/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.553983]

what is some good poetry, or poets, or poems,

/lit/ doesn't seem to talk about poetry that much, or poems, or poets

[Anonymous No.553988]

Who is Phillip K. Dick?

That name just suddenly popped into my head when I saw your post. I don't even know if he writes poetry, or where I read the name. Well, whatever...

[Anonymous No.553990]

Ted Hughes. If you don't lie poetry yet, start with Tales of Ovid. It is The Metamorphoses adapted into English verse. This will convince you of the value of poetry.

If you already like poetry, read Crow. When you're done do Birthday Letters.

[Anonymous No.554031]

>>553988
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_k_dick

Anyway, I can't be bothered with reading poetry.

[Anonymous No.554044]

John Keats, black romance.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:John_Keats

And, naturally, one of my favorites: William Butler Yeats

[Anonymous No.554047]

Prayer (I) by Herbert is awesome as shit IMO

but then again i think the best effect is reading it on paper, with all the proper line placements

[Anonymous No.554053]

>>554047
Don't mean to be a dick, but real poetry is spoken. This is why I think EE Cummings is more of a snobby troll than a poet.

[Anonymous No.554072]

WS Merwin - one of the best living poets. He lives cheap on only a few tens of thousands a year. When he needs money, he does poetry reading tours until he has enough. Then he retires back to his simple home and his wife - he writes and writes and writes

Suggested works:
The Lice
Lament for the Makers

[Anonymous No.554480]

'the days run away like wild horses over the hills' by charles bukowski. some brilliant stuff in there

[The Sound and the Fury !!ryNUDThtPTn No.554482]

Emperor of Ice Cream gives me the shivers.

[Anonymous No.554490]

Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away

When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door

Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away

[Anonymous No.554793]

I highly suggest the reading on Chivalric poems by the poet John Donne, also the romanctic period of british literature is quite rewarding in the poets Coleridge and Shelley especially. Best of luck in your poetic search.

[Anonymous No.554798]

>>554044
You, sir, are correct.

[Anonymous No.554817]

i'm not a poem person but i like Konstantinos Kavafis.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind..

[Anonymous No.554836]

>>554482

I've read that at least a dozen times and I still have no idea what it means.

[Anonymous No.554838]

I really like Federico Garcia Lorca. I can only read the translations so I'm sure a lot of it is lost with that, but, still interesting to me.

[Anonymous No.555532]

At the world's end
This gentle art alone
Will stand imperishable-
Had I not had this dream...
I would have you hear of it.

[Anonymous No.555542]

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot really got me into poetry. I dunno if it's the best place to start, but that's how I got into it.

[Anonymous No.555549]

>>554817
Fuck year waiting for the barbarians

[Anonymous No.555634]

If you know little about poetry, try anthologies:

Palgrave's Golden Treasury - online
Norton Anthology of Poetry

both have wide range of time, interest, style. There are many others.

[Anonymous No.556190]

Sailing on the ocean dim
Gold a starlight maiden shines
And bark of crowing countenance
Reveals a shattered mizzenmast

The static burning in the haze
A rebel siren sends away
Into the endless space-time void
To conquer what it's given last

A moustache like a walrus' tusks
Above a foghorn's speaking mouth
Summons both and drives away
The flocks of praying beggars

Oh mirrored hall that eats my heart
With clamping iron jaws
Beyond the sea in deserts wild
Won't last another day

[Anonymous No.556209]

one art by elizabeth bishop:

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.


--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
that and some walcott and some plath (fucking read ariel). go back from there. yeats & eliot, then whitman and then start getting into the romantics and shit. i'd even recommend starting with the 2nd generation romantics - wordsworth & blake & coleridge laid the foundation I guess, but byron & shelley & keats pwn them IMO

[Anonymous No.556214]

A peom by Neil Gaiman:

My grandpa sells condoms to sailors
He punctures the tips with a pin
My grandma does backstreet abortions
My God, how the money flows in!

[Anonymous No.556247]

>>554817

Cavafy rocks. His erotic poems are kinda meh, but the historically themed ones are awesome.

Philhellene

Make sure the engraving is done skillfully.
The expression serious, majestic.
The diadem preferably somewhat narrow:
I don’t like that broad kind the Parthians wear.
The inscription, as usual, in Greek:
nothing excessive, nothing pompous—
we don’t want the proconsul to take it the wrong way:
he’s always nosing things out and reporting back to Rome—
but of course giving me due honor.
Something very special on the other side:
some discus-thrower, young, good-looking.
Above all I urge you to see to it
(Sithaspis, for God’s sake don’t let them forget)
that after “King” and “Savior,”
they engrave “Philhellene” in elegant characters.
Now don’t try to be clever
with your “where are the Greeks?” and “what things Greek
here behind Zagros, out beyond Phraata?”
Since so many others more barbarian than ourselves
choose to inscribe it, we will inscribe it too.
And besides, don’t forget that sometimes
sophists do come to us from Syria,
and versifiers, and other triflers of that kind.
So we are not, I think, un-Greek.

