NationStates Jolt Archive

So there's prolly a poetry-relatd thread somewhere, but I figured I'd put one on the front page -- for at least five minutes, anyway.

So obviously you can discuss poetry, or post your own poetry, or the poetry of others.

Have at it.

I will start this off with my "Ode to the Big Four" -- dedicated (in complete sincerity) to what I call the Big Four American poets: Frost, Whitman, Dickinson and Longfellow.

Enjoy (or don't. hehe):

--
I scratch myself, and bathe myself.
And what you know, I know.
And what you know I know, I know you know I know.

Behold the grass. Isn't it cool?
I hear it speak, and it speaks in the tongues of
Squirrels and of bugs;
They speak of the newness of yore,
And the antiquity of birth.
The squirrels and bugs converse with me
For I am the force animalia incarnate,
And also because I have a special animal-linguistic hearing aid.

I am sweat; I hear my own sweat purr,
Like a cat on the lap of a silk-pajama-wearing
Largesse-spreader, spreading fertilizer on the
Fertile soil-soul of the cat.

I am the cat. I celebrate the cat,
And she celebrates me.
She and I look at this single blade of grass and think,
"Wow... now this is something about which to write a hundred pages."

The sun rises, the sun sets
The renter rents, the landlord lets
O'er the globe, green grass grows,
Its birthright-height halted when the mower mows.
And the sun rises, the sun sets.

I never saw such grass but twice,
And that was on TV:
Bluegrass at Lambeau, fake grass'd Camp Randall
A fan was I, then grass-bereaved.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
To my kindred, here or on high:
A squirrel pooped on the lawn, and I --
I paid a migrant worker to recruit some flies,
And they made quick work of the mess.


Walt Whitman -- "Song of Myself"
Henry W. Longfellow -- "The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls"
Emily Dickinson -- "(poem number) 49"
Robert Frost -- "The Road Not Taken"

John Keats is my absolute favorite poet. Ode to a Nightengale is his best poem, I think.
I love John Donne's holy sonnets.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge tells beautiful stories in his poetry.

.. pretty much any poet of the romatic era I'm a fan of, but Keats was the best of them all... and died so young. :(

I love poetry. Poetics are fascinating in of themselves, as is the simple emotional engagement one can feel in reading poetry without critical analysis.

Can't write the bloody stuff at all.

John Keats is my absolute favorite poet. Ode to a Nightengale is his best poem, I think.
I love John Donne's holy sonnets.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge tells beautiful stories in his poetry.

.. pretty much any poet of the romatic era I'm a fan of, but Keats was the best of them all... and died so young. :(

Coleridge is my favourite poet. "The Rime of the Ancynte Marinere" and "Kubla Khan" are wonderful to read.

In regard to Keats, I prefer "Ode to Melancholy"; all the Odes are exceptional poems, I simply empathise with Keats discussion of emotion and the nature of joy within Melancholy.

A poem I wrote a while back... (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/2823165/1/Farewell_Christine)

It's kind of long...

I like Wallace Stevens

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

I can only write poetry when I'm either extremely tired, or drunk.

My favorite poets are Hafiz and Rumi.

---------------------------------
I want to be where
your bare foot walks,
because maybe before you step,
you'll look at the ground.
I want that blessing.

~Rumi

Roses are red
Violets are blue
My dog is dead
He sniffed my shoe.

Iniika & The Blessed Chris

Keats was awesome. I like "To My Brothers" and "While I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be" (I think that's the name of it).

~

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high - piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And feel that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
-----

I love the way he can end a poem with a brilliant flourish. Frost was adept at that too. Keats and Frost were great finishers.

My favorite poet is Robert Frost. Forthwith I shall post some of (what I consider) his greatest hits (so to speak):

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
---

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

---

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

---

Fire And Ice

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.

---

Tree At My Window

Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.
Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.
But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.
That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.

---

Desert Places

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it—it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less—
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

...and a couple of Frost's longer poems.

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
And spills the upper boulder in the sun,
And make gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there,
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having though of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

---

After Apple-Picking

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing dear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.

For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

My beard grows to my toes
I never wears no clothes
I wraps my hair
Around my bare
And down the road I goes

-Shel Silverstein

"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed---and gazed---but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

-- William Wordsworth

I always appreciated e.e. cummings in school - pretty much because he was beyond criticism, and I thought that was a great move. :p

I mean
this



is a
b i t

hard to
crit i
q


u

e,

isn't it? :p

"The Laughing Heart" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtiHbZFx0Xw)

I like a local poet.

You can listen to her read her poetry here:
http://www.atwaterlibrary.ca/node/421

It's language poetry, so the more traditional poetry lovers may find it odd.

My kids love Dennis Lee:

There's a place I go, inside myself,
Where nobody else can be,
And none of my friends can tell it's there—
Nobody knows but me.


It's hard to explain the way it feels,
Or even where I go.
It isn't a place in time or space,
But once I'm there, I know.

It's tiny, it's shiny, it can't be seen,
But it's big as the sky at night . . .
I try to explain and it hurts my brain,
But once I'm there, it's right.

There's a place I know inside myself,
And it's neither big nor small,
And whenever I go, it feels as though
I never left at all.

I read to my Grandma Robert Burn's 'A Red, Red Rose' a few days before she died. Of course I didn't know she was going to die so soon. I thought I'd be up the next weekend to see her again.

