I have read this poem from Alllen Ginsberg, a beatnik writer. I really like some of these beat writers.

Robert Brautigan is another on of my favs, but here is an exerpt from Howl, one of Ginsberg's poems.

Allen Ginsberg's Howl:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats
floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene- ment roofs
illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the
scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn- ing their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror
through the wall,

Obviously this poem is huge, but it is one of Ginsberg's best.

Who are your favorite poets and what poems do you like?

That's a beauty, I like Ginsberg and the beat poets. Cummings was remarkable.

This poem by Sylvia Plath is one of my favorites. It's a stunning example of visceral emotional musicality. A reflection of the oppression of the feminine in more than just the rise of fascism.

Daddy

You do not do, you do not do
Anymore, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time -
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one grey toe
Big as a frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters of beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Pollack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Anre not very pure of true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat moustache
and your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less the devil for that, oh not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even bones would do,

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephones cut off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

I have always been a fan of Robert Frost's poetry, although, he is not the only poet I read. Here is one of my favorites:

The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Frost is a classic and deservedly so. Here's one I bet you sky-watchers will like. I think Adrienne Rich's poetry is brilliant.

Planetarium

A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them

a woman 'in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles'

in her 98 years to discover
8 comets

she whom the moon ruled
like us
levitating into the night sky
riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there
doing penance for impetuousness
ribs chilled in those spaces of the mind

An eye,

'virile, precise and absolutely certain'
from the mad webs of Uranusborg

encountering the NOVA

every impulse of light exploding
from the core
as life flies out of us

Tycho whispering at last
'Let me not seem to have lived in vain'

What we see, we see
and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive

Heartbeat of a pulsar
heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus

I am bombarded yet I stand

I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me And has
taken I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.

Over the past few years, I have grown to be most impressed with Christopher Dewdney, a Canadian poet living in Toronto. He is a contemporary wordsmith, which make his work 'of our time' and yet, often timeless.

Here is an example of his timelessness;

Dewdney, Christopher from Signal Fires, McClelland &Stewart Inc., 2000, pg 33

Desert Angel

The door of the desert has opened,
skeletons of words
tumble in the frozen wind like dead leaves.
I have awakened
from the dream of meaning
into the implacable narcissism
of the word.
For within words is the progeny of words.
and I am caught in their honey.

In the transparent desert air
the angel appeared, flattened
against a dividend of reality so temporal,
so variegated, she was consumed
by the blank empire
of its shadows. She shone,
dustily iridescent in the
waning light of the setting sun
and I saw the ghosts of words,
painful, beautiful,
pluck her sides
like kites.

Now, within the fossil dance of words,
when letters hung like insects
in mind's amber, I sing
this dusty kingdom of Braille,
while skeletons of words
the shadow of shadows
intone our names
across the dusty plain.

And here, an example of 'our time'

Dewdney, Christopher from Demon Pond, McClelland &Stewart Inc., 1994, pg 41

White Sands

This evening the desert wind
blows down the highway, stretches
fingers of sand across the asphalt.
We drive beneath a night sky into the blank,
artificial darkness.
Our car is a chariot, is a blown
four-forty, a leaf, driven by swamp gas
three-hundred million years old.
At the edge of the flats
there are mountains,
there are abandoned mines where
children toil.
Their lives are inconceivable
to themselves, as their suffering
is inconceivable to us.
And in the darkness
that illuminates this night
from the inside
the mountains are invisible,
locked out of the cones
our headlights make.

On the evening of
the last night you will ever
know, when the heavens
fall away and the planets
become magnified pictures of themselves,
like illustrations in a children's book,
there is a sky so blue it is inconceivable.
It is the darkness uncovered,
when night caves up
into a deeper midnight, a cobalt
so lost and intimate
that your heart fills with dread and love.

And on this last night
your heart will form the shape
of a constellation and the sky
will ring with your music. The desert wind
will blow clear through you
and the mystery
of everything will be
absolutely sill, transparent
at the centre
of a storm of glass.

But tonight we are merely adorned
with the instruments of our deaths.
Down the highway and through the night
we carry golden monkeys on our backs.
We drive
into the blank insulation
of all the sadness, all
the joys of life
becoming a double crystal,
fire and ice.