As with all poetry it is better in the original, but I think it manages to retain quite a lot through the translation.

[Anonymous No.556262]

Sylvia Plath. Start with her later work-- the Ariel poems.

[Anonymous No.556282]

The Kraken by Tennyson

Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber'd and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die

[Anonymous No.556315]

>>556262
This. The Colossus is pretty cash if you're into symbolism and metaphors.

[Anonymous No.556343]

Lord Byron

I have always loved "The Destruction of Sennacherib," but that's a personal taste thing. Lord Byron is a tough candidate for best poet of all time, nevertheless.

[Anonymous No.556397]

This thread needs some motherfuckin' Ozymandias by motherfuckin' Percy Shelley.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.[

[Anonymous No.556401]

Seamus Heaney

[Anonymous No.556403]

Don't read enough poetry, but my favorites are the oh so common Wordsworth, Coleridge and of course Keats,

[Anonymous No.556405]

>>556397
Percy Shelley motherfucking atheist badass.

[Anonymous No.556496]

Do people on /lit/ only read single poems? Does anyone actually read poetry collections published by single authors anymore?

[Anonymous No.556511]

>>556496
We have the internet. What's the point?

I only have two poetry collections at home, one of Robert Frost's and one of Emily Dickinson's.

[Anonymous No.556535]

FUCK ME finally someone started a poetry thread...

where to start...

William Blake, one my favorite

Tennyson, Wallace Stevens (see my post of Emp. of Ice cream above or below) T.S. Eliot, sop many... god now i have to go look...

[Anonymous No.556537]

Uncle Walt's Song to Myself

[Anonymous No.556544]

>>556496
I own Norton anthologies with various works by various writers and Ariel, The Colossus, and the Complete Works of Anne Sexton.

[Anonymous No.556547]

>>556511
What's the point?

Have you ever thought about how you'll prepare for the day when the internet stops working?
I have.

[Anonymous No.556549]

>>556535

blake is awesome, so is stevens

how come now one mentions Dante when talking about poets, i think he's pretty badass

[Anonymous No.556554]

Three Bs are my homies: Byron, Baudelaire and Blake

Coleridge and Lermontov come pretty close though

[Anonymous No.556877]

Paul Celan:

No one molds us again of earth and clay
no one conjures our dust.
No one.


Praised be your name, no one.
For your sake
we shall flower.
Towards
you.


A nothing
we were, are, shall
remain, flowering:
the nothing-, the
no one’s rose.


With
our pistil soul-bright,
with our stamen heaven-ravaged,
our corolla red
with the crimson word which we sang
over, O over
the thorn.

[Anonymous No.556972]

The Colossus

"I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.
Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles
Proceed from your great lips.
It's worse than a barnyard.
Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or
other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser.

Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails
of lysol
I crawl like an ant in mourning
Over the weedy acres of your brow
To mend the immense skull plates and clear
The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.

A blue sky out of the Oresteia
Arches above us. O father, all by yourself
You are pithy and historical as the Roman
Forum.
I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.
Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are
littered

In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.
It would take more than a lightning-stroke
To create such a ruin.
Nights, I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear, out of the wind,

Counting the red stars and those of plum-
color.
The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.
My hours are married to shadow.
No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones of the landing."

[Anonymous No.556995]

ee cummings is a poet god-king

[Tippers !!Y+KolZOLN/b No.557025]

Philip Larkin. Possibly my favorite poet of all time.
Just something about his poems, I can connect with them SO well.
I'm actually writing something on him right now.
Oh, and read this interview he did in the 80's. I laughed out loud for parts of it, he's truly an amazing person.
http://www.parisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/3153

[Tippers !!Y+KolZOLN/b No.557035]

>>556496
I read collections. My favorites are probably Duffy's collection, Stevie Smith's collection, Larkin's Whitsun Weddings, and a more modern collection I love is Hofmann's Acrimony.

[Anonymous No.557117]

>>556995
>e e cummings

> Eeeehhhhh eeeeeehhhhh *CUMMING*

That's what she said

[Anonymous No.557294]

>>555542
fukkin brofist

[Anonymous No.557299]

Read some Baudelaire to amp up my spooky cred when I was going through my grimdark goth phase, then took a lit class that mainly focused on poetry.

