A fellow Walcott fan!

"The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other's welcome..."

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on that sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Ah, we were thinking of the same one. It's worth noting that his brother, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James , wrote some of the most lyrical philosophy and psychology works of the late 19th century.

As measured by lines remembered, I suppose that Yeats has to top the list. In no particular other order, Eliot, Ransom, Wyatt, Hardy, J.V. Cunningham, Bunting.

Omar Khayyam is wonderful. I have the first stanza of the Rubaiyat painted and framed in khatam style.

This quatrain makes me think Khayyam was a HN reader:

    Myself when young did eagerly frequent 
    Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument 
    About it and about: but evermore 
    Came out by the same door where in I went.

Hurray, I've been looking for that Larkin poem since college.

Wow! I though nothing could be cornier than Neruda.

No there's rhyming all over the place in this one, just not always on the end of the line. But first and second stanzas, in the 4th just take for example:

"Pasan huyendo los pájaros. El viento. El viento"

huyendo rhymes with viento, pasan alliterates with pajaros, and the "l" en los and "o" in pajaros fits very nicely with the "l" and "o" in the repition of "el viento".

In english you see the translator trying to get it somewhat with birds and by :

"The birds go by, fleeing. The wind. The wind."

He actually had a typo there. It's 'cerezos', not 'cerizos'.

well, if you want to get into the older stuff like shakespeare I would suggest just diving in. At first, just lookup the words you dont know and after maybe one play you should have already learned enough to understand his style and language and "get" his works on their face value.

as far as literary references go - aka john milton - (basically the only reason you'd need a class), I really think you'd just have to read/know most of the greek/roman classics and the bible to be able to get most of them. But no worries, if you enjoy reading the classics are a blast, the hebrew old testament is packed with pretty cool stories (the mad king Nebuchadnezzer) and it doesn't get much better than the iliad and odyssey.

I read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency before ever coming across Coleridge's Kubla Khan and spent quite a bit of time (this was before I was on the Internet) trying to find the rest of the poem. I was quite disappointed once I figured things out but on the plus side I understood what happened in the book afterwards.

A personal favourite of mine, by Coleridge :-

http://www.orgs.miamioh.edu/anthologies/bijou/vissat/Workwit...

Why? Because in the movie Groundhog Day, when Phil Connors has had his moment of enlightenment/peripety, he quotes :

"And winter, slumbering in the open air, Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!"

Knowing this poem makes the film better. Knowing how widely popular Coleridge became makes the poem better.

Houseman's a favorite of mine as well.

I'll join you in appreciating Neruda. Me gusta especialmente Los Versos del Capitan. Night on the Island, just one of the gems.

http://www.akirarabelais.com/vi/o/thelibraryofbabel/neruda/c...

Genius.com is a wonderful site.

Please don't turn HN into Quora.

Natalie merchant has a wonderful song using the second poem as the lyrics. Enjoy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrJHrc-ABp4

it's not Apollinaire, it's Christopher Logue, an English poet

Rabindranath Tagore:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high

Where knowledge is free

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments

By narrow domestic walls

Where words come out from the depth of truth

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way

Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Where the mind is led forward by thee

Into ever-widening thought and action

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake

This was a scene from the movie "Бакенбарды" ("Backenbardy", literary "sideburns") where Pushkin cultists encounter Lermontov fanboys.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099097/

What Auden couldn't find On hornbooks or in verses Is whether it is our condition Only stirring with the curses

Bro ;)

This is (arguably) a better book than GEB ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel,_Escher,_Bach ) for the literature-minded folks out there. I can't recommend it enough.

Richard Wilbur has done exquisite translations, like this one...

Everness, Jorge Luis Borges

  One thing does not exist: Oblivion.
  God saves the metal and he saves the dross,
  And his prophetic memory guards from loss
  The moons to come, and those of evenings gone.
  Everything is: the shadows in the glass
  Which, in between the day’s two twilights, you
  Have scattered by the thousands, or shall strew
  Henceforward in the mirrors that you pass.
  And everything is part of that diverse
  Crystalline memory, the universe;
  Whoever through its endless mazes wanders
  Hears door on door click shut behind his stride,
  And only from the sunset’s farther side
  Shall view at last the Archetypes and the Splendors.

Yes!

Also a fan of Mary Oliver.

I like him in-person even more than on the page.

A couple recordings:

Where Dogs Come From: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOvbl3ZPPV4

A reading from Prairie Home Companion in February, dealing with cats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTxpQCY7df8

If you get a chance tosee him live, don't miss it. He's delightful.

Glad people still read poetry! Surprised no one's mentioned Byron yet:

Lo! where the Giant on the mountain stands, His blood-red tresses deep'ning in the sun, With death-shot glowing in his fiery hands, And eye that scorcheth all it glares upon; Restless it rolls, now fixed, and now anon Flashing a far,—and at his iron feet Destruction cowers to mark what deeds are done. For on this morn three potent nations meet, To shed before his shrine the blood he deems most sweet.

Also only one rapper?

Not too far off, but it turns out there are several versions.

From http://www.rampantscotland.com/poetry/blpoems_grace.htm:

  Some hae meat and canna eat,
     And some wad eat that want it;
  But we hae meat, and we can eat,
     Sae let the Lord be thankit.

The last line is often varied to read-

  And sae the Lord be thankit

    Inspiring bold John Barleycorn!
    What dangers thou canst make us scorn!
    Wi' tippenny, we fear nae evil;
    Wi' usquabae, we'll face the devil!

Violet Jacobs, from Hallowe'en:

     But gin the auld fowks' tales are richt
    An ghaists come hame on Hallow nicht,
    O freend o' freends! what wad I gie
    To feel ye rax yer hand to me
    Atween the dark an' caun'le licht?

    Awa in France, across the wave,
    The wee lichts burn on ilka grave,
    An' you an' me their lowe hae seen--
    Ye'11 mebbe hae yer Hallowe'en
    Yont, whaur ye're lyin' wi' the lave.

A few mentions of Hopkins in this thread, but too few examples.

So, Heaven Haven:

  I have desired to go
  Where springs not fail,
  To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail,
  And a few lilies blow.

  And I have asked to be
  Where no storms come,
  Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
  And out of the swing of the sea. 

And then: "The Habit of Perfection":

    ELECTED Silence, sing to me 
    And beat upon my whorlèd ear,   
    Pipe me to pastures still and be    
    The music that I care to hear.  
     
    Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb: 
    It is the shut, the curfew sent 
    From there where all surrenders come    
    Which only makes you eloquent.  
     
    Be shellèd, eyes, with double dark  
    And find the uncreated light:        
    This ruck and reel which you remark 
    Coils, keeps, and teases simple sight.  
     
    Palate, the hutch of tasty lust,    
    Desire not to be rinsed with wine:  
    The can must be so sweet, the crust  
    So fresh that come in fasts divine! 
     