Monkey-light.

It is our turn to know
the absolute, the pure
random.

Billy Collins is a recent discovery of mine and a very refreshing voice IMO. He was Poet Laureate of the US from 2001-2003. One of the things I especially like about him is his humerous, yet introspective tone.

Creatures
by Billy Collins

Hamlet noticed them in the shapes of clouds,
but I saw them in the furniture of childhood,
creatures trapped under surfaces of wood,

one submerged in a polished sideboard,
one frowning from a chair-back,
another howling from my mother’s silent bureau,
locked in the grain of maple, frozen in oak.

I would see these presences, too,
in a swirling pattern of wallpaper
or in the various greens of a porcelain lamp,
each looking so melancholy, so damned,
some peering out at me as if they knew
all the secrets of a secretive boy.

Many times I would be daydreaming
on the carpet and one would appear next to me,
the oversize nose, the hollow look.

So you will understand my reaction
this morning at the beach
when you opened your hand to show me
a stone you had picked up from the shoreline.

“Do you see the face?” you asked
as the cold surf circled our bare ankles.
“There’s the eye and the line of the mouth,
like it’s grimacing, like it’s in pain.”

“Well, maybe that’s because it has a fissure
running down the length of its forehead
not to mention a kind of twisted beak,” I said,

taking the thing from you and flinging it out
over the sparkle of blue waves
so it could live out its freakish existence
on the dark bottom of the sea

and stop bothering innocent beachgoers like us,
stop ruining everyone’s summer.

Billy Collins, “Creatures” from Nine Horses. Copyright © 2002 by Billy Collins. Reprinted with the permission of Random House, Inc.

Source: Nine Horses: Poems (Random House, Inc., 2002).

I started reading this thread and as I was scrolling down I was thinking:

I'm totally posting Billy Collins.
I'm totally posting Billy Collins.
I'm totally posting Billy Collins.


Good call Stormrider.

Collins is just so...pure.

Poets. Still prefer mine old skool.

E A Poe
Lord Byron
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Elizabeth Carter
Henri Cazalis
William Blake
Goethe

Just to name a few.

Writers. Sci Fi, Fantasy and Horror.

Robert Bloch
Iian Banks
Greg Bear
L E Modesitt
Peter Straub
Robert Howard

So many more, so little time.

Essedarius-

I agree 100% with everything you say about Collins; his poetry just seems to flow so elegantly through the mind and makes a connection on some level that I really can't identify but is extremely powerful.

Here's another of my favorite Collins works:

Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun In The House


The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

Dewdney is gorgeous. I really like Collins too.

Here's one I think is funny, it's often how I feel reading other poets.

Heredity

How you became a poet's a mystery!
Wherever did you get your talent from?

I say: I had two uncles, Joe and Harry -
One was a stammerer, the other dumb.

Tony Harrison

LoL





[edit on 7-12-2006 by clearwater]

Thanks for the imput guys, you have broadened my horizon for poets.

Rozena Maart is a poet and a scholar from South Africa. This thread won't be complete without my mentioning her. I had the great honour and privilege of studying under her for a year. This is from my autographed copy of "Talk About It" by Rozena Maart.

The Clitoral Nature of Colonialism or What Happened To Our Dela

The socks
the pants
the water in the iron basin reflect her hair
it lie there
engrossed by the stare
of our mamma
our mamma
our story teller
our dear

The sun shines on her voice
with rays of pleasantries
with strokes of plenitude
an air of delight
as she speaks with so much power
so much power and so much might

Our eyes survey her presence
and she asks that we not despair
this is about life
about the lives that was
and those to come
and those to regain
for pleasure and not shame
of lives and land
to reclaim and rename
of experiences unknown
untold but bold
but behold
mamma talks
tells the story
and so it unfolds:

We hear mamma talk about the shore
the tip of Africa -- our home -- our life
about the white man's dreams
and oh, so galore
she tells their desires
of the young Black girls they admire
of the girls who they ask to parade
not in the sunlight
but in their shade
where they lie and compete
for fresh Black women's meat
and so they explore
on every possible shore
forever and ever
for Black women for their dela
for their tings dat hang like grapes
for der tings dat hold dem men tings tight
for der dela brings delight
delight and pleasure
to the white man's liesure

