What is your favorite poem?

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What is your favorite poem?




RECITAL

ROGER BOBO GIVES
RECITAL ON TUBA
Headline in the Times

Eskimos in Manitoba,
Barracuda of Aruba,
Cock an ear when Roger Bobo
Starts a solo on the tuba.

Men of every station -- Pooh-Bah,
Nabob, bozo, toff and hobo--
Cry in unison, "Indubi'
Tably, there is simply nobo-

Dy who oompahs on the tubo,
Solo, quite like Roger Bubo!"

John Updike

Good one!

I have favorite poets rather than individual poems: ee cummings, Kenneth Patchen, Ginsberg, Kerouac, etc.

The Tyger, by William Blake:

http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~keith/poems/tyger.html

I'll be stereotypical and say 'The Raven' or anything by Poe.

Oh, yeah and this one:

The once was a man from Nantucket....

How about William Blake's "The Proverbs of Hell?"

You almost feel kind of dirty after reading it.

Unfortunately I'm at work right now and can't dig up any poetry by the Marquis de Sade.

Bye!

Last edited by Ghosthunter on 16 Aug 2005, 2:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The Wife.

She rose to his requirement, dropped
The playthings of her life
To take the honorable work
Of woman and of wife.

If aught she missed in her new day
Of amplitude, or awe,
Or first prospective, or the gold
In using wore away,

It lay unmentioned, as the sea
Develops pearl and weed,
But only to himself is known
The fathoms they abide.

Emily Dickinson

ooooh - cummings, dickinson, eliot, dylan thomas (and about a gazillion more) - how could i possibly choose?

i'd probably have to go for "under milk wood" (thomas), but - as you can imagine - i won't post it here

Oh boy, where do I begin? I'd have to say The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe, Sestina: Altaforte by Ezra Pound, America by Allen Ginsberg, To My Mother by George Barker, I Said To Poetry by Alice Walker, I Too Am America and The Negro Speaks of Rivers, by Langston Hughes and pretty much anything by Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams. Many of these are pretty long, but here is one by Langston Hughes I really love, The Negro Speaks of Rivers:

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins

My soul has grown deep like the river

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen it's muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset

I've known rivers:
Anceint, dusky rivers

My sould has grown deep like the rivers.

I love Langston Hughes. I like the poem "House in Taos". It's so beautiful. What about "Harlem Sweeties"?

Have you dug the spill
Of Sugar Hill?
Cast your gims
On this sepia thrill:

Brown sugar lassie,
Caramel treat,
Honey-gold baby
Sweet enough to eat.

Peach-skinned girlie,
Coffee and cream,
Chocolate darling
Out of a dream.

Walnut tinted
Or cocoa brown,
Pomegranate-lipped
Pride of the town.

Rich cream-colored
To plum-tinted black,
Feminine sweetness
In Harlem's no lack.

Glow of the quince
To blush of the rose.
Persimmon bronze
To cinnamon toes.

Blackberry cordial,
Virginia Dare wine --
All those sweet colors
Flavor Harlem of mine!

Walnut or cocoa,
Let me repeat:
Caramel, brown sugar,
A chocolate treat.

Molasses taffy,
Coffee and cream,
Licorice, clove cinnamon
To a honey-brown dream.

Ginger, wine-gold,
Persimmon, blackberry,
All through the spectrum
Harlem girls vary --

So if you want to know beauty's
Rainbow-sweet thrill
Stroll down luscious,
Delicious, fine Sugar Hill

Gwendolyn Brooks's "We Real Cool."

THE POOL PLAYERS.
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.


We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

Yeah, I read that one in school; it was good. Langston Hughes is an awesome poet; it suites well for my visual thinking.

Rilke on love and other difficulties


.27

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people; that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rhythmically interrupt periods of deep emotion.

.28

A Togetherness between two people is an impossibility, and where it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a reciprocal against which robs either party or both of his fullest freedom and development. But, once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distance continues to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!

I love The Raven, but I actually prefer Poe's short stories to the vast majority of his poems.

Favorite Poets: Rainer Maria Rilke, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats (who was HFA), Bertolt Brecht, Mary Oliver, a smattering of the French Symbolists such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Charles Simic, Donald Justice, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and quite a few others that I can't recall at the moment. Ai is good, too.

Favorite Poem:

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.


LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all--
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
. . . . .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

I got my user name from a DH Lawrence poem... I haven't been able to find it online or in any of my books in a while though. The line went "the kind of hell grey that Dante never saw." Google only comes up with one poem that fits this, called Death is not Evil, Evil is Mechanical (or something like that.)

Po Chu-I (not sure how im supposed to spell that ) is a Chinese poet. I just think his poems are really beautiful and simple even if I dont understand a lot of the history behind his more political ones.

This poem by Rainer Maria Rilke isn't one of my favorites but I always thought it was... interesting. lol. it doesn't have a title in my book.