    Nostrils, your careless breath that spend   
    Upon the stir and keep of pride,    
    What relish shall the censers send  
    Along the sanctuary side!     
     
    O feel-of-primrose hands, O feet    
    That want the yield of plushy sward,    
    But you shall walk the golden street    
    And you unhouse and house the Lord. 
     
    And, Poverty, be thou the bride    
    And now the marriage feast begun,   
    And lily-coloured clothes provide   
    Your spouse not laboured-at nor spun.

Billy Collins.

  here’s a toast to Alan Turing
  born in harsher, darker times
  who thought outside the container
  and loved outside the lines
  and so the code-breaker was broken
  and we’re sorry
  yes now the s-word has been spoken
  the official conscience woken
  – very carefully scripted but at least it’s not encrypted –
  and the story does suggest
  a part 2 to the Turing Test:
  1. can machines behave like humans?
  2. can we?”

  ― Matt Harvey

For me it's Sir John Betjeman. Very English of course. But...

    A man on his own in a car
    Is revenging himself on his wife;
    He open the throttle and bubbles with dottle
    and puffs at his pitiful life

    She's losing her looks very fast,
    she loses her temper all day;
    that lorry won't let me get past,
    this Mini is blocking my way.

    "Why can't you step on it and shift her!
    I can't go on crawling like this!
    At breakfast she said that she wished I was dead-
    Thank heavens we don't have to kiss.

    "I'd like a nice blonde on my knee
    And one who won't argue or nag.
    Who dares to come hooting at me?
    I only give way to a Jag.

    "You're barmy or plastered, I'll pass you, you bastard-
    I will overtake you. I will!"
    As he clenches his pipe, his moment is ripe
    And the corner's accepting its kill.

Mario Benedetti:

   Don’t Play it Safe

   Don’t stand idle
   at the side of the road
   don’t hold off on happiness
   don’t love with half a heart
   don’t play it safe now
   or ever
   don’t play it safe
   don’t fill up with calm
   don’t take cover from the world
   in a quiet corner
   don’t let your eyelids come down
   like a weighty sentence
   don’t forget you have lips
   don’t sleep but to rest
   don’t ignore the blood in your veins
   don’t think you have no time

   but if
   in any case
   you can’t help it
   and hold off on happiness
   and love with half a heart
   and play it safe now
   and fill up with calm
   and take cover from the world
   in a quiet corner
   and let your eyelids come down
   like a weighty sentence
   and dry up without lips
   and sleep not to rest
   and ignore the blood in your veins
   and think you have no time
   and stand idle
   at the side of the road
   and play it safe
   in that case
   don’t hold on to me.

Emily Dickinson:

All life to know each other

Whom we can never learn

Dickinson, Tennyson, Yeats, Whitman

Thomas Grey ("Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," with its lyric celebration of ordinary life, is arguably the greatest English poem).

TS Elliot, on his good days (Prufrock counts as a good day, as do the Landscape poems. He oversteps in "The Waste Land".)

Tennyson, when in the mood for melancholy.

Robert Herrick, when in the mood for insouciance, contemplation and the poet's struggle.

I don't pay attention to the world Ending. It has ended for me many Times and began again in the morning.

― Nayyirah Waheed

Desert Places by Robert Frost

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.

Ode by Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy.

WE are the music-makers,

  And we are the dreamers of dreams, 

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

  And sitting by desolate streams; 

World-losers and world-forsakers, On whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers and shakers

  Of the world for ever, it seems. 

 

With wonderful deathless ditties

We build up the world's great cities, And out of a fabulous story

  We fashion an empire's glory: 

One man with a dream, at pleasure,

  Shall go forth and conquer a crown; 

And three with a new song's measure Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying

  In the buried past of the earth, 

Built Nineveh with our sighing,

  And Babel itself with our mirth;

And o'erthrew them with prophesying

  To the old of the new world's worth; 

For each age is a dream that is dying,

  Or one that is coming to birth.

Alec Guinness reading the Wasteland is amazing.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xbunup_t-s-eliot-the-waste-...

"Hurry up please, it's time."

If you haven't already, you should watch this lecture by Nick Mount on Eliot's "The Waste Land": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxF9xkB5o04

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

I recently reread Christopher Alexander's foreword to "Patterns of Software" and remembered his mention of this poem. He asks, with something that could be called optimism:

"Can you write a program which overcomes the gulf between the technical culture of our civilization, and which inserts itself into our human life as deeply as Eliot's poems of the wasteland or Virginia Woolf's The Waves?"

No Mention of the Bard?

    That time of year thou may'st in me behold
    When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
    Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
    Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
    In me thou see'st the twilight of such day,
    As after sunset fadeth in the west,
    Which by-and-by black night doth take away,
    Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
    In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
    That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
    As the death-bed whereon it must expire
    Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
        This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
        To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

William Butler Yeats:

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

I discovered The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran around 2009 and it quickly became and has remained one of my favorites. I appreciate the descriptiveness and beauty of the language along with the continuing relevance of the advice. It's very easy reading and enjoyable to pick up for a short time and enjoy in small bits or read straight through.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prophet_%28book%29

A couple favorites of mine are:

On Pain - http://www.katsandogz.com/onpain.html

On Reason & Passion - http://www.katsandogz.com/onreason.html

William S. Burroughs

  Dead City Radio (1990)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Pn79iNS-Js

  Discipline of Do Easy (1982)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pjQ0FNzkLQ

  Ah Pook (1979-Poem, 1994-Animation)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3kz4AUHe1M

One of the 'beat poets' and pioneer of the "cut up", a semi-randomized collage of slicing, duplicating, and splicing media. The effect seems to create awareness of the medium itself.

  (The Cut Ups, 1966)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq_hztHJCM4

  Speaking on his Cut Ups (1983)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NU3dIdqIBw

Ted Kooser.

http://tedkooser.net/

He was the US Poet Laureate for a few years. He is from Nebraska, and writes about Midwestern life, among other things. His most recent volume just came out, and I thought it was great.

http://www.amazon.com/Splitting-Order-Ted-Kooser/dp/15565946...

From "Splitting an Order":

    I like to watch an old man cutting a sandwich in half 
    … and then to see him lift half
    onto the extra plate that he asked the server to bring,
    and then to wait, offering the plate to his wife
    while she slowly unrolls her napkin and places her spoon,
    her knife and her fork in their proper places,
    then smoothes the starched white napkin over her knees
    and meets his eyes and holds out both old hands to him.

Velimir Chlebnikov, 1885 - 1922. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velimir_Khlebnikov

My favorite poem:

Once again, once again

I’m a star for

you.

Woe to the sailor who has taken

The wrong angle of the ship

On a star:

He will be shattered on the rocks,

On the underwater sandbanks.

Woe to you also who have taken

The heart’s wrong angle on me.

You will be shattered on the rocks,

And rocks will laugh

At you

As you laught

At me.

I stumbled across this in a high school magazine left in a youth hostel in Maroochydore, Queensland in 1986, and have never seen another reference to it since. It's attribution was 'anonymous', and googling key lines bring up nothing.

