[Closed] Poetry Saturday

If you like Eliot, how about something about middle-aged men who feel worthless, fearful, lacking in achievement and utterly scorned by women? Should hit the spot around here:

I have measured out my life in coffee spoons

🙂

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock

I was just listening to it there, Eliot reading.

There are holes in the sky
Where the rain gets in
But they're ever so small
That's why the rain is thin.

S.Milligan

The boy stood on the burning deck
His lip was all a quiver
He gave a cough, his leg fell off
And floated down the river

There was a bike rider named dyna-ti,
whose preference was for bleak poetry
He complained, "That does't rhyme!"
- I thought it might at the time.
Then we were all locked down until next February.

Alternatively you might have a look at Christoph Ransmayr's The Flying Mountain, which is a novel in blank verse about things going awry up a mountain in Tibet.

What I know about poetry could be written on a post-it, but I like this chap's stuff.

I'm pretty simplistic in that I like my poetry to actually rhyme. My own favourite style is the "epic tale", stuff like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Paul Revere's Ride, Tam o'Shanter etc. I also like short, silly poems as well mind you.

There are a couple of BBC books, The Nation's Favourite Poems and The Nation's Favourite Comic Poems that have a great selection of all sorts of stuff.

One thing I have found is that hearing a poem read properly can make for a very different experience to reading it yourself from a book. Some poems I had never really "got" I suddenly saw in a very different light when recited by the right person.

I like poetry, but I agree with Robin Robertson:

"The world of poetry is small and currently polarised: it’s often either simplistic or incomprehensible. I find myself in the middle, vaguely appalled. I’m allergic to “light verse”, because it seems a betrayal of the purpose of poetry. Equally, poetry that sets out to be deliberately opaque is betraying the purpose of language."

My English Lit. teacher of 53 years ago her passion was Coleridge, I've ended up with the same passion.

Wordnumb by name
Wordnumb by nature
dislike wot u write
no worry, won't h8ch yer.

Patrick Stewart read all of Shakespeare's sonnets during lockdown, well worth a listen/watch:

https://twitter.com/SirPatStew

And I do like a bit of Eliot, The Waste Land and The Hollow Men are superb.

But my favourite poem is probably still "This Is Just To Say" by Williams:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

All I've got are the ones I wrote after lyanda passed away which are on my blog. I don't think they're all that but other people say they're good and they like them. Can't work out if they're just being nice because of the subject matter. Never really enjoyed poetry before, but liking some of the ones I've read over the past couple of years.

I prefer bleak hard poetry

I like a bit of Brian Patten. Some of his stuff, but not all of it, is quite bleak.

Not at all bleak (for the most part) but my absolute favourite of late, Norman Maccaig.

Maccaig I think, is a must read for anyone who appreciates nature or who is drawn to the connection between people and place.

Studied 'V' by Tony Harrison at school 30 odd years ago. Been hooked ever since.

I like a bit of Brian Patten.

Or Roger McGough

"Conservative Government Unemployment Figures" by Roger McGough‏

Conservative Government.
Unemployment?
Figures.

And from the times of the NI Troubles:

A Brown Paper CarrierBag By Roger Mcgough

IN THE TIME....

a spider's web woven across
the plateglass window shivers snaps
and sends a shimmering haze of leathal stars
across the crowded resturant

IN THE TIME IT TAKES....

jigsaw peices of sharpnel
glide gently towards children
tucking in to the warm flesh
a terrible hunger sated

IN THE TIME IT TAKES TO PUT DOWN....

on the pavement
people come apart slowly
at first
only the dead not screaming

IN THE TIMES IT TAKES TO PUT DOWN A BROWN PAPER CARRIERBAG.

Marcus Rashford
Would like to see poor kids
Well fed
Boris Johnson
Would like to see poor kids
Well dead

Thank you for that. Hits the spot.

And all else (8

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.