While I’m getting most of my poetry from Hip Hop music, i love this one:
Paul Celan: death fugue
I first read it when i was looking up the qoute “Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland” (“Death is a master from Deutschland” - Deutschland is not translated to Germany on the site I linked to) that is quit popular in the extreme left in Germany (and can be seen as graffti every once in a while, o r shouted at demonstrations).
Whoa–more excellent ones I’d never heard of.
“Bruise purple, cadaver green.” from the Lobsters poem–excellent.
And the Celan is wonderful too.
And props for the Lorca.
My pet peeve is posts which name a poem or poet and don’t link. Please link–I want to read what you all like. Thanks.
anyone lived in a pretty how town
I was so bored at work today I recited somewhere i have never traveled and parts of Eliot’s The Dry Salvages to myself. Of course, it doesn’t take a lot to make me recite poetry. I’m trying to raise the tone of the store I work in. Probably not possible.
There once was a lady from Wheeling
Who had a peculiar feeling.
She laid on her back
And opened her crack
And pissed all over the ceiling.
:eek:
"If I should learn, in some quite casual way" – Edna St. Vincent Millay
If I should learn, in some quite casual way,
That you were gone, not to return again–
Read from the back-page of a paper, say,
Held by a neighbor in a subway train,
How at the corner of this avenue
And such a street (so are the papers filled)
A hurrying man–who happened to be you–
At noon to-day had happened to be killed,
I should not cry aloud–I could not cry
Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place–
I should but watch the station lights rush by
With a more careful interest on my face,
Or raise my eyes and read with greater care
Where to store furs and how to treat the hair.
There once was a man from Nantucket!
(ducks and runs)
John Masefield’s “Sea Fever”
http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Poetry/MasefieldSeaFever.htm
Longfellow’s “The Skeleton in Armor”
http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/longfellow/theskeleton.shtml
Rudyard Kipling “Cold Iron”
http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/verse/p2/coldiron.html
Maurice Thompson’s “An Address by an Ex-Confederate Soldier to the Grand Army of the Republic”
http://users.erols.com/kfraser/confederate/postwar/gar.html
These in addition to the many listed already.
Ah, lokij, Maurice Thompson! Also author of The Witchery of Archery*. Very cool
I commend to y’all’s notice the book Good Poems, selected and introduced by Garrison Keillor. (Yeah, I know, but it has a lot of Really. Good. Poems.)
It introduced me to James Wright, and poems like this: A Blessing.
It always gives me goosebumps.
I know what you mean about the goosebumps, James Wright is amazing! My all time favorite poem is his Sitting in a Small Screenhouse on a Summer Morning. Here’s the end:
It is so still now, I hear the horse
Clear his nostrils.
He has crept out of the green places behind me.
Patient and affectionate, he reads over my shoulder
These words I have written.
He has lived a long time, and he loves to pretend
No one can see him.
Last night I paused at the edge of darkness,
And slept with green dew, alone.
I have come a long way, to surrender my shadow
To the shadow of a horse.
For the whole thing, go here and scroll down about a third of the way..
The Spell of The Yukon and The Ballad of Dangerous Dan McGrew, both by Robert Service.
“A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune; Back at the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o’-love, the lady that’s known as Lou.”
“The Bench-Legged Fyce”, by Eugene Field
THE BENCH-LEGGED FYCE
"Speakin’ of dorgs, my bench-legged fyce
Hed most o’ the virtues, an’ nary a vice.
Some folks called him Sooner, a name that arose
From his predisposition to chronic repose;
But, rouse his ambition, he couldn’t be beat -
Yer bet yer he got thar on all his four feet!
Mos’ dorgs hez some forte - like huntin’ an’ such,
But the sports o’ the field didn’t bother him much;
Wuz just a plain dorg, an’ contented to be
On peaceable terms with the neighbors an’ me;
Used to fiddle an’ squirm, and grunt “Oh, how nice!”
When I tickled the back of that bench-legged fyce!"…
That’s beautiful, Tigers2B1. I’ve read it before, but I don’t think I understood it at the time. (I was a kid.)
There are so many wonderful poems mentioned here … One I haven’t seen is “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Sara Teasdale. Also, “Richard Cory” by Edwin Arlington Robinson. Oh, and “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes. I believe someone already mentioned “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks and “This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams. Hmm … “The Death of the Hired Man” (and others) by Robert Frost, and, among others by Emily Dickinson, “I Heard a Fly Buzz”. Oh, and “I Saw in Louisiana a Live Oak Growing” by Walt Whitman.
Okay, I’ll stop now.
By Kevin Kling - based on Odysseus IIRC
I’ll send you my kisses like birds, hoping they’ll migrate to you.
I’ll send you my kisses because by keeping them home, I might tame them.
I’ll send you my tears like jewels, hoping they’ll be lost.
I’ll send you my tears because by keeping them home, they might tame me.
I’ll send you my love like warm wind on your back, hoping you’ll turn
and breathe me in.