College Students! discussion

Do any of you enjoy poetry? Do you despise it? What are some of your favorite poems? Favorite poets?

Hilarious! I was JUST about to start a poetry thread!

Personally, I love Donne. My favorite of his is A Valediction Forbidding Mourning. But all of his stuff is great. It's romantic. And metaphysical with a lot of allusions, especially to scientific inventions of the day.

I want to broaden my horizons and read some other poets. Maybe Millay, Byron...I don't know. I honestly don't know a lot about poetry, so I'm interested to see what everyone else has to say.

I don't think I'm a poetry fan, I've never really gotten into it. But I also haven't really read a lot of it.

I would also like to broaded my outlook about it though!

I got a chance to study Donne in my British Lit class during my last semester in college. I quite enjoyed him. I loved Tennyson, Blake, & Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I also am a fan of ee cummings.

I really liked John Keats when I was a teen, but I haven't read a lot of poetry since then. It's definitely something I need to get back into.

For someone who doesn't read a lot of poetry, I definitely have high expectations of it. I like poetry with a set form rather than stuff where it's like the poet randomly hit the enter key on their typewriter, but it still has a kind of rhythm and beat. But even that stuff I can get into; it's the stuff with no rhythm and no pattern whatsoever that I can't deal with.

One thing about poetry, is it has to be read out loud. It is so much better that way, even on your own or for class.

I would agree!

I especially love reading Burns with a Scottish accent. Aside from thinking I'm a total doofus, my girlfriend loves it.

I also have collections of Browning, Dickenson, Whitman, Longfellow, Tennyson, and a collection of American classics (it's like 700 pages long).

Poetry was made to be read aloud rather than silently from a page.

Aside from all the classics, I really like Ellen Bass and Billy Collins.

I like some poetry. I agree with ye, Lori and Jamie, John Donne is fantastic! I love The Sunne Rising.

Others..W.B. Yeats, William Wordsworth, Patrick Kavanagh, Elizabeth Bisop....

I dunno if it counts as poetry but I absolutely LOVE the poems that Roald Dahl writes in his books! They're hilarious!

If I could make a suggestion...it would be cool if everyone posted up their favourite poem. And it'd be a good way to discover poems we might not have heard about otherwise.

Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
Most poems rhyme,
But this one doesn't.

Just kidding. I'll look for my favorite one when I'm back at home.

Gate C22
by Ellen Bass

At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he'd just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she'd been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching--
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn't look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after--if she beat you or left you or
you're lonely now--you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman's middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.

I love Charles Bukowski.

There's something about the raw, realism about his work that amuses me.

I personally write free-form poetry as a way to purge my feelings, and his poems are so opposite from what I write that I think that is the exact reason for why I love him so much.

I don't really read a lot of poetry, but I've been wanting to get into it, mostly as a way to help develop my own skills. I have a feeling, though, that aside from Bukowski the type of poems I would be drawn to would be love sonnets...

What can I say, I'm a closet romantic. Crap. Lol

I grew up in a literary household, so I've always been quite fond of poetry. I particularly fancy French/German avant-garde poetry (1908-1958)*

I translate French/German/Spanish/Portuguese poetry into English. It started as a hobby, but has since led to a small career. I really recommend Apollinaire, Reverdy, Cendrars, Jacob, et al.

*A fluid frame of time—no exact date(s).

I love Portuguese poetry! Os Lusiadas is one of the best epic poems ever and then there's Castro Alves, Dom Dinis, Gil Vicente, Fernando Pessoa (and all his identities), etc. Coisa gostoso.

I studied Apollinaire in first year of college. I really liked 'Le Pont Mirabeau'.

Emily, that poem is lovely!

Anyone like Robert Frost?

I'm...actually quite secretive about my favourite poem, but I'll post up one I love.

Jamie wrote: "I got a chance to study Donne in my British Lit class during my last semester in college. I quite enjoyed him. I loved Tennyson, Blake, & Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I also am a fan of ee cummings. "

I loved ee cummings' anyone lived in a pretty how town. I must have read it 4 or 5 times before I started to understand what he was talking about. I meet some friends for a monthly book club and each time we met, we also discuss a poem. That was my first intro to ee cummings and certainly won't be the last.

i carry your heart with me
by e.e cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)



So is it just me, or are the last two lines of the second stanza just perfect?

Advent- Patrick Kavanagh

We have tested and tasted too much, lover-
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.
But here in the Advent-darkened room
Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea
Of penance will charm back the luxury
Of a child's soul, we'll return to Doom
The knowledge we stole but could not use.

And the newness that was in every stale thing
When we looked at it as children: the spirit-shocking
Wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill
Or the prophetic astonishment in the tedious talking
Of an old fool will awake for us and bring
You and me to the yard gate to watch the whins
And the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time begins.

O after Christmas we'll have no need to go searching
For the difference that sets an old phrase burning-
We'll hear it in the whispered argument of a churning
Or in the streets where the village boys are lurching.
And we'll hear it among decent men too
Who barrow dung in gardens under trees,
Wherever life pours ordinary plenty.
Won't we be rich, my love and I, and
God we shall not ask for reason's payment,
The why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges
Nor analyse God's breath in common statement.
We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages
Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour-
And Christ comes with a January flower.

