about the desert, relationships, and being alone.
Oh, almost forgot, Cathy Smith Bowers. The Love that Ended Yesterday in Texas is great stuff!
I have always loved the work of Elizabeth Bishop , who has yet to be mentioned.
This is the reason I love the SDMB. Until I read this thread I had no idea that Philip Larkin once live and that he wrote poetry. Aubade froze my blood, mainly because I am also terrified of dying.
I wish there were more translations on-line of spanish poetry, (that is second to none), I know Longfellow translated “Coplas por la Muerte de su padre” by Jorge Manrique but I can’t find it and post it as an example of middle ages poetry.
Calderon de la Barca, a dramatist of spain’s golden century, can be compared with Shakespeare, (mainly because our greatest writer, Cervantes, didn’t bother with plays), in “Life is a dream”, he gives a brilliant example of one of poetry’s more used ideas
Pablo Neruda is one of last century greatest poets, as a modernist his poetry is not easy but no one expresses love’s sorrow or passion better. One of his books “Twenty love poems and a song of despair” is a must, an example, he could be conventional or not
Jorge Luis Borges short stories are among the best ever written, he is also a poet. As a librarian his works are full of references, another, another and finally
I can’t find any translation of contemporary uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti, for anyone in here that speaks spanish, this is a beautifull love poem, it’s also very easy
Don’t let this thread die, not yeat at least. I will take a break and then I will post my favourites english poems, (except of course thos that I found in here).-
Another vote for Anne Sexton here. We read her in my Lit. Study class last semester and I was blown away. Her interpretations of the classic fairy tales are both pointed social commentary and absolutely hilarious.
I wish there were better translations all around. I would often provide my own translations of Lorca, Neruda, etc. to my students because it was so hard to find any that I thought really hit the mark. Merwin did some good work with Lorca, though (my Merwin link above includes a translation of his “The Mute Boy”), and there are other experienced poets out there who love verse in Spanish and speak both languages well enough to get it right.
I’d add Antonio Machado (Spain) to the list.
I came in here to recommend Pablo Neruda with the same caveat. I have his Residencia en la tierra, with the Spanish on all the left pages, and English translation by Donald Walsh on the right. Even without being able to understand a lick of the Spanish, just roughly and blindly reciting the words is poetry in their sound. The spine of my book is broken at my favorite poem from reading it so many times, and I often find myself muttering the translation. Can’t find any online links, but it is one of his (at least two) poems titled “Alliance (Sonata),” beginning “Neither the heart cut by a sliver of glass.”
James Dickey’s stuff is very blokey but check this out:
And I to my motorcycle
Parked like the soul of the junkyard
Restored, a bicycle fleshed
With power, and tore off
Up Highway 106 continually
Drunk on the wind in my mouth
Wringing the handlebar for speed
Wild to be wreckage forever.
or maybe this:
Bums, on waking,
Do not always find themselves
In gutters with water running over their legs
And the pillow of the curbstone
Turning hard as sleep drains from it.
I am surprised that after Deliverance he didn’t become a God-like figure of American letters. He is by a long way my favourite American post-war poet.
My favorite poet is Robert W. Service. He’s best known for his poems about the Yukon and the gold rush, but he’s also got a number of moving poems dating to his experience during WWI.
From an obituary printed in the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph:
He may be a bit maudlin for some, or overly dramatic, but I like him. In fact, he, Ogden Nash, and Robert Frost are the only poets I have in my bookcase.
His most famous poems and a few of my favorites include:[ul]
[li]The Shooting of Dan McGrew[/li][li]The Cremation of Sam McGee[/li][li]The Man from El Dorado[/li][li]The Stretcher-Bearer[/li][li]Just Think![/li][li]My Friends[/li][/ul]