I've always liked it, and posting it here might give it some longevity beyond that of my hard drive.

  Running on the front line
  Leading the way to uncertainty.
  With the shadow of a dream to guide you,
  Following a gleaming ray
  Picked from another’s closed mind.
  Why will you lead the way while
  Others show no taste for adventure?
  Alone and self-exiled
  In the midst of a crowd
  Something not quite a thought flickers and is gone
  Leaving just enough to tell it came
  But not enough to remember.
  Somehow it is connected
  To what you don’t know
  But must find out.
  Go forward, relish the unusual,
  And question the normal.
  Push yourself always to the edge
  And the edge will move with you.
  A blur of consciousness, knowledge,
  Experience, prediction, guesses and lies
  The elusive unknown and
  The excitingly uncertain.
  -
  Anonymous

Thank you so much for reminding me of his writing. I fell in love with a Greek woman on Crete many years ago. It was one of the most painful times of my life when I realized that I could not stay there with her, or she with me. Cavafy's poem Ithaca has haunted me whenever I'm reminded of it:

http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=74&cat=1

I am a muted Ulysses.

[Update] Looks like I'm not the only one who loves this poem. See the follow-on comment for some background.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9292200

John Burroughs

One Art

Elizabeth Bishop, 1911 - 1979 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Bishop)

  The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
  so many things seem filled with the intent
  to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

  Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
  of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
  The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

  Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
  places, and names, and where it was you meant 
  to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

  I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
  next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
  The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

  I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
  some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
  I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

  —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
  I love) I shan’t have lied.  It’s evident
  the art of losing’s not too hard to master
  though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Parsimony.

nice to see another filker on here :)

I'm surprised no-one said Keats (which is mine) but Hunt is, in some sense, close enough

Fantastic

Do you have any particular poems, or collections that you would suggest?

Gerard Manley Hopkins:

"[..] sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine."

this world of dew

just a world of dew

and yet...

And here is a famous one from Ghalib:

   Rekhta k tum he nahi ustaad Ghalib
   Kehte hain Aglay Zamanay mein koi Mir[1] bhi tha

Rough translation:

   You aren't alone the master of Rekhta, Ghalib
   It is said that there was also someone called Mir[1] in the previous era

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_Taqi_Mir

Not the blossom of song not the veil of music

I am the sound of my own breaking

You toy with the length of your dark curls

I am captive to my own dark thoughts

We brag to ourselves that we are different

this weakness has burdened our simple grief

Now you have come and I find myself bowing

this blessing a sadness this prayer a longing

I am a fragment sounding the dawn

you are the walls of my every echo

Wislawa Szymborska.

Until I read her poems, I thought people that fawned over poetry were just making it up.

Here is the one that I read first http://bettinamay.com/poem/2008/10/view-with-a-grain-of-sand...

I had to study a corpus of 30 texts for the bac as well a couple months ago. I certainly understand how you feel... (I am glad to be done with high-school)

Bravo! I'm curious though: 15 years ago the french part was done a year earlier than the rest. Is it common to do everything together nowadays, or was your curriculum a bit different?

It's even better in French:

  Le Poison
  
  Le vin sait revêtir le plus sordide bouge
  D'un luxe miraculeux, 
  Et fait surgir plus d'un portique fabuleux
  Dans l'or de sa vapeur rouge,
  Comme un soleil couchant dans un ciel nébuleux.

  L'opium agrandit ce qui n'a pas de bornes,
  Allonge l'illimité,
  Approfondit le temps, creuse la volupté,
  Et de plaisirs noirs et mornes
  Remplit l'âme au delà de sa capacité.
  Tout cela ne vaut pas le poison qui découle

  De tes yeux, de tes yeux verts,
  Lacs où mon âme tremble et se voit à l'envers...
  Mes songes viennent en foule
  Pour se désaltérer à ces gouffres amers.

  Tout cela ne vaut pas le terrible prodige
  De ta salive qui mord,
  Qui plonge dans l'oubli mon âme sans remords,
  Et charriant le vertige,
  La roule défaillante aux rives de la mort!

In Immortal Ad Vitam (2004) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0314063/), they quote a mix of the original version in French and the English translation, combined with the song Beautiful Days by Venus, and it's really beautiful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spMm3A2T-CM

Yes, I'm French and I agree. The message is well translated, but the original is made with much more precision, and it is more gracious. But English has some nice poetry, I like Whitman and e. e. cummings. When it comes to French, I'd recommend this classic from Victor Hugo, Tomorrow at dawn, it's simple but human, and the translation is fair, it's dedicated to his daughter: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/972635-tomorrow-at-dawn-the...

There's also this poem of Baudelaire about female homosexuality, which I like, Damned women, also called Delphine and Hippolyta. His whole book "Les fleurs du mal" (The Flowers of Evil) was heresy at the time (1860), it was about the beauty of evil, well, in part. There are English versions there but it's not easy to translate: http://fleursdumal.org/poem/180

Story? There's no story in poetry!

But yes, this is still Baudelaire's poem, I would have recognized it (I know well the French version).

I particularly like the Liam Clancy recitation of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sydUOvELvg#t=29

Wow. Sincerely thank you for that video. I honestly can't recommend it enough. I gave you my upvote for posting it.

It was really instructive. Now I understand how you came to your opinions.

I couldn't resist - if you look in the comments to that video, you'll see me listing eight rhetorical devices against Eminem's quoted word "Yo", using the same qualifying standards that the bloke in the video uses (re-using several of the vlogger's own selections).

The video makes a big song and dance about there being so many rhetorical devices, but there's so much padding in that list. The vlogger than quotes a verse from Eminem's Lose Yourself, and states that it only has one rhetorical device - assonance. But you simply can't get assonance without "word choice" and "word arrangement", which the vlogger previously gave as props to his koran verse. It's a pretty cut-and-dried case of stacking the deck.

Anyway, if you're interested, check out the comments to the video to see how I found (at least) eight rhetorical devices in the two-letter word "Yo" that starts the verse. Density of rhetorical devices is the key point of the video; according to the vlogger, such high density either indicates the divinity of the author, or disproves the koran as the word of god.

Despite the lack of logic in the vlogger's arguments, he does have fantastic oration and sounds beautifully melodic as he speaks. I enjoyed the video just for the sound of his talking.

Fernando Pessoa (great portuguese language poet)

TOBACCO SHOP - (excerpts)

I'm nothing. I'll allways be nothing. I can't even wish to be something. Aside from that, I've got all the world's dream inside me.

Windows of my room, The room of just one of the millions in the world nobody knows (And what would they know, if they knew that?), You open on the mistery of a street people are constantly crossing, A street blocked off to all though, A street that's real, impossibly real, and right, unconsciously right, With the mistery of things lying under live beings and stones, With death spreading darkness on walls and white hair on heads, With fate driving the cart of everything down nothingness road.

