Do you read poetry?

[oxcoug]

I used to think I was in to poetry but I haven't really looked at it much in the last decade.

My current theory on it is that the best 10% of poetry is damn near sublime - some of the richest and most rewarding threads of human expression - but the other 90% are chronic masturbators trying sound deep.

Art is similar, though probably with slightly less wanking going on.

But I'm watching this talk right now w/ poet laureate W.S. Merwin and am thinking I should re-evaluate... a little.

[creekster]

I used to think I was in to poetry but I haven't really looked at it much in the last decade.

My current theory on it is that the best 10% of poetry is damn near sublime - some of the richest and most rewarding threads of human expression - but the other 90% are chronic masturbators trying sound deep.

Art is similar, though probably with slightly less wanking going on.

But I'm watching this talk right now w/ poet laureate W.S. Merwin and am thinking I should re-evaluate... a little.

I dont mind poetry but I am not sure why you had to pick on Bishop Vandelay like that.

[woot]

My stand is that 99% of everything is crap, and the same is certainly true of poetry. Poetry seems to be that there isn't a great way for people like me to run across the good stuff. I attended a poetry reading in NY last year that I loved, and have read some other stuff that I've really enjoyed, but I rarely have the attention to sit and read it, especially when I don't know if it'll be any good.

My GF writes amazing poetry, but I have context so I might not be the best judge (it's seriously great, though. I'll probably encourage her to publish a volume some day). I tried to be a songwriter in high school and abhorred everything I wrote.

[SoonerCoug]

I love Mormon poetry. Here is one of my favorites:

It was high noon. I did not know there was
Before or After . . . or that long hours could grow
with morning stretching long. I did not know
that evening would bring graying mist and gloom.
I only knew that by your side the cause
of things seemed very clear and I could go
with you, and love, and work, and win. And though
the way be rough and hard, there would be room
for us, for love was magic; we were young.
Together we would seek the Holy Grail,
and days and weeks would pass like pearls well strung
on one long thread of gold, fine-spun and frail
as mist. It has been so, will be tomorrow,
together, we will double strength, divide all sorrow.

[MarkGrace]

The only good poem I've ever read: http://cougaruteforum.com/showpost.p...32&postcount=2

[oxcoug]

I love Mormon poetry. Here is one of my favorites:

It was high noon. I did not know there was
Before or After . . . or that long hours could grow
with morning stretching long. I did not know
that evening would bring graying mist and gloom.
I only knew that by your side the cause
of things seemed very clear and I could go
with you, and love, and work, and win. And though
the way be rough and hard, there would be room
for us, for love was magic; we were young.
Together we would seek the Holy Grail,
and days and weeks would pass like pearls well strung
on one long thread of gold, fine-spun and frail
as mist. It has been so, will be tomorrow,
together, we will double strength, divide all sorrow.

That's priceless. Like pearl of great price. Or some ceramics, or something.

This reminds me of my last two years at BYU when my roommates and I would have "poetry readings" which consisted of us compiling some of the trashiest, trite-est Ratt, Poison and Winger songs out there, lighting candles, inviting chicks and reading them as serious poetry. Some of the ladies from RS came expecting Coleridge and Browning and were deeply disappointed by this bit of Ratt flavor:

And im looking for someone with a vengeance
And i know you were looking too
I thnk i found it in my sweet Melissa
I'm gonna tell you what im gonna do
Yeah she's my lover she's my friend
You don't even come close to that
Now im lookin for that invitation
And if you're lucky you'll get yours too

You kinda like me and i like that
You got me grinning like a cheshire cat
The way you love me i wouldn't bet
I'll tell you something it's as good as it gets

So you went looking for that wanted man
And i know that i was part of the plan
The way you love me i wouldn't bet
I tell you honey it's as good as it gets
She's like no other i can't pretend
I'm gonna give her everything i can
We slip and slide when im deep inside
Come up for air gonna go for a ride

[wuapinmon]

To me poetry is the attempt to express, with words, the ineffable. Here are some that I like:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~richie/poetry/html/aupoem162.html

http://users.ipfw.edu/jehle/poesia/queespoe.htm

http://southerncrossreview.org/64/borges-chess.htm

[YOUTUBE]vVzqd33Cxls [/YOUTUBE]

[Surfah]

I really love Li-Young Lee.

