Poetry Questions

[callistra]

What's your favourite poem, and why?

What do you look for in poetry?

Comments

My poems

[benjaminmonkey.livejournal.com]

My own poems are my favorites,
I think it's mainly about the rhyming.

Little Monkey up in space
Looking down on the human race
I can get lots of TV
You can send questions to me

The computers up here go bleep bleep bleep
makes it hard for a monkey to sleep
I dull out their constant sound
watching re-runs of The Ghost and Mrs Muir

[editormum.livejournal.com]

The Road Less Travelled, by Robert Frost. I first read this poem in high school and it's been something of a mantra for me. I love the underlying tinge of regret that you don't take some paths, but that the ones you take, be they less travelled or not, are the choices you make.

[akire-yta.livejournal.com]

this is the rubbish of human rind (http://plagiarist.com/poetry/9242/)

and its nothing tangible i can point to and say "that's what i like" - there are just some poems and poets who 'speak' to me.

that said, i can't think of a single poem i like that doesn't rhyme or scan in some way ;)

[jennyblackford.livejournal.com]

Favourite English poem: Yeats' He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

If there's anything more beautiful in the English language, I haven't seen it.

In Latin, Catullus's famous translation (beginning "Ille mi par esse deos videtur") of Sappho's even more famous love poem is utterly wonderful, but it wouldn't mean much to most of your readers, and no English translation can do it justice.

[random-alex.livejournal.com]

oooh I love it too!

[random-alex.livejournal.com]

According to my subconscious, at the moment it must be John Donne's "Death be not proud" (aka Holy Sonnet no.10); I love it as a Christian because it's fierce and defiant and true.

I also love Ogden Nash's "Have you read a good book tomorrow?" which isn't available on the net; but the last four lines are:
Every summer I truly intend
My intellectual sloth to end
But every summer for years and years
I've read Sherlock Holmes and the Three Musketeers

... and I love it because I say AMEN, BROTHER! stuff that classical nonsense people say you SHOULD read, and read the stuff that's fun! =D

[madradish.livejournal.com]

I love Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll. Mainly for the whimsy, but the onomatopoeia is great too. :)

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

My favourite poems are really long ones. My favourite poet at the moment is Dorothy Porter, who wrote (before her tragic death last year) novel length, very modern poems. I also like Vikram Seths novel length poem The Golden Gate. If you want to read modern poetry that is very readable and not too obscure, I really recommend these.

I'm also a T.S. Eliot fan, the individual poem that means the most to me is probably The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

My favourite love poems are Shakespeares sonnets.

Hmmm... *glances upwards* I should read more Yeats. I'm interested in him for his involvement in the Golden Dawn as well.

There isn't any one thing I look for in poetry - certainly, what I look for in long poems is different to what I look for in shorter ones, for example. I like some modern, some very old, some very passionate some very dispassionate. I have favourite poems by Plath, Blake, various war poets, Milton. Never quite really got into Donne, though I think he is very clever - just doesn't quite gel with me for some reason, though I like 'To His Coy Mistress' by Marvell, which is a very similar sort of thing. .

[flinthart.livejournal.com]

My favourite poem varies with mood. For me, poetry must evoke an emotional response. If it's purely an intellectual exercise, it bores me. It follows, therefore, that my personal state of mind affects my response.

Yeats "Sailing To Byzantium" sometimes wins. Other times, I like Tennyson's "Ulysses". Dylan Thomas and "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" is pretty damned cool at times. Sometimes I'm in a mood that responds to Stephen Crane's "In The Desert"... in fact, it's probably pointless to try nominating a 'favourite'.

[http://users.livejournal.com/doctor_k_/]

My favourite poem is nigh impossible to track down it seems. It's by Randolph Stow, it's about Easter, the setting is WA outback, and I don't know the name of it.

[jennyblackford.livejournal.com]

Well, if we're allowed *multiple* favourites, I want heaps of Eliot, Shakespeare, Plath, Blake, Dylan Thomas, Frost... (hmm, who else has been mentioned?) And "Sailing to Byzantium", as well ;) And take a look at Robert Frost's great sfnal apocalyptic poem, "Fire and Ice". You HAVE to read it aloud:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

[emma-in-oz.livejournal.com]

Tennyson's In Memoriam

[bugs-jenny.livejournal.com]

"If" by Rudyard Kipling. It's been my favourite poem for years & years - I think I must have been about 13 when I first read it. I've just re-read it again then & it's still a great poem!

[meljane.livejournal.com]

Been there before by Banjo Paterson .

I like the story in it .

[llamachameleon.livejournal.com]

My favorite is "What lips my lips have kissed" by Edna St. Vincent Millay. (Though T.S. Eliot and Langston Hughes are close behind.)

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply;
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands a lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet know its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone;
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

It's hard for me to pick out exactly what I like in poetry. Mostly, I like evocative poems that get caught in my head. This poem tends to come to me in the middle of the night when I can't sleep.

[laughingimp.livejournal.com]

Mine is "Howl" (http://members.tripod.com/~Sprayberry/poems/howl.txt) by Allen Ginsberg. I love Ginsberg's imagery, even though (or maybe because) it's filthy and slimy and street-level, and it suggests a not-entirely-reliable narrator.

[laughingimp.livejournal.com]

Langston Hughes is a very close second.

[callistra.livejournal.com]

This Is A Rubbish Of Human Rind
e.e. cummings
Click Here!

this is a rubbish of human rind
with a photograph
clutched in the half
of a hand and the word
love underlined

this is a girl who died in her mind
with a warm thick scream
and a keen cold groan
while the gadgets purred
and the gangsters dined

this is a deaf dumb church and blind
with an if in its soul
and a hole in its life
where the young bell tolled
and the old vine twined

this is a dog of no known kind
with one white eye
and one black eye
and the eyes of his eyes
are as lost as you'll find

(i had to cut and paste it here as the evony ad was getting to me)

[callistra.livejournal.com]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmKjZX3A-ow

[akire-yta.livejournal.com]

that's the one. i've been planning for...sheesh, nearly a decade now to get get "this is a girl who died in her mind" tattooed around my wrist, but I haven't found an artist yet who can do it that way i want...patience, grasshopper ;)

[jennyblackford.livejournal.com]

Hmm, a bit lush for me. And I'd rather have heard a strong Irish accent than an American one. But interesting! And nice to see it out there being treated with love.