O my Luve's like a red, red rose
That's newly sprung in June;
O my Luve's like the melodie
That's sweetly played in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry:

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun;
I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o' life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only Luve,
And fare thee weel awhile!
And I will come again, my Luve,
Tho' it ware ten thousand mile.

Oh Eucharistic Jesus!
How much thou hast loved me!
So much, so far...
even before the beginning of time.

Before I was born thou hadst saught me...
Freely thou gavest thyself
Enduredst thou death, even death on a cross.
Seeking me, thou didst die for me.

My Lord and My God
How late have I loved thee.

Oh Eucharistic Jesus!
How much thou hast loved me!
So much, so far...
even before the beginning of time.

Before I was born thou hadst saught me...
Freely thou gavest thyself
Enduredst thou death, even death on a cross.
Seeking me, thou didst die for me.

My Lord and My God
How late have I loved thee.


That's really quite wank.

Care to give a poet?

(see if anyone recognizes this...)

I can't imagine any greater fear
Than waking up without you here
And though the sun would still shine on
My whole world would all be gone
But not for long

If I had to run..
If I had to crawl..
If I had to swim a hundred rivers
Just to climb a thousand walls
Always know that I would find a way
To get to where you are
There's no place that far

(barf)

hehehehehe

Roses are red
Violets are blue
My dog is dead
He sniffed my shoe.

Judging by the order of events implied by the lines… your dog sniffed the shoe post-mortemly. Call Ghost Busters!

I'm more into the abstract, myself. The best (:confused:) poetry is the kind created with a word processor's spell check function and a long series of random letters:

Icons ends; hulk baton wedges urn.
Wry, his gait; working Tao never laundered highboy with urea.
Hip gnu; icier Bangor ash's.

It's fun for the whole family! :D

Edit: you have to punctuate it though

Judging by the order of events implied by the lines… your dog sniffed the shoe post-mortemly. Call Ghost Busters!Not really. The first three lines are present tense. The last is past tense. The fourth is the reason as to why the dog is dead. But I'm sure you knew that already you facetious little... :P

I once met ol' Lich.
Think he'd use deoderant?
You should think again!

Kary's a nice girl
But she insists that you pay
Then buys caviar.

I would show you pics
Of Kraken and White Wizard
But they're all AO.

And in other news
Tiamat is so sexy. <3
Please have my hatchlings!

Care to give a poet?

Composed on the spot. I did, however, steal the last line from St. Augustine.

Composed on the spot. I did, however, steal the last line from St. Augustine.

hmmm..... still , to quote Byron, "mental masturbation", I feel.

hmmm..... still , to quote Byron, "mental masturbation", I feel.

Best kind?

Never seen "wank" used as an adjective before… I'll add it to my list of completley awesome adjectives, along with pants.

Here is another favorite of mine, (http://youtube.com/watch?v=-fMHms5Cvsw) written by Thomas of Celano in the 1200's. Here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dies_Irae) is an APPROXIMATE translation.

Here's another great poem...I've heard this one played as an excellant blues tune a few times.

"No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down"
~Claude Ely

Go down yonder Gabriel
put your foot on the land and sea
now blow your trumpet boy until you hear from me

There ain't no grave gonna hold my body down
there ain't no grave gonna hold my body down
when you hear that trumpet sound
gonna get up out of the ground
there ain't no grave gonna hold my body down

Looked over Jordan, what did I see?
A band of angels coming after me

There ain't no grave gonna hold my body down
there ain't no grave gonna hold my body down
when you hear that trumpet sound
gonna get up out of th"e ground
there ain't no grave gonna hold my body down

Meet me Jesus meet me
Meet me in the middle of the air
if these wings fail me, meet me with another pair

There ain't no grave gonna hold my body down
there ain't no grave gonna hold my body down
when you hear that trumpet sound
gonna get up out of the ground
there ain't no grave gonna hold my body down

My Poetry. (http://wildeflowers.deviantart.com/)

Eh, these are my best poems:

Sleepless in Sanity
I slip, I fall, I am down
This path which few seem to see
A path of oddity, of weird
The path that calls to me.

I see a light, purple perhaps
Down a tunnel of Marigold
Pink elephants and green Giraffes
Beckon further down the road.

I do not walk, nor do I run
But down this road I dance
To a place of merriment and joy
To a place called France.

Some may think I ramble
Others think I stammer
Still others believe I should sit
And forgo my silly banter.

Tis not I, I say,
For I am not the six foot Sheep
Nor am I the forgone Horse,
I will never utter the lowly peep.

But surely, they proclaim
The strange will one day wane.
To them, I utter one little thing,
The magical word "Insane."

I rather like that poem, really. Really sums me up.

Or then:

And Now, Something Serious For a Change
I see a reflection in a Pond
Is this me?
The eyes, the nose, the ears and hair,
I no longer recognize as mine.
What time has done to my face,
What the ages have claimed as theirs to have,
I wish I could remember when
The face I see was my own.

Now, the reason for that title is that every thing I wrote in class was silly, funny, and over all nonsensical. So, for my final project, I decided to write a serious poem for a change.

Roses are red
Violets are blue
My dog is dead
He sniffed my shoe.

Roses are red
Violets are bluish
If it weren't for jesus
We'd all be Jewish.:p

*I really gotta reclaim all my lost Poetry from the original "Poets of NS" thread.*