Mine is Billy Collins, the current national poet laureate. I curse Books-A-Million every time I go there since they don't have a copy of his newest book, or any of his books for that matter. They always tell me they're willing to order them for me, but damn it he's by name the nation's best poet and they have 8 copies of Jewel. A sample poem..

The Best Cigarette


There are many that I miss
having sent my last one out a car window
sparking along the road one night, years ago.

The heralded one, of course:
after sex, the two glowing tips
now the lights of a single ship;
at the end of a long dinner
with more wine to come
and a smoke ring coasting into the chandelier;
or on a white beach,
holding one with fingers still wet from a swim.

How bittersweet these punctuations
of flame and gesture;
but the best were on those mornings
when I would have a little something going
in the typewriter,
the sun bright in the windows,
maybe some Berlioz on in the background.
I would go into the kitchen for coffee
and on the way back to the page,
curled in its roller,
I would light one up and feel
its dry rush mix with the dark taste of coffee.

Then I would be my own locomotive,
trailing behind me as I returned to work
little puffs of smoke,
indicators of progress,
signs of industry and thought,
the signal that told the nineteenth century
it was moving forward.
That was the best cigarette,
when I would steam into the study
full of vaporous hope
and stand there,
the big headlamp of my face
pointed down at all the words in parallel lines.

ian curtis...he could technically be a poet. i'm not patient enough to read poetry. leonard cohen had the right idea.

I'm going to be the stereotypical teenager again and say E. E. Cummings. I'm rather attached.

I'm not a big fan of reading much, but on the Sifl and Olly site, there's a poet page and it has some pretty good peoms. http://www.sifl-n-olly.com/poetry/index.html

Sweet jesus, I'm almost sorry I asked.

If that was directed towards me, I'm sorry. I'm easily entertained and don't know real works of literature.

Sifl and Olly? You were kidding, right?

I mean, the fact is, poems/literature can be funny and have meaning. You're missing out.

Read this, and tell me its not at least humorous.

The History Teacher
Trying to protect his students' innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.

And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.

The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
'How far is it from here to Madrid?'
'What do you call the matador's hat?'

The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom
on Japan.

The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,

while he gathered up his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences, wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off

I liked that. Who's it by?

Billy Collins

allen ginsberg

hey, don't knock the sifl and olly. thats quality stuff. (no, im not being sarcastic)

Thank you. I couldn't find the words to say it, or I already would have. I love them. Do you know who really writes that? Is there a book of anything? That would be great. It'd be the only book I've bought in about 5 years.

i really like philip larkin and seamus heaney. eavan boland is a wonderful female poet. oh yeah, and i like dylan thomas too

ezra pound perhaps. the cantos rule.

can we classify steve perry as a poet?

This is an odd topic. My favorite is and for a while has been

Wallace Stevens

Yusef Komunyakaa, Robert Hass, and Adrienne Rich.
Also, Lynda Barry is a comic strip artist whose work is hilarious and somewhat dark. She weaves a lot of poetic material into her work.

Welcome back etcetera, and we didn't even have to bring up 90210 again to get you here.

It takes a powerful thread to make me realize I have other interests besides 90210.

hey yadadada do you like 'sunday morning' by stevens or stuff like 'the emperor of ice cream' he has a plethora of material

definitely Ian Curtis. Not only did he front one of THE most influential and greatest bands of all time, but he also wrote heartbreaking and amazing lyrics.

(Edited by ray davies at 12:26 pm on Aug. 24, 2003)

... as well as inspire countless suicides...

Which proves once again my point...poetry is dead in the world, anyone that would have been a poet is a songwriter. Its sad.

Shel Silverstein definitely

i'd have to say tupac

for real, 'dear momma' was powerful.

rainer maria rilke.

word

i hope you're kidding. reading is good fun, i promise. you should check into it sometime.

anne sexton

i'm also reading maya angelou's The Heart of a Woman and not to be too fiona apple, but i love maya angelou.

maya angelou sucks soooo much fucking ass. she seems to be a favorite of confused girls though. same goes for tori amos.

biz markie is a true poet

truer words have never been spoken.

Yes, Steve Perry counts. But I like Lawrence Ferlinghetti & Gary Snyder better.

ok so
i'm sitting in ka$hville playing urban housewife
with no cable being lame and looking forward to what happens next on days of our lives and getting excited about tuesdays because dr. phil is on oprah.

oprah's book club
yes, i bake
and i went to the lovely new library and checked out 5 books from oprah's book club.  that's where the heart of a woman came in.  and deep end of the ocean .  and i know this much is true .

i'd like to recite a few lines from a poem called damn it feels good to be a gangster...

this gangster here was a smart one
started living for the lord and i lasted
and all i gotta say to you wannabe
gonna be p*ssy eating  c*ck sucking pranksters
when the ship jumps off
what the f*ck you gonna do?


courtesy of the geto boys

(Edited by damon at 12:17 pm on June 23, 2002)

tori amos, while a favorite of confused and not confused girls alike, does not suck.
i cannot make you like her music, and i can understand if you think she's a freak. she is. but you cannot deny that she has a lot of fucking talent.

sucks

weren't we speaking a few weeks earlier about closemindedness and music? like i said, there is a difference in saying somoene sucks bc of lack of talent and saying that you don't like someone as a matter of opinion.