Been a goddamn love affair ever since.

[Anonymous No.557851]

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extras, just for you.

And they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style frocks and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern,
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can
And don't have any kids yourself.

-- Philip Larkin

[Anonymous No.557873]

ENVY

Swimming, streamed with salt
Abob upon your love-licked
nest of curls. I weighed those breasts
more pale then curds and wanted nothing
more. Nor did my glistening lamprey make complaint
nosing amongst your coral pinks. Content in all
the world was I until you smiled, whence satisfaction
fled. I envied what you were, that I could never be:
The one spread pierced and worshiped under me.

AVARICE

There is an oyster bed
I know will not fail to yield
a pearl; a fleece of gold
that Argo never found; soft bells of polished
bronze and ruby burns, and silver eggs...
In our easy wealth, this luxury of sweat, we may be
careless of deposits and withdrawals; spend unto
our heart's content. Let us be rich in love, to sneer
like fat, contented jades upon the poor.

PRIDE

Yes, she adores me but
I would not stoop so low.
Those alabaster legs she swears to
cleave for me alone. But I demur:
eschew her soapstone belly, scorn an arse that
shames Callipygia. With eyes that have no resting
place save mine, she promises me only her exquisite
nakedness. Aloof, I turn my head; Despising one
who would take me to bed.

WRATH

Amok as fabled Hekate, eyes
spitting like burned elm, she
rails against me, set ablaze by spite.
Snake-fisted, fierce with scourges, now
She promises to flay the skin off my back, vows
torments Nero blanched at. If she finds me,
she will surely murder me, trample my spine beneath
her perfumed heel. I cower and hide, and in an ectasy
of dread, fear she will not find me.

[Anonymous No.557876]

LUST

When blood is in my loins,
plain girls are fair as
wastelands in the sunset. Dulls wives
speaking of skirts they wish to buy
are Pythias, a brandy-fire upon their sharp, pink
tongues, with bed meat and night-gravy my concern.
I have no thought for art, nor yet the poor, nor
anything of use. Inflamed, I see no depth in things:
Where love is blind, lechery's one-eyed

GLUTTONY

This is the inlet where
mermaids bask. This spray
blown by an amniotic sea, her subtle,
liquid song from the ruin of ships. Hips, foam-
capped, ebb and flow. The tides are rough.
Astride my face she is a strange, soft mask. Through
which are glimpsed bowers of anemone. Her grape,
her wine. Divine rot smears my lips, that I am drunk
yet cannot say "enough"

SLOTH

I must get up. The sheets
are trampled flags from
splendid wars, stained by each skirmish;
worse by each retreat. I cannot lie here,
pillows slumped and rumpled like unconscious sheep,
for somewhere there is need of me. My hands are
needed and my wits, though not my lips, nor belly nor
my tongue, that are expected here. My mattress asks
enough. How can I work, exhausted by this indolence?

[Anonymous No.557901]

>>557873
>>557876

Lost Girls is pretty fucking mediocre, even for Alan Moore.

[Anonymous No.557919]

I ain't one for poetry, ain't one for prose,
Ain't one for the scent of a spring-time rose,
But there is one fact that I do know,
I sure get a kick out of that Beavis and Butt-head show.

[Anonymous No.557973]

Charles Baudelaire is pretty fucking great:


I love the naked ages long ago
When statues were gilded by Apollo,
When men and women of agility
Could play without lies and anxiety,
And the sky lovingly caressed their spines,
As it exercised its noble machine.
Fertile Cybele, mother of nature, then,
Would not place on her daughters a burden,
But, she-wolf sharing her heart with the people,
Would feed creation from her brown nipples.
Men, elegant and strong, would have the right
To be proud to have beauty named their king;
Virgin fruit free of blemish and cracking,
Whose flesh smooth and firm would summon a bite!
The Poet today, when he would convey
This native grandeur, would not be swept away
By man free and woman natural,
But would feel darkness envelop his soul
Before this black tableau full of loathing.
O malformed monsters crying for clothing!
O ludicrous heads! Torsos needing disguise!
O poor writhing bodies of every wrong size,
Children that the god of the Useful swaths
In the language of bronze and brass!
And women, alas! You shadow your heredity,
You gnaw nourishment from debauchery,
A virgin holds maternal lechery
And all the horrors of fecundity!