Today I'm bowled over, as though hit by the truth. Today I'm clearheaded, as though I were going to die, Having no more brotherly feeling for things Than to say good-bye, turning this house and this side of the street Into a line of coaches in a long train with its whistle shrieking good-bye From inside my head, And a nerve-wracking, bone-cracking jerk as it moves off.

Today I'm mixed up, like someone who thought something and grasped it, then lost it. Today I'm torn between the allegiance I owe Something real outside me - The Tobacco Shop across the street, And something real inside me - the feeling that it's all a dream.

I failed in everything. Since I was up to nothing, maybe it was all really nothing. From learning and training for anything useful I escaped By slipping off to the country with great plans, By found only grass and threes there, And when there were people, they were just like any others. I leave the window, sit down in a chair. What should I think about?

[....]

(Eat your chocolates, little girl! Eat your chocolates! Look, there's no metaphysics on earth but chocolates. Look, all religions on earth have nothing more to teach us than a candy store does. Eat, dirty little girl, eat them up! If I could gobble down those chocolates as trustily as you do! But I think, peeling off the silver wrapper, it's only tinfoil, And toss it in the floor, just as I've tossed away my life.)

But at least, out of my bitterness at what I'll never be, There's the quick calligraphy of these lines, The broken archway to the Impossible. And at least I reserve for myself this dry-eyed contempt- Noble, at least, in the great gesture I make Flinging out the dirty clothes I am, with no laundry list, into the drift of things, And stay at home, shirtless.

[....]

Walt Whitman ..

    AH POVERTIES, WINCINGS, AND SULKY RETREATS.
    
    AH poverties, wincings, and sulky retreats,
    Ah you foes that in conflict have overcome me,
    (For what is my life or any man's life but a conflict with foes, the 
            old, the incessant war?) 
    You degradations, you tussle with passions and appetites,
    You smarts from dissatisfied friendships, (ah wounds the sharpest 
             of all!) 
    You toil of painful and choked articulations, you meannesses,
    You shallow tongue-talks at tables, (my tongue the shallowest of 
             any;) 
    You broken resolutions, you racking angers, you smother'd ennuis!
    Ah think not you finally triumph, my real self has yet to come 
             forth, 
    It shall yet march forth o'ermastering, till all lies beneath me,
    It shall yet stand up the soldier of ultimate victory.

http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/index.html

original manuscripts :: http://www.whitmanarchive.org/manuscripts/transcriptions/ind...

be the singing-masters of my soul

Those have to be seven of the most powerful words ever written in any language.

Victor Segalen:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Segalen

In particular, the book of Steles:

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/?s...

Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel)

“Think and wonder, wonder and think.”

Czesław Miłosz, "Campo di fiori":

  In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori
  baskets of olives and lemons,
  cobbles spattered with wine
  and the wreckage of flowers.
  Vendors cover the trestles
  with rose-pink fish;
  armfuls of dark grapes
  heaped on peach-down.

  On this same square
  they burned Giordano Bruno.
  Henchmen kindled the pyre
  close-pressed by the mob.
  Before the flames had died
  the taverns were full again,
  baskets of olives and lemons
  again on the vendors' shoulders.

  I thought of the Campo dei Fiori
  in Warsaw by the sky-carousel
  one clear spring evening
  to the strains of a carnival tune.
  The bright melody drowned
  the salvos from the ghetto wall,
  and couples were flying
  high in the cloudless sky.

  At times wind from the burning
  would drift dark kites along
  and riders on the carousel
  caught petals in midair.
  That same hot wind
  blew open the skirts of the girls
  and the crowds were laughing
  on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.

  Someone will read as moral
  that the people of Rome or Warsaw
  haggle, laugh, make love
  as they pass by the martyrs' pyres.
  Someone else will read
  of the passing of things human,
  of the oblivion
  born before the flames have died.

  But that day I thought only
  of the loneliness of the dying,
  of how, when Giordano
  climbed to his burning
  he could not find
  in any human tongue
  words for mankind,
  mankind who live on.

  Already they were back at their wine
  or peddled their white starfish,
  baskets of olives and lemons
  they had shouldered to the fair,
  and he already distanced
  as if centuries had passed
  while they paused just a moment
  for his flying in the fire.

  Those dying here, the lonely
  forgotten by the world,
  our tongue becomes for them
  the language of an ancient planet.
  Until, when all is legend
  and many years have passed,
  on a new Campo dei Fiori
  rage will kindle at a poet's word.

  Warsaw, 1943

Aside from Tolkien's poetry in-world poetry, my favorite is probably Tennyson. Ulysses in particular is awesome. This is the final stanza.

    There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
    There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
    Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—
    That ever with a frolic welcome took
    The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
    Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
    Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
    Death closes all: but something ere the end,
    Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
    Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
    The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
    The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
    Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
    'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
    Push off, and sitting well in order smite
    The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
    To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
    Of all the western stars, until I die.
    It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
    It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
    And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
    Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
    We are not now that strength which in old days
    Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
    One equal temper of heroic hearts,
    Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
    To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Seamus Heaney & Patrick Kavanagh

Heaney was a literary genius. Kavanagh was a master at capturing the bleak reality of working class Ireland.

Both very different in their own right but both are prime examples of the immense variety within Irish poetry.

Mihai Eminescu - "Si Daca" (And If in English)

And if the branches tap my pane And the poplars whisper nightly, It is to make me dream again I hold you to me tightly.

And if the stars shine on the pond And light its sombre shoal, It is to quench my mind's despond And flood with peace my soul.

And if the clouds their tresses part And does the moon outblaze, It is but to remind my heart I long for you always.

Desiderata by Max Ehrmann:

    Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
    and remember what peace there may be in silence.
    As far as possible without surrender
    be on good terms with all persons.
    Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
    and listen to others,
    even the dull and the ignorant;
    they too have their story. 
    
    Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
    they are vexations to the spirit.
    If you compare yourself with others,
    you may become vain and bitter;
    for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
    Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. 
    
    Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
    it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
    Exercise caution in your business affairs;
    for the world is full of trickery.
    But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
    many persons strive for high ideals;
    and everywhere life is full of heroism. 
    
    Be yourself.
    Especially, do not feign affection.
    Neither be cynical about love;
    for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
    it is as perennial as the grass. 
    
    Take kindly the counsel of the years,
    gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
    Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
    But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
    Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
    Beyond a wholesome discipline,
    be gentle with yourself. 
    
    You are a child of the universe,
    no less than the trees and the stars;
    you have a right to be here.
    And whether or not it is clear to you,
    no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. 
    
    Therefore be at peace with God,
    whatever you conceive Him to be,
    and whatever your labors and aspirations,
    in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. 
    
    With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
    it is still a beautiful world.
    Be cheerful.
    Strive to be happy.

Richard Brautigan!!

~All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

  I like to think (and
  the sooner the better!)
  of a cybernetic meadow
  where mammals and computers
  live together in mutually
  programming harmony
  like pure water
  touching clear sky.

