Favourite Poets or Poems

[Rumil]

I know it's a large field, but who are your favourite poets, perhaps we could post short poems/passages? I have many favs. I think The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth is amazing, Ted Hughes Tales From Ovid is cool, some Coleridge, Greg Woods, Thom Gunn, bits of Shakespeare and Marvell. Am I being greedy or what. I'll try and think of some nice bits to post.

[Tar-Ancalimë]

hmm I've always loved Emily Dickenson... her poems are really brilliant... i love the canturbury tales esp in old english... shakespeare is wonderful... thomas gray i adore....

modern poets arent really my thing, i dont much appreciate free verse, but i actually do like ee cummings... i dont know, something about his poems just grabs me...

ill find my fav emily dickenson poem online (or try to) and post some of it here :)

[Rumil]

Good choices Tar - i haven't read any Dickinson (shame on me) but will give her a try. Here is a couple of short poems by Greg Woods from his collection 'May I Say Nothing'

Inscription

This is to commemorate
A moment which passed.
All the witnesses were late.
The stone mason last.
What they made of what occurred
Could be conveyed in a word:
Nothing.


This is to accentuate
An all-too-human norm:
The living cannot but create
Meaning in a storm,
But only the impassive dead
Can fathom what the thunder said:
Nothing.

This is to anticipate
The moment to come,
Fated to negotiate
What we must become -
Beyond desire, beyond disgust,
Less than water, less than dust
Nothing

From the same collection:

Like a Shark's

We have the eye if not the will. The seasons attract us.
For every grove igniting lemons on a terreced slope
There's a fog; for every breath of air, air freshener.
Love has kept us occupied whatever the condition
Of the economy, no matter how surprised we are
We even like each other, let alone adore or worse.
We never learned to survive the pure menace of beauty:
Incisors like a shark's, angled inwards, no going back.

I love the idea of 'the pure menace of beauty' it says so much to me about surface attraction. Well i like it anyway :)