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Favorite Poem

"London" is good...

My other favorite from "Songs of Experience."

(This is from memory)

The Little Vagabond

Dear Mother, Dear Mother,
The church is cold
But the alehouse is happy and pleasant and warm,
Such usage as this will never do harm.

... (I forgot the stanza with the bit about 'modest Dame Lurch...I think I had her in grade school...)

But if in the church they would give us some ale,
And a pleasant fire our souls to regale,
We'd sing and pray the livelong day,
And never wish from the church to stray.

And, God like a Father, happy to see,
His children as merry and pleasant as he,
Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the Barrel,
But kiss him, and give him both drink and apparel.
 
9mmCensor said:
not really. i have his collected works but everytime I open it up to read something new I always end up drifting back to Howl, and reading that.

if you have anything specific to recommend, I will certainly try to give them a shot. hehe.
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he published a book called reality sandwhich it was quite good. ill find specifics soon.
 
I have Ginsberg's Collected Poems also. It's very uneven, but of course when he's good, he's mindblowing.

Howl and Sunflower Sutra are favourites of mine also. Others include America, First Party at Ken Kesey's With Hell's Angels, A Supermarket in California, In Society (a very early poem) and The Lion for Real. And then there's Kaddish, which, aside from Howl, is generally considered his masterpiece.

I didn't realise there was a new posthumous Nick Drake release?! Will have to check it out.
 
I love Ginsberg...but I always seem to get more from Sexton and Plath. A little Virginia Wolf...strange being a male I relate to these women. But here is a favorite from Anne Sexton.

WANTING TO DIE

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost unnameable lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention,
the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

Twice I have so simply declared myself,
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.

In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.

I did not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.

Still-born, they don't always die,
but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet
that even children would look on and smile.

To thrust all that life under your tongue!--
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death's a sad Bone; bruised, you'd say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

leaving the page of the book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

My response:

Just to me it reads that she has accepted she wants to die. Both suicides have met, they are friends, they cannot wait to hang out. Death is a LUST to her, I love that line.... I have been at that point before, but I came out and I'm glad it's no longer that way. But I feel her.
 
I originally had intended for each member to post only one favorite poem because, well, you can't have multiple "favorite" poems. But, the rules change as we do so it's all fair game now. I'll jump in the pool soon too... there's too many good poems to select but one.

I'd also encourage people to really read and appreciate/dislike the poems posted by the other members and leave comments. I'm happy to see that this is what everyone is doing so... awesome.
 
^impossible to name only one I have soo many.

Insomniac ~ by Sylvia Plath
Insomniac

The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole ---
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie
Exposes embarrassments--the mizzling days
Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,
Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,
A garden of buggy rose that made him cry.
His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks.
Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.

He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue ---
How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!
Those sugary planets whose influence won for him
A life baptized in no-life for a while,
And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.
Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods.
Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.

His head is a little interior of grey mirrors.
Each gesture flees immediately down an alley
Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance
Drains like water out the hole at the far end.
He lives without privacy in a lidless room,
The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open
On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats
Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.
Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,
Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.
The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,
And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.
Click to expand...
 
Plath and Sexton are two of my favourite poets, and I couldn't have picked better examples of their work. Truly awe-inspiring.
 
wastedwalrus said:
I I'll jump in the pool soon too... there's too many good poems to select but one.
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No kidding!

I just thought of...

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,
When a new planet swims into his ken,
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eye,
Looked at the Pacific, and all his men,
Stared at each other with a wild surmise,
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Guy died at 26, can you imagine?
 
"To Nature" Samuel Taylor Coleridge


It may indeed be phantasy, when I
Essay to draw from all created things
Deep, heartfelt, inward joy that closely clings;
And trace in leaves and flowers that round me lie
Lessons of love and earnest piety.
So let it be ; and if the wide world rings
In mock of this belief, it brings
Nor fear, nor grief, nor vain perplexity.
So will I build my altar in the fields,
And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be,
And the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields
Shall be the incense I will yield to Thee,
Thee only God ! and thou shalt not despise
Even me, the priest of this poor sacrifice.


I cannot even begin to tell you just how much I relate to this piece. When I stumbled upon it (which was inevitable given my obsession with the Romantics) my heart began to race. It articulated the feelings I couldn't even clearly interpret... but were present inside of me everytime I stepped outdoors. As an Eagle Scout and someone who just generally spends a lot of time in and gives a lot of thought to nature, I am absorbed by this piece. It's a bit obscure, as is most of Coleridge's works aside from "Rime of The Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan", but it certainly deserves appreciation.
 
It's not a complex poem, but to me, through its simplicity, it really conveys the emotion the author wants.

A little history: It was written by my 1/2 sister, in her early teens, about her brother (my 1/2 brother) who died when he was a child, of leukaemia:

One smile, one life,
One will to live;
All of these, the price to give.

One smile, one tear,
One loving heart;
All of these from which to part.

One child, one life,
Down he fell;
One child, no life,
One cancer cell.

:(

I have other favourites, but this one has special meaning to me.
 
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Quickly does my friend approach...
Eduardo was a little roach...
On my toes he came to land...
With a smash of my hand...
He no longer was my friend...
For his life had come to an end...

by Me
 
^Hahahahahahaha

I hope you're kidding because 1. Awful poem and 2. How tactless is it to post your own poem?

Leave
 
The modern biographers worry
“how far it went,” their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone's eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving us nothing to overhear.
Click to expand...

Romantics: Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann
A poem by Lisel Mueller
 
wastedwalrus said:
^Hahahahahahaha

I hope you're kidding because 1. Awful poem and 2. How tactless is it to post your own poem?

Leave
Click to expand...

I hope you're kidding with that reply?

Harsh. :\
 
When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

_Martin Niemöller


I don't know why, but this poem speaks volumes to me. It just hits me every time I hear it or read it.
 
Sunflower Sutra

Sunflower Sutra

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and
sat down under the huge shade of a Southern
Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the
box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron
pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts
of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,
surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of
machinery.
The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun
sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that
stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves
rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums
on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray
shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting
dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--
--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower,
memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes
Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black
treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the
poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel
knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck
and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the
past--
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,
crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog
and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like
a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,
soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays
obliterated on its hairy head like a dried
wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures
from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster
fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O
my soul, I loved you then!
The grime was no man's grime but death and human
locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad
skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black
mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance
of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial--
modern--all that civilization spotting your
crazy golden crown--
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless
eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the
home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar
bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards
of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely
tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what
more could I name, the smoked ashes of some
cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the
milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs
& sphincters of dynamos--all these
entangled in your mummied roots--and you there
standing before me in the sunset, all your glory
in your form!
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent
lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye
to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited
grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden
monthly breeze!
How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your
grime, while you cursed the heavens of the
railroad and your flower soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a
flower? when did you look at your skin and
decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?
the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and
shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a
sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me
not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck
it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul
too, and anyone who'll listen,
--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread
bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all
beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed
by our own seed & golden hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black
formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening
sitdown vision.

Allen Ginsberg

Berkeley, 1955
 
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