  I like to think
  (right now, please!)
  of a cybernetic forest
  filled with pines and electronics
  where deer stroll peacefully
  past computers
  as if they were flowers
  with spinning blossoms.

  I like to think
  (it has to be!)
  of a cybernetic ecology
  where we are free of our labors
  and joined back to nature,
  returned to our mammal
  brothers and sisters,
  and all watched over
  by machines of loving grace.

As this is my favourite poem as well and you beat me to sharing it, I may as well add some context to it for the people not familiar with names and situations:

Ithaca[1] is where Odysseus[2], one of the greek heroes in the Trojan War, came from. After the war was over he set, along with his crew, to return home but this took him ten whole years and Homer wrote about his adventures and misfortunes in the epic that is known as Odyssey[3].

Now, as this consists of dangerous situations, very bad luck, betrayal and a couple of other bad things, the word "odyssey" has become one with which modern greeks describe a long and difficult period until something (a goal, a destination, etc) is reached. However, Kavafis (greek for Cavafy) turned this around and is describing all the great things that one can benefit from during such journeys: new harbours, Phoenician goods, Egyptian cities - all these pictures are used to demonstrate how rich one will be after an "odyssey" even if he/she has to face Laistrygonians, Cyclops and angry Poseidons.

In the end, Kavafis tells us about what Ithaca really is about: not reaching your destination but experiencing the journey.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odysseus [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey

this, absolutely! My favourite as a kid

  A big locomotive has pulled into town,
  Heavy, humungus, with sweat rolling down,
  A plump jumbo olive.
  Huffing and puffing and panting and smelly,
  Fire belches forth from her fat cast iron belly.

  Poof, how she's burning,
  Oof, how she's boiling,
  Puff, how she's churning,
  Huff, how she's toiling.
  She's fully exhausted and all out of breath,
  Yet the coalman continues to stoke her to death.

  Numerous wagons she tugs down the track:
  Iron and steel monsters hitched up to her back,
  All filled with people and other things too:
  The first carries cattle, then horses not few;
  The third car with corpulent people is filled,
  Eating fat frankfurters all freshly grilled.
  The fourth car is packed to the hilt with bananas,
  The fifth has a cargo of six grand pi-an-as.
  The sixth wagon carries a cannon of steel,
  With heavy iron girders beneath every wheel.
  The seventh has tables, oak cupboards with plates,
  While an elephant, bear, two giraffes fill the eighth.
  The ninth contains nothing but well-fattened swine,
  In the tenth: bags and boxes, now isn't that fine?

  There must be at least forty cars in a row,
  And what they all carry -- I simply don't know:

  But if one thousand athletes, with muscles of steel,
  Each ate one thousand cutlets in one giant meal,
  And each one exerted as much as he could,
  They'd never quite manage to lift such a load.

  First a toot!
  Then a hoot!
  Steam is churning,
  Wheels are turning!

  More slowly - than turtles - with freight - on their - backs,
  The drowsy - steam engine - sets off - down the tracks.
  She chugs and she tugs at her wagons with strain,
  As wheel after wheel slowly turns on the train.
  She doubles her effort and quickens her pace,
  And rambles and scrambles to keep up the race.
  Oh whither, oh whither? go forward at will,
  And chug along over the bridge, up the hill,
  Through mountains and tunnels and meadows and woods,
  Now hurry, now hurry, deliver your goods.
  Keep up your tempo, now push along, push along,
  Chug along, tug along, tug along, chug along
  Lightly and sprightly she carries her freight
  Like a ping-pong ball bouncing without any weight,
  Not heavy equipment exhausted to death,
  But a little tin toy, just a light puff of breath.
  Oh whither, oh whither, you'll tell me, I trust,
  What is it, what is it that gives you your thrust?
  What gives you momentum to roll down the track?
  It's hot steam that gives me my clickety-clack.
  Hot steam from the boiler through tubes to the pistons,
  The pistons then push at the wheels from short distance,
  They drive and they push, and the train starts a-swooshin'
  'Cuz steam on the pistons keeps pushin' and pushin';
  The wheels start a rattlin', clatterin', chatterin'
  Chug along, tug along, chug along, tug along! . . . . 

  Julian Tuwim

Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, about poetry itself (sorry, Spanish is my language, still wanted to share):

No digáis que agotado su tesoro, de asuntos falta enmudeció la lira: podrá no haber poetas, pero siempre habrá poesía.

Mientras las ondas de la luz al beso palpiten encendidas, mientras el sol las desgarradas nubes de fuego y oro vista, mientras el aire en su regazo lleve perfumes y armonías, mientras haya en el mundo primavera, ¡habrá poesía!

Mientras la ciencia a descubrir no alcance las fuentes de la vida, y en el mar o en el cielo haya un abismo que al cálculo resista, mientras la humanidad siempre avanzando no sepa a do camina, mientras haya un misterio para el hombre, ¡habrá poesía!

Mientras se sienta que se ríe el alma sin que los labios rían, mientras se llore, sin que el llanto acuda a nublar la pupila, mientras el corazón y la cabeza batallando prosigan, mientras haya esperanzas y recuerdos, ¡habrá poesía!

Mientras haya unos ojos que reflejen los ojos que los miran, mientras responda el labio suspirando al labio que suspira, mientras sentirse puedan en un beso dos almas confundidas, mientras exista una mujer hermosa, ¡habrá poesía!

A Poison Tree

William Blake, 1757 - 1827

I was angry with my friend:

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

I was angry with my foe:

I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears

Night and morning with my tears,

And I sunned it with smiles

And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,

Till it bore an apple bright,

And my foe beheld it shine,

And he knew that it was mine,--

And into my garden stole

When the night had veiled the pole;

In the morning, glad, I see

My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

William Blake, especially Auguries of Innocence.

"Digging" by Seamus Heaney. One of my favorites.

  Between my finger and my thumb   
  The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

  Under my window, a clean rasping sound   
  When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   
  My father, digging. I look down

  Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   
  Bends low, comes up twenty years away   
  Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   
  Where he was digging.

  The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   
  Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
  He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
  To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
  Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

  By God, the old man could handle a spade.   
  Just like his old man.

  My grandfather cut more turf in a day
  Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
  Once I carried him milk in a bottle
  Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
  To drink it, then fell to right away
  Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
  Over his shoulder, going down and down
  For the good turf. Digging.

  The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
  Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
  Through living roots awaken in my head.
  But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

  Between my finger and my thumb
  The squat pen rests.
  I’ll dig with it.

Andrew Marvell and John Donne. Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" and Donne's "The Ecstasy" are both classic love poems.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173355

John Donne. "The Anagram" is probably one of the cleverest poems ever written; I have never seen such an elaborate put-down in any form.

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?18947...

This poem (and the original spanish) is one of my favourites! Thank you for posting.

The Little Dog's Day by Rupert Brooke

All in the town were still asleep, When the sun came up with a shout and a leap. In the lonely streets unseen by man, A little dog danced. And the day began.

