Whatever poem you post should not be a rhyming poem. Why? Because there’s no point in playing tennis without a net, that’s why
B) The poem(s) you contribute should be a poem you yourself like. Why, you ask? Because, I answer.
Ɣ) I’m including links both to the complete poem and to biographies of the poet. But that’s just me being me. So anybody who wants to can read more of it, that’s why.
iv) Please respect copyright. It’s kinder to the mods. If I were y’all, I’d err on the side of assuming a given work is not in the public domain (though certain claims made by certain universities about certain dead white chicks named Emily Dickinson are bullshit).
I thought about adding a stipulation that people who don’t like poetry shouldn’t post in the thread, but I decided I didn’t care enough. People who insist on thread-shitting will thread-shit no matter what I say anyway.
Okay, housekeeping’s done. I’ll start with “Traveling Through the Dark,” by William Stafford. Here’s the first stanza:[INDENT]Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.
[/INDENT]Anybody else?
I’ve always like Bagpipe Music by Louis MacNiece. It doesn’t rhyme, but works very hard to come damn close without every rhyming. I submit that’s harder than either rhyming or free verse.
For pure free verse, William Carlos Williams’s “This is Just to Say” is my favorite.
Well, I don’t really have a “favorite” poem, but since its Father’s Day, I think it’s appropriate to post Robert Hayden’s poem, “Those Winter Sundays.”
The last lines haunt me: What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
I wrote “a favorite non-rhyming poem,” not “your favorite non-rhyming poem.” That means a poem you like a lot, not necessarily the one poem you love best.
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.
Instead of the first stanza, I posted part of the last.
(I googled for it and found my own quotation of it here on the SDMB from 12 years ago… I hope there’s a statute of limitations on quoting an entire single stanza poem).
James Dickey of Deliverance fame wrote a lot of great poetry. One of my favorite pieces is Cherry Log Road. How about the last line but it’s full of great imagery.
*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.
Just to explain, Robert Frost compared writing free verse poetry to playing tennis without a net. He had no problem with non-rhyming poetry, as is demonstrated in his famous (and one of my favorite) poems: The Mending Wall.