Just my charming sense of humor. Tori can certainly play piano and is basically good at what she does. It just isn't my bag.

she certainly knows how to rip off kate bush. i like tori more than sara mcdhkglan.

thank you for your compliance. totally, sarah maclaughlan's stuff isn't that innovative. some of it pretty, but its not that great over all.

i still say that biz markie is the greatest poet of our time. with such lines as:

have you ever met a girl that you tried to date
but a year to make love she wanted you to wait
let me tell you a story of my situation
i was talking to this girl from the US nation
the way that i met her was on tour at a concert
she had long hair and a short miniskirt...

~and~


i asked her her name and she said blah blah blah...

that last one with the 'blah blahs' is pretty cool. tori's main redeeming quality is that she really believes in elves. i wish everyone believed in elves and ate a lot of candy.

so true. there is a lack of stars who believe in elves and eat candy. we can only hope that the future holds more of them... preferably not michael jackson types.

good call.

i'm not a fan of tori amos, but all my friends (gay, male) are. she was a customer of mine when i worked at an oyster bar in memphis several years ago. we talked briefly, i told her i wasn't a fan, but that i had just seen her video for jackie's strength. she was very nice and tipped very well.

did this really happen? i am so jealous of you.

my favourite poet is tina barr.

she's got nice lines and a nice ass, too.

i like doing it EE style.....

oh that's right....... i like it E.E. style.............

O.K., poets....my favorite has always been Howard Nemerov......a former poet laureate.

Here's a little something very salient now, for a variety of reasons:

The Fourth of July

Because I am drunk, this Independence Night,
I watch the fireworks from far away,
From a high hill, across the moony green
Of lakes and other hills to the town harbor,
Where stately illuminations are flung aloft,
One light shattering in a hundred lights
Minute by minute. The reason I am crying,
Aside from only being country drunk,
That is, may be that I have just remembered
The sparklers, rockets, roman candles, and
So on, we used to be allowed to buy
When I was a boy, and set off by ourselves
At some peril to life and property.
Our freedom to abuse our freedom thus
Has since, I understand, been remedied
By legislation. Now the authorities
Arrange a perfectly safe public display
To be watched at a distance; and now also
The contribution of all the taxpayers
Together makes a more spectacular
Result than any could achieve alone
(A few pale pinwheels, or a firecracker
Fused at the dog's tail). It is, indeed, splendid:
Showers of roses in the sky, fountains
Of emeralds, and those profusely scattered zircons
Falling afalling, flowering as they fall
And followed distantly by a noise of thunder.
My eyes are half-afloat in happy tears.
God bless our Nation on a night like this,
And bless the careful and secure officials
Who celebrate our independence now.

I dedicate that one to the Bush administration and the federal government.  Anyone else feel they grew up in a better time??

Yes, indeed. Except that at least maybe kids won't be forced to say the discriminatory pledge anymore. But of course George W is already railing against that decision

Seeing as it is a year later, there are some new faces, the whole reading suggestions thread, blah blah blah...I wonder if there are any good responses to this now, that aren't rappers, songwriters, or sock puppets.

I've been reading a lot of Pablo Neruda as of late.

(Edited by Ceeze at 2:03 pm on Aug. 9, 2003)

I would never, ever read poetry for fun and I rarely actually 'get' them on the first read through...or the second...or third...anyway, I didn't mind Theodore Roethke and Vachel Lindsay. Of course, those are the two that I wrote term papers on, so I know more about them.

Robert Frost is cool, too, but he's such an easy answer.

Some things never change.

i can't stand robert frost. being named digsy redeems you, though.

Of course my real answer is Liam Gallagher.

"Have you ever played with plasticine/even tried a trampoline." It's beautiful.

he is quite the poet.

live for your toys, even though they make noise

althoughm, i really like how noel made motor car rhyme with jaguar (pronounced jag-u-ar).

He also made 'star' rhyme with 'jaguar.' He likes rhyming things with 'jaguar.'

I'm a real fan of e.e. cummings (hence the signature) as well as Yeats and Wallace Stevens. I also like Sylvia Plath, though I certainly haven't delved into too much of her catalogue.

I like either Kerouac, Langston Hughes, or Blake. other than that, nothing really interests me in the way of poetry.

sylvia plath
anne sexton
dylon thomas
t.s. elliot
d.c. berman

Wallace Stevens would be mine too. Emperor of Ice Cream is the longest poem that I have permenantly commited to memory... I love it so.

Will

all great answers. Yusef Komunyakaa is an amazing poet. he has spoken a couple of times at rhodes.