All his life he'd been good, as far as he could, And the poor little beast had done all that he should. But this morning he swore, by Odin and Thor And the Canine Valhalla—he'd stand it no more!

So his prayer he got granted—to do just what he wanted, Prevented by none, for the space of one day. "Jam incipiebo, sedere facebo," In dog-Latin he quoth, "Euge! sophos! hurray!"

He fought with the he-dogs, and winked at the she-dogs, A thing that had never been heard of before. "For the stigma of gluttony, I care not a button!" he Cried, and ate all he could swallow—and more.

He took sinewy lumps from the shins of old frumps, And mangled the errand-boys—when he could get 'em. He shammed furious rabies, and bit all the babies, And followed the cats up the trees, and then ate 'em!"

They thought 'twas the devil was holding a revel, And sent for the parson to drive him away; For the town never knew such a hullabaloo As that little dog raised—till the end of that day.

When the blood-red sun had gone burning down, And the lights were lit in the little town, Outside, in the gloom of the twilight grey, The little dog died when he'd had his day.

I've always enjoyed Blake's poems. One of my favourites from that collecion is The Fly:

    Little Fly
    Thy summer's play,
    My thoughtless hand
    Has brush'd away.

    Am not I
    A fly like thee?
    Or art not thou
    A man like me?

    For I dance
    And drink & sing;
    Till some blind hand
    Shall brush my wing.

    If thought is life
    And strength & breath;
    And the want
    Of thought is death;

    Then am I
    A happy fly,
    If I live,
    Or if I die.

Plenty of great poets mentioned here. Figured I'd add a pair of my favorite contemporary poets, Sarah Lindsay and Paul Guest:

Sarah Lindsay - Elegy for the Quagga (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/182245)

  Krakatau split with a blinding noise
  and raised from gutted, steaming rock
  a pulverized black sky, over water walls
  that swiftly fell on Java and Sumatra.
  Fifteen days before, in its cage in Amsterdam,
  the last known member of Equus quagga,
  the southernmost subspecies of zebra, died.
  Most of the wild ones, not wild enough,
  grazing near the Cape of Good Hope,
  had been shot and skinned and roasted by white hunters.

  When a spider walked on cooling Krakatau's skin,
  no quagga walked anywhere. While seeds
  pitched by long winds onto newborn fields
  burst open and rooted, perhaps some thistle
  flourished on the quagga's discarded innards.
  The fractured island greened and hummed again;
  handsome zebras tossed their heads
  in zoos, on hired safari plains.
  Who needs to hear a quagga's voice?
  Or see the warm hide twitch away a fly,

  see the neck turn, curving its cream and chestnut stripes
  that run down to plain dark haunches and plain white legs?
  A kind of horse. Less picturesque than a dodo. Still,
  we mourn what we mourn.
  Even if, when it sank to its irreplaceable knees,
  when its unique throat closed behind a sigh,
  no dust rose to redden a whole year's sunsets,
  no one unwittingly busy
  two thousand miles away jumped at the sound,
  no ashes rained on ships in the merciless sea.

Paul Guest - User’s Guide to Physical Debilitation (http://www.theparisreview.org/poetry/5874/two-poems-paul-gue...)

  Should the painful condition of irreversible paralysis 
  last longer than forever or at least until 
  your death by bowling ball or illegal lawn dart 
  or the culture of death, which really has it out 
  for whoever has seen better days 
  but still enjoys bruising marathons of bird watching, 
  you, or your beleaguered caregiver 
  stirring dark witch’s brews of resentment 
  inside what had been her happy life, 
  should turn to page seven where you can learn, 
  assuming higher cognitive functions 
  were not pureed by your selfish misfortune, 
  how to leave the house for the first time in two years. 
  An important first step, 
  with apologies for the thoughtlessly thoughtless metaphor. 
  When not an outright impossibility 
  or form of neurological science fiction, 
  sexual congress will either be with 
  tourists in the kingdom of your tragedy, 
  performing an act of sadistic charity; 
  with the curious, for whom you will be beguilingly blank canvas; 
  or with someone blindly feeling their way 
  through an extended power outage 
  caused by summer storms you once thought romantic. 
  Page twelve instructs you how best 
  to be inspiring to Magnus next door 
  as he throws old Volkswagens into orbit 
  above Alberta. And to Betty 
  in her dark charm confiding a misery, 
  whatever it is, that to her seems equivalent to yours. 
  The curl of her hair that her finger knows 
  better and beyond what you will, 
  even in the hypothesis of heaven 
  when you sleep. This guide is intended 
  to prepare you for falling down 
  and declaring détente with gravity, 
  else you reach the inevitable end 
  of scaring small children by your presence alone. 
  Someone once said of crushing 
  helplessness: it is a good idea to avoid that. 
  We agree with that wisdom 
  but gleaming motorcycles are hard 
  to turn down or safely stop 
  at speeds that melt aluminum. Of special note 
  are sections regarding faith 
  healing, self-loathing, abstract hobbies 
  like theoretical spelunking and extreme atrophy, 
  and what to say to loved ones 
  who won’t stop shrieking 
  at Christmas dinner. New to this edition 
  is an index of important terms 
  such as catheter, pain, blackout, 
  pathological deltoid obsession, escort service, 
  magnetic resonance imaging, 
  loss of friends due to superstitious fear, 
  and, of course, amputation 
  above the knee due to pernicious gangrene. 
  It is our hope that this guide 
  will be a valuable resource 
  during this long stretch of boredom and dread 
  and that it may be of some help, 
  however small, to cope with your new life 
  and the gradual, bittersweet loss 
  of every God damned thing you ever loved.

One day somebody sent me this. It still gets me every time.

  I will try to live on earth without you.
  
  I will try to live on earth without you. 
  
  I will become any object,
  I don’t care what—
  
  I will be this speeding train.
  This smoke
  or a beautiful gay man laughing in the front seat.
  
  A human body is defenseless 
  on earth.
  
  It’s a piece of fire-wood.
  Ocean water hits it.
  Lenin puts it on his official shoulder.
  
  And therefore, in order not to suffer, a human spirit
  lives
  inside the wind and inside the wood and inside the shoulder    of a great dictator.

  But I will not be water. I will not be a fire.

  I will be an eyelash.
  A sponge washing your neck-hairs.
  Or a verb, an adjective, I will become. Such a word
  
  slightly lights your cheek.
  What happened? Nothing.
  Something visited? Nothing.
  
  What was there you cannot whisper.
  No smoke without fire, they whisper.
  I will be a handful of smoke
  over this lost city of Moscow.
  
  I will console any man,
  I will sleep with any man,
  under the army’s traveling horse carriages.
  
  
  -- Polina Barskova

Not my absolute favorite poem but one I always liked.