Der story is not finished
we are told dat there is more
we know all about der shore
about der rules and der law
about der women who lived before
about der times when we were more
Mamma tells about der times
when the rivers ran and ran
when they covered all the land
when der women washed in der shore
when they were grabbed and spoke no more

We want to cry
but mamma says "No"
there's no tears for what happened
no tears for all der years
no time to reminisce
if we are only going to miss
the objective of the lesson
of the lesson and the story
of our pain and future glory
of the glory still to come
if we stand and fight as one
and build our hearts and hopes
and dream about the land that's ours
and keep our dela safe ashore
in our bloomers
shut behind our door

Our dela
our heritage
and still our fight
our knowledge
our history
our right
our land
our culture
in their hands tight

The plan is clear as daylight
our legs apart
our hearts crossed
our fists clenched
our mouths sealed
pressed hard against our will
our dela pinched closed
our teeth chattering to our spirits
our spirits racing to the future
racing for the day
when our dela can be ours
and only ours
to have and to hold
to savour and to fold

We clasp our hands together
and jpin mamma loud in song
it's a pray and a story
a story and a song
a story overdue
overdue
so long

lol, At one point, there was a purse snatcher on campus. Campus security was advising all the women to give up their purses without resistance. Rozena was incensed at the advice. The poor fool had the misfortune of trying to steal Rozena's purse. lol

[edit on 12-12-2006 by clearwater]

I always enjoyed reading Willa Cather. Stephen King is my favorite fiction writer. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Daniel Quinns Ishmael series, and perhaps my favorite poet is a local lady by the name of Portia Love King. She is the daughter of Jazz great Preston Love, and I had the pleasure of putting together her first poetry book. These may be published again, I haven't spoken with her in some time, and I know she was writing more. I've never read poetry that holds so much passion and emotion—even compared to the greats. Here are a a couple of personal favorites. Taken from "Elicpses of the Sun."

Lament for Auntie's Son

The daylight sky darkens
and the pall of a shadow,
like an eclipse of the sun
shades my vision.

His crime was nothing buth the
darkness he carried
and the pride that didn't fit it
through no choice of his own.

Now his body swings high
from the branch of that tree
and the life-breath that left it
flew too, from within me.

For the love of his people and
worth of himself,
I will suffer my lifetime
for this
his freedom.

and the women shall grieve:
why life if it be so cold?
why life so mean?
why death don't come swifter,
sure is mystery



Anything Else?

you took
my smile
and
the sparkle in my eyes
away.

i got some dreams i ain't usin'
would you like to come take those too?

Charles Baudelaire, translation by Roy Campbell.

The Owls

Within the shelter of black yews
The owls in ranks are ranged apart
Like foreign gods, whose eyeballs dart
Red fire. They meditate and muse.

Without a stir, they will remain
Till, in its melancholy hour,
Thrusting the sun from power,
The shade establishes its reign.

Their attitude instructs the sage,
Content with what is near at hand,
To shun all motion, strife and rage.

Men crazed with shadows that they chase,
Bear as punishment, the brand
Of having wished to change their place

What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit of yield.
--- Milton

A quotation from Milton, Satan's part in Paradise Lost.

The Road to Hell
by Charles Bukowski

if only there were more magic people
to help us get through
this strange life.

surprisingly there are a few.

the problem being that often
their magic doesn't hold up
for long
mainly
because they begin to
think it's because
they are special

when really
it's almost an off-hand thing
like some damned crazy unearned
gift.

and when the magic people
begin to misuse their
prowess
begin to use it
in the wrong ways
then
it
vanishes

and
that's a
LAW

and
it's one of the most
unalterable laws
of the gods and the
universe

and there is
nothing sadder
or more
frightening
than the once-gifted ones
still trying to work their
magic
for the
crowd

which never offers,
but only
accepts
mercy.

I'm not a great poetry reader but some of the war poets like Rupert Brookes and Wilfred Owen wrote some stunning, profound pieces which totally convey the horror of the WW1. Wilfred Owens parents were informed of his death on Armistice Day which just adds another level of tragedy to this poem.

Wilfred Owen
Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.