At the end of the day i've always been most inspired by Ginsberg. I'm into alliteration. Dylan Thomas will open a new world for you if you're not already into his stuff. I like reading T.S. Eliot for the way he puts sentences together but i think i'm too dumb to understand the overall themes he's talking about. embarrasingly i never "got it" until the english teacher explained it to me/the class. Kerouac is cool.

Hey what about Shakespeare? Any Jeff Tweedy supporters out there?

Unfortunately i am very poorly read and i know absolutely nothing about some of the more contemporary writers mentioned here. What can i say, i'm a film/music guy.

uglyapeman, is d.c. berman in reference to the infamous Nashvillian David Berman of the Silver Jews? I've never read his "poetry" but I guess i like his lyrics. Its funny, your list reads...Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, and a guy who passed out drunk at my house one time.

you're no ugly apeman, your an ewok!

Oh yes. Very true. I forgot all about him. Dylan Thomas is spectacular. I also read a very interesting sort of biography on him by his ex-wife, Caitlyn Thomas. Very insightful.

i would put tweedy on that list. he and costello are the best lyricists of our time, and l guess lyrics be poems. you dig?

Well, what should I have expected?

the bird and the fat guy opposite abbot?

Dave Berman of Silver Jews and Idaho Kitchen Cleaning fame is an incredible lyricist which indeed led him to publish at least one book of poems, Actual Air. His poetry holds some of the same clever, vernacular-spinning style of his lyrics, but unlike the other leagues of musicians-turned-poets who should be immediately discarded (read: Jewel), Berman has clearly used his library card and been influenced by some excellent poets like Ashbery or perhaps Wright.

For those of you don't read or don’t "get" poetry as you say, quit reading the poems that you were previously assigned in high school. While Keats, Frost, Shelley and even (excuse me while I vomit) Emily Dickinson are each unmatched contributors to the craft, try reading more contemporary poets who write in the mindset and language closer to our own. And quit reading confessional, complaint-poetry by troubled suburban teens who too-often confuse their diary entires with art.

I highly recommend Marilyn Nelson, Andrew Hudgins, Yusek Komunyakaa, Seamus Heaney, Mark Jarman, Gerald Stern (personal favorite), Derek Walcott, and Robert Lowell.

and dave berman could be seen at gold rush last week singing the mtsu blue raiders fight song.

Welcome back Freezetag.

(Edited by Keith at 8:21 pm on Aug. 12, 2003)

Q-Tip: Abstract poet, prominent like Shakespeare

I'm really into Emily Dickenson. I like the roller coaster of emotions that all of her poems bring to me. It is evident in the tone and mood of most of her poems that she is manic depressive/bipolar.
I HEARD a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.

The eyes beside had wrung them dry, 5
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in his power.

I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I 10
Could make assignable,—and then
There interposed a fly,

With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed, and then 15
I could not see to see.

Welcome Pdog!

Emily Dickenson has always been too deep for me... but I hold a soft spot in my heart for anyone that Dorothy Jane Torkelson adored so much. I was always fond of the Man in the Moon, too.

Charles Bukowski

pdog,

I'll give you that the above poem isn't bad. I just can't get into her stuff mostly because of the "oh, come on" factor. I just want to shake her and scream "give it a rest already!" Talk about a poet beating one style into the ground. And hey, the depressed/bipolar thing was already old by dickenson's time, and I dare say its been done better since. Don't all writers of any substance suffer from any combination of depression, alcoholism, anxiety, or whatever mental illness?

its the same reason Rainer Maria (sp?) makes me puke. Pompous, heavy handed diary lyrics sung in free verse to sound indie. Someone tell her nobody gives a shit!

Does this make me a misogynist?

i nominate ceeze.






also alfred, lord tennyson. i'm naming my first born for him.

Did you know you can sing any of her poems to the theme of Gilligan's Island?! Try it.

And Yellow Rose of Texas, and Amazing Grace. This also means you can sing the theme to Gilligan's Island to the tune of Amazing Grace, and vice versa. I do this periodically when I'm bored.

louise gluck, rimbaud, pablo neruda, theodore roethke, e.e. cummings, galway kinnell, nick bozanic, richard wilbur, talvikki ansel, michael ondaatje,
rainer maria rilke, ezra pound, robert creeley, jorie graham, james dickey, leonard cohen, lorca, elliott, dorothy parker, wh auden, james wright, zbignew herbert, charles simic, the requesite plath-sexton-rich, sometimes william carlos williams & wallace stevens, depending on my mood...

...i could go on for days as this is my field...well, i am getting my master's in it so...but it all just comes down to i love words, love language...poetry is good stuff

I LOVE candy. And Garcia Lorca. Is Bukowski a poet or just a dirty old man(not that there is anything wrong with it)?

I've often found that people who write poetry aren't necesarily poets.




Jeff Tweedy though, yeah, I bet he likes candy.