Emily- that is one of my FAVORITE poems!! :)

Here's my favorite poem:

A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING.
by John Donne


AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears;
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove
The thing which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.


His other stuff is pretty good. There's one about him trying to convince his girlfriend to have sex with him.

I have to be honest. I just don't get poetry. It frustrates me..and I hate dissecting their meaning. I remember reading it in class and then the class would start discussing what it meant and I was like..What?? Where did he say that??

Molly, I'm with you. I've never really been able to get into poetry. I always hated when we had to analyze them. The only poetry I ever really took the time to read & get into was E.E. Cummings, but I think that's because his work was pretty simplified compared to a lot of the other poetry I've had to read for classes. The poem Emily posted above is also my favorite poem.

I think that schools teach poetry the wrong way. It isn't about dissecting it. It isn't about taking apart every little word and deciding what they meant by it. Or at least not all poetry is that way. In it's simplest forms, good poetry is just about reading beautiful language. People who try to convince you that it always has to be more than that are being too stuffy.
I would suggest reading Billy Collins and Ellen Bass. There's nothing to decipher there, just the most perfect descriptions and the most beautiful phrases you'll ever read. Poetry should not be an exercise, but an experience. When you finish a poem, you should sit back and say "Yeah, they said that just right. That poem speaks the truth." If a poem makes you feel that way, then it's a good poem.

Amen to that Emily! Especially that last part..about how you should feel when you finish the poem.

I love poetry! I'm so glad someone started this thread. My favorites include e.e.cummings, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost. I really liked Lori's point about poetry being meant to be read aloud because for me, a poem doesn't come alive until I can read it out loud. One of my recent favorites is Camille Dungy--I highly suggest looking her up, her poetry is fantastic. My favorite poem at the moment is "Manzano Sunflowers" by Dale Harris:

You missed Indian Market
And of course the sunflowers.
As usual they swept across August
At first a few, a yellow trickle along the fence line
Then more, making pools in the pasture
And splashing down into the arroyo
Then incredibly many more,
Dappling the distance,
As though a giant hand had buttered the land.

Yet with the entire prairie to expand into,
They prefer crowds of themselves
They mass along the roadside,
Lined up as though a parade were about to pass.
Here and there one stands alone,
But not for long.
Soon his kin will come
And there will be sunflower squalor
There will be sunflower squalor, a floral slum.

Once they are out,
They will not be ignored.
Stretching their skinny stalks,
They top our roofline,
Press against the window screens,
And peep in at the door.
Familiar foot paths to the out buildings are obscured,
And from the road we seem afloat,
Our cabin, an odd tin boat
In a sea of sunflower faces.

They are the most staccato of flowers.
I catch them humming snatches of polkas
And John Phillips Sousa Marches,
Bobbing in the wind to the Boogaloo,
The Boogie Woogie and the Lindy Hop.
I call their names,
Clem, Clarissa, Sarah Jane
To try and tame them.

My neighbor comes by.
She has a field full
They’re useless, she complains.
Her horses can’t eat them.
I should hope not! I exclaim,
After she’s gone.

I don’t remember if you even liked sunflowers
But you liked life
And they are all about that.
Today I wrote to your family, finally.
I expect they are occupying themselves,
With beautiful gestures
In order to get over the grief of you.
As for me, I have sunflowers.

Jess..I really like that poem! I've never heard of him nor have I heard of Camille Dungy. I'll have to check her out too!

Oh wow. Jess, that poem is beautiful. I didn't really expect it to take that turn at the end. I love how it describes the sunflower slums, because they're all mushed together. And how the sunflowers are humming songs. That's just perfect. Sunflowers do just seem to sing, don't they? I got a feeling like he was trying to say that sunflowers are kind of like people, because they don't like to be alone. they're all about life too, which is how people should be. I think it's great how the sunflowers loving life contrasts with the fact that her lover (I assume) is dead. And of course flowers die too. And since he loved life, and the flowers love life, it's a great connection.
Wonderful.

Jamie--Camille Dungy is so great! She gave a reading at my school last year and I was just blown away. Not only is she a talented poet, but she is also a fabulous performer. I highly recommend Youtubing her :)

Emily--I fell in love with this poem the first time I read it. I love the imagery. I just had such vivid pictures running through my mind as I read. I also loved the correlation between sunflowers loving life and her dead lover's love of life. Sunflowers are all about life, aren't they? I think the last line is such a kicker too...I find myself randomly thinking "As for me, I have sunflowers" throughout the day, just because I like that line so much!

I'm a poet myself. Started writing poetry when I was a junior in High School. Sadly though I haven't written any new poems lately. Nothing is sparking. Here some poems I've written in the past.

