Request: Poems

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

I am gearing up for a month of poetry in April, so I am asking my DW friends what their favourite poem(s) and/or poet(s) are. Feel free to extol and exalt in the comments!

Comments

[dr_zook]

Sadly I don't read much poems, I find it often quite challenging, and I'm rarely in the mood for that, haha. I do have two favourites, though: one by Leonard Cohen, This is War, and when I was younger I found The Cinnamon Peeler by Ondaatje highly erotic! :D

I'm looking forward to what you're planning for April!

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Interesting! I do know The Cinnamon Peeler's Wife well because my first/main fandom is BBC Sherlock and there is a very famous Sherlock fic (romantic consensual cannibalism!) called The Cinnamon Peeler's Wife.

So I hope to be posting every day in April, either poems I like (or others like) or my own verse.

[redders]

Ooh, poetry month! I definitely started reading more poetry once I got sick - not reading much right now in general as I'm pretty cooked by the rehab program I'm going through to get stronger and back to work, but I spent a good year slowly enjoying poetry.

Overall my favorite collection: Salient by Elizabeth T Gray Jr (the description on her site is better worded than my brain can do right now)

Overall (in general) my favorite current poet: Sharon Olds; it's very visceral and often sexual, so YMMV; writes beautifully about death and the body in The Father.

Another collection I loved: Pilgrim Bell by Kaveh Akbar... I can think up more sometime!

I subscribe to a poetry collection thing through a local bookstore, and that helps me find new poets all the time. I read sort of... intuitively, so I suppose it's a bit of a mix what I get reading.

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

I do know Sharon Olds and posted a few poems by her last year. The others you mention are not familiar to me but I will check them out. It is very interesting what you say about your relationship to poetry regarding your illness and recovery. I am glad it brought you solace in distressing times. Thank you so much for letting me know what you like. At this time of year, I am looking to expand my horizons :)

[redders]

I hope you enjoy some of what I suggested! I can always suggest more as well.

I read On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf this year. She writes intriguingly about what I wound up experiencing myself last year:

With responsibility shelved and reason in the abeyance—for who is going to exact criticism from an invalid or sound sense from the bed-ridden?—other tastes assert themselves; sudden, fitful, intense. We rifle the poets of their flowers. We break off a line or two and let them open in the depths of the mind. … In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning, gather instinctively this, that, and the other—a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause—which the poet, knowing words to be meagre in comparison with ideas, has strewn about his page to evoke, when collected, a state of mind which neither words can express nor the reason explain.