We have, it is true, corrupt nations,
Beauty unknown to the radiant ancients:
Faces that gnaw through the heart's cankers,
And talk with the cool beauty of languor;
But these inventions of our backward muses
Are never hindered in their morbid uses
Of the old for profound homage to youth,
—To the young saint, the sweet air, the simple truth,
To the eye as limpid as the water current,
To spread out over all, insouciant
Like the blue sky, the birds and the flowers,
Its perfumes, its songs and its sweet fervors.

[Anonymous No.557978]

Pessoa, motherfuckers.

[Anonymous No.558041]

>>557978
I'm portuguese.

Do people really love this guy or is just our inflated egos that tell us that?

[Anonymous No.558047]

>>558041
maybe the inflated egos, because there is a quite a bunch of other authors who praise the shit out of him.

And his stuff is probably sold more in translated versions than in the original.

[Anonymous No.558085]

>>557117

[Anonymous No.558244]

>>557978
PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE

[Anonymous No.558258]

surprised no one posted this example of genius already.

[Anonymous No.558347]

All poetry is bullshit.

They write poetry because they cannot write books.

[Anonymous No.558380]

>>558347

poetry is just concentrated prose

[Anonymous No.558423]

George, Lord Byron

Robert Burns

Robert Frost.

Those are my favorites.

[Anonymous No.558434]

>>558347
And sprinters are bullshit because they don't run marathons? hmmm.

[Anonymous No.558435]

>>558434
Yeah, pretty much.

Still, poetry is fun to read out loud. Books aren't.

...But that's just my opinion.

[Anonymous No.558438]

For contemporary poetry, I recommend James Tate.

[Anonymous No.558439]

>>558347
You so funny. Some poets do write books!

[Anonymous No.558447]

[Anonymous No.559343]

>>558447

Is that an ad banner?Yes, I think it is.

[Anonymous No.559805]

Philip Larkin
Destroyed love idealism
In a female-dominant english class
I was there
Shit was cash

[Anonymous No.560704]

Anne Sexton. In the genre of Plath but (in my opinion) far superior.

[Anonymous No.562513]

Pablo Neruda for sure...also Walt Whitman is good, The Beats..Ginsberg

[Anonymous No.562521]

>>559805

This requires story time.

[Anonymous No.562526]

>>562521
I second that.

[Anonymous No.562530]

>>560704
Oh shit, someone else on /lit/ actually likes Sexton.

O Sylvia, Sylvia,
with a dead box of stones and spoons,

with two children, two meteors
wandering loose in a tiny playroom,

with your mouth into the sheet,
into the roofbeam, into the dumb prayer,

(Sylvia, Sylvia
where did you go
after you wrote me
from Devonshire
about rasing potatoes
and keeping bees?)

what did you stand by,
just how did you lie down into?

Thief --
how did you crawl into,

crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long,

the death we said we both outgrew,
the one we wore on our skinny breasts,

the one we talked of so often each time
we downed three extra dry martinis in Boston,

the death that talked of analysts and cures,
the death that talked like brides with plots,

the death we drank to,
the motives and the quiet deed?

(In Boston
the dying
ride in cabs,
yes death again,
that ride home
with our boy.)

O Sylvia, I remember the sleepy drummer
who beat on our eyes with an old story,

how we wanted to let him come
like a sadist or a New York fairy

to do his job,
a necessity, a window in a wall or a crib,

and since that time he waited
under our heart, our cupboard,

and I see now that we store him up
year after year, old suicides

and I know at the news of your death
a terrible taste for it, like salt,

[Anonymous No.562532]

>>562530
(And me,
me too.
And now, Sylvia,
you again
with death again,
that ride home
with our boy.)

And I say only
with my arms stretched out into that stone place,

what is your death
but an old belonging,

a mole that fell out
of one of your poems?

(O friend,
while the moon's bad,
and the king's gone,
and the queen's at her wit's end
the bar fly ought to sing!)

O tiny mother,
you too!
O funny duchess!
O blonde thing!

[Anonymous No.562555]

what goes where?

[Anonymous No.562556]

>>562555
COCK GOES HERE.

[Anonymous No.562557]

>>562555
go to /adv/ for sex ed

[Anonymous No.562559]

Federico Garcia Lorca

[Anonymous No.562569]

Does /lit/ have a recommendation chart for poetry? It's unacceptable that we don't have one.

[Anonymous No.563255]

>>556972
The more I read of Plath the more her talent impresses me.

[Anonymous No.563647]

>>562569

I'd appreciate this. I remember a few poems from high school, and I've read a few Shel Silverstein books but beyond that I've never been exposed to much poetry.