Deadly Medicine
by Ashley Lamore


Here comes the alcohol, drugs, and pills
There goes the stress and pain
That's what you think
Here comes the addiction
There goes the control
Here comes the devil
There goes the angel
There goes loved ones
Here comes death
There goes your life
Here comes your funeral
There goes broken hearts
Here comes you, finally realizing
What a huge mistake you made
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Like A River
by Ashley Lamore

Like a river
Life
Is sometimes smooth
And sometimes rough
Like a river
We flow into what is destined to be
Like a river
We can only go forward
We can't go back in time
Like a river
When there are nasty storms
And life is a bit much
We overflow
Like a river
We dry up
We die
Another river forms
A life is born
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beauty and the Body
by Ashley Lamore

We are born with a beautiful body
A body that takes criticism
Our toughest critic being ourselves
We try to change our body
When we should be trying to enhance it
With what we have and what there is
When we wish we had another girl's body
That girl is most likely wishes she had ours
Perfection
Although we know it does not exist
We still reach for it
We blind ourselves with the
Image of a perfect body
Failing to see the beauty that's
Already there

Hope you enjoy the poems!

I enjoy reading peotry, but it really has to capture my attention. One of my favorite poets, is Pat Mora she is awsome almost or all of her poems are meaningfull I especially like Border Town:1938 and Immigrants.

Poetry is something I would love to get into more, but I always find that I don't know where to start. Jess, I really liked that poem "Manzano Sunflowers"!

Here is another one I like, called Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe:

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea:
But we loved with a love that was more than love -
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her high-born kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me -
Yes! that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud one night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we -
Of many far wiser than we -
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling -my darling -my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea -
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

One of the books we are required to read in my English class is a book of poetry, it's called Native Guardby Natasha Trethewey.
Very pretty, yet very sad poetry. I'm really enjoying it, and I must say it's a relief to be able to analyze something that feels like it's supposed to be.

Sounds really good Michelle!

You Are Tired (I Think)
by e.e. cummings

You are tired,
(I think)
Of the always puzzle of living and doing;
And so am I.

Come with me, then,
And we’ll leave it far and far away—
(Only you and I, understand!)

You have played,
(I think)
And broke the toys you were fondest of,
And are a little tired now;
Tired of things that break, and—
Just tired.
So am I.

But I come with a dream in my eyes tonight,
And I knock with a rose at the hopeless gate of your heart—
Open to me!
For I will show you places Nobody knows,
And, if you like,
The perfect places of Sleep.

Ah, come with me!
I’ll blow you that wonderful bubble, the moon,
That floats forever and a day;
I’ll sing you the jacinth song
Of the probable stars;
I will attempt the unstartled steppes of dream,
Until I find the Only Flower,
Which shall keep (I think) your little heart
While the moon comes out of the sea.

What I like about that poem is the stanza that starts with "You have played." I think that stanza is painfully true. When I read that I can feel the exact feeling that he's describing, like I've already made those decisions in life, like I'm already that tired. And it hurts just a little, because I think we all know exactly how that feels.

Emily thanks for the posts! I'm really loving it. Does anyone have good suggestions for books of poetry. I am sorry to say that I haven't read a lot of poetry, but I would love to! And it's always better to be reading a book than a computer screen, i always feel. :)

Anyone remember their favorite poems from childhood? (like under age 10) I remember being fascinated and horrified by The Raven and the Highwayman.

I always loved Shel Silverstein when I was little. I didn't really like poetry that much in my younger years.

Oh gosh, I loved The Highwayman. Actually, I still do. and the Raven. I had like the first half of it memorized.

I remember Shel Silverstein. He always made me laugh.

David wrote: "I love Portuguese poetry! Os Lusiadas is one of the best epic poems ever and then there's Castro Alves, Dom Dinis, Gil Vicente, Fernando Pessoa (and all his identities), etc. Coisa gostoso. " Really? I absolutely hate Os Lusíadas. It was forced on me so many times as well... (also the last sentence doesn't really make sense :P)

I'm going to get a collection of poetry by Rumi because of the following quote (shared by my cute professor):

This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause 100 veils to fall each moment. First, to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.

About a month ago we had Yusef Komunyakka come and read. His work is absolutely amazing, and hearing him read it was an experience to remember.

It's one thing to read it yourself or hear someone like a teacher read it to you. But to hear the person who wrote it down, that takes the poem to a whole other level of understanding.

We are having Natasha Trethewey come and read next semester as well, and I'm thinking about trying to go.

Billy Collins came and did a reading at my school last year. That's how I fell in love with his poetry. Now, whenever I read it, I hear it in his voice.

Evening after evening

A vector of light crosses

This same windowpane

And fades

Night

Carries it off to

Where you

Invisible

Adapt to denseness

-Jacques Roubaud (Meditation)

I love that poem 'You are tired (I think)' by e.e. cummings. Thanks for putting it up, Emily! It's funny...how you can randomly discover a poem sometimes that expresses something that is going on in your life, and it hits home so true....

Did anyone like any of the poems I posted up above? I wrote those :)

Anastasia wrote: "I love Charles Bukowski."

Yes, Bukowski takes what the beats started and completely removes form from poetry. The raw emotion of his works are pure power.