    Madame quel est votre mot
    Et sur le mot et sur la chose
    On vous a dit souvent le mot
    On vous a fait souvent la chose
    
    Ainsi de la chose et du mot
    Vous pouvez dire quelque chose
    Et je gagerais que le mot
    Vous plaît beaucoup moins que la chose
    
    Pour moi voici quel est mon mot
    Et sur le mot et sur la chose
    J'avouerai que j'aime le mot
    J'avouerai que j'aime la chose
    
    Mais c'est la chose avec le mot
    Mais c'est le mot avec la chose
    Autrement la chose et le mot 
    A mes yeux seraient peu de chose
    
    Je crois même en faveur du mot
    Pouvoir ajouter quelque chose
    Une chose qui donne au mot 
    Tout l'avantage sur la chose
    
    C'est qu'on peut dire encore le mot
    Alors qu'on ne fait plus la chose
    Et pour peu que vaille le mot
    Mon Dieu c'est toujours quelque chose
    
    De là je conclus que le mot
    Doit être mis avant la chose
    Qu'il ne faut ajouter au mot
    Qu'autant que l'on peut quelque chose
    
    Et que pour le jour où le mot
    Viendra seul hélas sans la chose 
    Il faut se réserver le mot
    Pour se consoler de la chose
    
    Pour vous je crois qu'avec le mot
    Vous voyez toujours autre chose
    Vous dites si gaiement le mot
    Vous méritez si bien la chose
    
    Que pour vous la chose et le mot
    Doivent être la même chose
    Et vous n'avez pas dit le mot
    Qu'on est déjà prêt à la chose
    
    Mais quand je vous dis que le mot
    Doit être mis avant la chose
    Vous devez me croire à ce mot
    Bien peu connaisseur en la chose
    
    Et bien voici mon dernier mot
    Et sur le mot et sur la chose
    Madame passez-moi le mot
    Et je vous passerai la chose

It's by an 18th century libertine priest who was called l'Abbé de Lattaignant.

Buddy Wakefield. Slam poet, spoken word. He got be through some really hard times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLoRyBj0Jzo9rTFW1XGTkG3WF...

Adrienne Rich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrienne_Rich

I always loved Invictus. it was also my Father's favorite, and I remember how I felt "offended" when I learned Timothy McVeigh had chosen it for his last words.

This is one of my favourite poems.

  Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight?  
  Whom else from rapture’s road will you expel tonight?

  Those “Fabrics of Cashmere—” “to make Me beautiful—”  
  “Trinket”—to gem—“Me to adorn—How tell”—tonight?

  I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates—  
  A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight.

  God’s vintage loneliness has turned to vinegar—  
  All the archangels—their wings frozen—fell tonight.

  Lord, cried out the idols, Don’t let us be broken;  
  Only we can convert the infidel tonight.

  Mughal ceilings, let your mirrored convexities  
  multiply me at once under your spell tonight.

  He’s freed some fire from ice in pity for Heaven.  
  He’s left open—for God—the doors of Hell tonight.

  In the heart’s veined temple, all statues have been smashed.  
  No priest in saffron’s left to toll its knell tonight.

  God, limit these punishments, there’s still Judgment Day—  
  I’m a mere sinner, I’m no infidel tonight.

  Executioners near the woman at the window.  
  Damn you, Elijah, I’ll bless Jezebel tonight.

  The hunt is over, and I hear the Call to Prayer  
  fade into that of the wounded gazelle tonight.

  My rivals for your love—you’ve invited them all?  
  This is mere insult, this is no farewell tonight.

  And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee—  
  God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight.

- Agha Shahid Ali Khan

Nice! I grew up near him and my dad used to act in his plays. He was such a great artist and interesting person. I like this line "A hissing swarm of hair bugs has got the baby and its rugs" from the evil garden.

Felix Dennis (†2014)

What’s It Like Then, Being Rich?

What’s it like then, being rich,

Knitting gold to warm an itch?

        Very much like being poor;

        Wealth is just a key — no more.

Why not share this magic key

To luxury — and start with me!

        Surely better that you earn it;

        Could I trust you to return it?

How does one become your ilk?

Is it bred in mothers’ milk?

        Many paths can lead to riches,

        Few in sunlight, most in ditches.

Wherein lies the difference

From us — this odd ambivalence?

        Envy, malice, obligations;

        Toadying from poor relations.

Grown far richer than his neighbour,

Why would any rich man labour?

        Wealth is salt in wine immersed,

        Quaffing but excites the thirst.

Salt my arse! It’s filthy greed —

How many homes does one man need?

        For some the trick’s in trading it;

        For others, in parading it.

I’ve seen. But surely, comfort pales

Perched on padded Chippendales?

        When affluence holds no surprise,

        Wonders come in other guise.

Aye, the eyes of tart and whore!

What might you miss, if you were poor?

        Time.  The luxury of choices.

        First editions.  Old Rolls-Royces.

Except his poems, I also recommend his great book on becoming rich http://www.felixdennis.com/books/how-to-get-rich/

Great to see Heaney mentioned by several people here! Recently voted Ireland's favourite poet of the last 100 years. This poem is a great example of his talent to document the small but evocative, quintessential elements of Irish experience. I'm having some wonderful childhood flashbacks of days on the bog right now :)

I love Edgar Allen Poe, but one particular reason is because of his essay "The Philosophy of Composition".[1] It's a long piece basically describing the methodical and mathematical way he developed The Raven. It's a really cool look at his process for creation.

Plus it pisses off your run-of-the-mill literary types.

1: http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/philcomp.htm

The Men Who Don't Fit In - Robert Service

http://alexmuir.com/the-men-who-dont-fit-in

Happy Dust

By Aleister Crowley

For Margot

Snow that fallest from heaven, bear me aloft on thy wings To the domes of the star-girdled Seven, the abode of ineffable things,

Quintessence of joy and of strength, that, abolishing future and past,

Mak'st the Present an infinite length, my soul all-One with the Vast,

The Lone, the Unnameable God, that is ice of His measureless cold,

Without being or form or abode, without motion or matter, the fold

Where the shepherded Universe sleeps, with nor sense nor delusion nor dream,

No spirit that wantons or weeps, no thought in its silence supreme.

I sit, and am utterly still; in mine eyes is my fathomless lust

Ablaze to annihilate Will, to crumble my being to dust, To calcine the dust to an ash, to burn up the ash to an air, To abolish the air with a flash of the final, the fulminant flare.

All this I have done, and dissolved the primordial germ of my thought;

I have rolled myself up, and revolved the wheel of my being to Naught.

Is there even the memory left? That I was, that I am? It is lost.

As I utter the Word, I am cleft by the last swift spear of the frost.

Snow! I am nothing at last; I sit, and am utterly still; They are perished, the phantoms, and past; they were born of my weariness-will

When I craved, craved being and form, when the consciousness-cloud was a mist

Precurser of stupor and storm, when I and my shadow had kissed,

And brought into life all the shapes that confused the clear space with their marks,

Vain spectres whose vapour escapes, a whirlwind of ruinous sparks,

No substance have any of these; I have dreamed them in sickness of lust,

Delirium born of disease-ah, whence was the master, the "must"

Imposed on the All? is it true, then, that something in me

Is subject to fate? Are there two, after all, that can be?