[hopfrog]

Poetry is one of the delights of life. I tend to read old poets, Elizabeth Bishop, Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane. My all-time favourite poet is William Shakespeare and I am obsess'd with his sonnets; and next to WS is Keats, especially his odes. I used to subscribe regularly to Poetry and American Poetry Review. Among modern poets I am enthralled by W. S. Merwin, and have just picked up his book of prose poems, as my last-written book was mostly a collection of prose poems, and I consider the form authentic poetry. There is, of course, wonderful poetry in the Scriptures. I find it wonderful to go to sleep with a bunch of poetry cds playing on me cd player, and then when I do fall asleep I dream in poetry, quite enchanting.

[Solon]

Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Alcaeus, Sappho, Archilochus, Simonides, Bacchylides, Theocritus, Callimachus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Virgil, Catullus, Plautus, Terrence, Martial, Horace, Ovid.

I read lots of poetry.

The historical Solon was a crappy poet, though.

[Surfah]

Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Alcaeus, Sappho, Archilochus, Simonides, Bacchylides, Theocritus, Callimachus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Virgil, Catullus, Plautus, Terrence, Martial, Horace, Ovid.

I read lots of poetry.

The historical Solon was a crappy poet, though.

How do you pronounce Solon? In my head I always read Sawl-un. Sometimes though it's So-loan.

[SoCalCoug]

The only poetry I'll go out of my way to read is Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. I recall that I kind of liked Wordsworth, and I enjoy Shakespeare, although more his plays than his poetry.

Most poetry is crap. All Mormon poetry is crap. At least I haven't come across any that wasn't primarily doggerel.

[CardiacCoug]

Billy Collins is an awesome poet -- his stuff is just great, full of humor and insight. Here are two of my favorites. Every Mother's Day I think of The Lanyard, and often when I'm waiting in an airport I think about Passengers and it makes me smile.

The Lanyard
By Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

Passengers
By Billy Collins

At the gate, I sit in a row of blue seats
with the possible company of my death,
this sprawling miscellany of people—
carry-on bags and paperbacks—

that could be gathered in a flash
into a band of pilgrims on the last open road.
Not that I think
if our plane crumpled into a mountain

we would all ascend together,
holding hands like a ring of skydivers,
into a sudden gasp of brightness,
or that there would be some common place

for us to reunite to jubilize the moment,
some spaceless, pillarless Greece
where we could, at the count of three,
toss our ashes into the sunny air.

It’s just that the way that man has his briefcase
so carefully arranged,
the way that girl is cooling her tea,
and the flow of the comb that woman

passes through her daughter’s hair…
and when you consider the altitude,
the secret parts of the engine,
and all the hard water and the deep canyons below…

well, I just think it would be good if one of us
maybe stood up and said a few words,
or, so as not to involve the police,
at least quietly wrote something down.

[Levin]

Those are great poems, Cardiac. I'm a new Billy Collins fan.

I love Wordsworth and Whitman. I like to memorize poetry, and have quite a few poems in there. It all stems from having to memorize Annabel Lee in 8th grade. That's as musical a poem as ever was written, at least until Dr. Suess came around.

[Mrs. Funk]

The latest poem I've read and loved is by Maxine Kumin.

Women and Horses
After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric.
-Theodor Adorno
After Auschwitz: after ten of my father's kin--
the ones who stayed--starved, then were gassed in the camps.
After Vietnam, after Korea, Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan.
After the Towers. This late in the life of our haplessly orbiting world
let us celebrate whatever scraps the muse, that naked child,
can pluck from the still-smoldering dumps.


If there's a lyre around, strike it! A body, stand back, give it air!
Let us have sparrows laying their eggs in bluebird boxes.
Let us have bluebirds insouciantly nesting elsewhere.
Lend us navel-bared teens, eyebrow- and nose-ringed prodigies
crumbling breakfast bagels over dogeared and jelly-smeared texts.
Allow the able-bodied among us to have steamy sex.


Let there be fat old ladies in flowery tent dresses at bridge tables.
Howling babies in dirty diapers and babies serenely at rest.
War and detente will go on, detente and renewed tearing asunder,
we can never break free from the dark and degrading past.
Let us see life again, nevertheless, in the words of Isaac Babel
as a meadow over which women and horses wander.

I love a lot of poetry. I read a lot of the American confessional poets in school, and Anne Sexton's Transformations is awesome—dark retellings of classic fairytales.

Made for Mormon poetry is awful. I received some atrociously written poem that I think was from one of those inspirational books for women for my birthday from the Relief Society—I would have settled for cookies!