I have brought all that is to an end; for myself am sufficient and sole.

Do I trick myself now? Shall I rend once again this homologous Whole?

I have stripped every garment from space; I have strangled the secret of Time,

All being is fled from my face, with Motion's inhibited rime.

Stiller and stiller I sit, till even Infinity fades; 'Tis an idol-'tis weakness of wit that breeds, in inanity, shades!

Yet the fullness of Naught I become, the deepest and steadiest Naught,

Contains in its nature the sum of the functions of being and thought.

Still as I sit, and destroy all possible trace of the past, All germ of the future, nor joy nor knowledge alive at the last,

It is vain, for the Silence is dowered with a nature, the seed of a name:

Necessity, fearfully flowered with the blossom of possible Aim.

I am Necessity? Scry Necessity mother of Fate!

And Fate determines me "I"; and I have the Will to create. Vast is the sphere, but it turns on itself like the pettiest star. And I am the looby that learns that all things equally are. Inscrutable Nothing, the Gods, the cosmos of Fire and of Mist.

Suns, atoms, the clouds and the clouds ineluctably dare to exist-

I have made the Voyage of Thought, the Voyage of Vision, I swam

To the heart of the Ocean of Naught from the source of the Spring of I am:

I know myself wholly the brother alike of the All and the One;

I know that all things are each other, that their sum and their substance is None;

But the knowledge itself can excel, its fulness hath broken its bond;

All's Truth, and all's falsehood as well, and-what of the region beyond?

So, still though I sit, as for ever, I stab to the heart of my spine;

I destroy the last seed of endeavour to seal up my soul in the shrine

Of Silence, Eternity, Peace; I abandon the Here and the Now;

I cease from the effort to cease; I absolve the dead I from its Vow,

I am wholly content to be dust, whether that be a mote or a star,

To live and to love and to lust, acknowledge what seem for what are,

Not to care what I am, if I be, whence I came, whither go, how I thrive,

If my spirit be bound or be free, save as Nature contrive. What I am, that I am, 'tis enough. I am part of a glorious game.

Am I cast for madness or love? I am cast to esteem them the same.

Am I only a dream in the sleep of some butterfly? Phantom of fright

Conceived, who knows how, or how deep, in the measureless womb of the night?

I imagine impossible thought, metaphysical voids that beget

Ideas intagible wrought to things less conceivable yet. It may be. Little I reck -but, assume the existence of earth.

Am I born to be hanged by the neck, a curse from the hour of my birth?

Am I born to abolish man's guilt? His horrible heritage, awe?

Or a seed in his wantoness spilt by a jester? I care not a straw,

For I understand Do what thou wilt; and that is the whole of the Law.

Wislawa Szymborska

THE RAILROAD STATION

My nonarrival in the city of N. took place on the dot.

You'd been alerted in my unmailed letter.

You were able not to be there at the agreed-upon time.

The train pulled up at platform 3. A lot of people got out.

My absence joined the throng as it made its way toward the exit.

Several women rushed to take my place in all that rush.

Somebody ran up to one of them. I didn't know him, but she recognized him immediately.

While they kissed with not our lips, a suitcase disappeared, not mine.

The railroad station in the city of N. passed its exam in objective existence with flying colors.

The whole remained in place. Particulars scurried along the designated tracks.

Even a rendezvous took place as planned.

Beyond the reach of our presence.

In the paradise lost of probability.

Somewhere else. Somewhere else. How these little words ring.

Didn't see Rumi in the list.

  Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
  there is a field. I will meet you there.
  When the soul lies down in that grass,
  the world is too full to talk about
  language, ideas, even the phrase each other
  doesn't make any sense.

Edwin Arlington Robinson - Richard Cory

  Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
  We people on the pavement looked at him:
  He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
  Clean favored, and imperially slim.
  
  And he was always quietly arrayed,
  And he was always human when he talked;
  But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
  "Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.
  
  And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
  And admirably schooled in every grace:
  In fine, we thought that he was everything
  To make us wish that we were in his place.
  
  So on we worked, and waited for the light,
  And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
  And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
  Went home and put a bullet through his head

Patrick Kavanagh - Stony Grey Soil

    O stony grey soil of Monaghan
    The laugh from my love you thieved;
    You took the gay child of my passion
    And gave me your clod-conceived.
    
    You clogged the feet of my boyhood
    And I believed that my stumble
    Had the poise and stride of Apollo
    And his voice my thick tongued mumble.
    
    You told me the plough was immortal!
    O green-life conquering plough!
    The mandril stained, your coulter blunted
    In the smooth lea-field of my brow.
    
    You sang on steaming dunghills
    A song of cowards' brood,
    You perfumed my clothes with weasel itch,
    You fed me on swinish food
    
    You flung a ditch on my vision
    Of beauty, love and truth.
    O stony grey soil of Monaghan
    You burgled my bank of youth!
    
    Lost the long hours of pleasure
    All the women that love young men.
    O can I stilll stroke the monster's back
    Or write with unpoisoned pen.
    
    His name in these lonely verses
    Or mention the dark fields where
    The first gay flight of my lyric
    Got caught in a peasant's prayer.
    
    Mullahinsa, Drummeril, Black Shanco-
    Wherever I turn I see
    In the stony grey soil of Monaghan
    Dead loves that were born for me.

[anyone lived in a pretty how town] (e.e. cummings):

    anyone lived in a pretty how town
    (with up so floating many bells down)
    spring summer autumn winter
    he sang his didn't he danced his did.

    Women and men(both little and small)
    cared for anyone not at all
    they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
    sun moon stars rain

    children guessed(but only a few
    and down they forgot as up they grew
    autumn winter spring summer)
    that noone loved him more by more

    when by now and tree by leaf
    she laughed his joy she cried his grief
    bird by snow and stir by still
    anyone's any was all to her

    someones married their everyones
    laughed their cryings and did their dance
    (sleep wake hope and then)they
    said their nevers they slept their dream

    stars rain sun moon
    (and only the snow can begin to explain
    how children are apt to forget to remember
    with up so floating many bells down)

    one day anyone died i guess
    (and noone stooped to kiss his face)
    busy folk buried them side by side
    little by little and was by was

    all by all and deep by deep
    and more by more they dream their sleep
    noone and anyone earth by april
    wish by spirit and if by yes.

    Women and men(both dong and ding)
    summer autumn winter spring
    reaped their sowing and went their came
    sun moon stars rain

To One In Paradise (Edgar Allen Poe):

    Thou wast all that to me, love,
    For which my soul did pine-
    A green isle in the sea, love,
    A fountain and a shrine,
    All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,
    And all the flowers were mine.

    Ah, dream too bright to last!
    Ah, starry Hope! that didst arise
    But to be overcast!
    A voice from out the Future cries,
    "On! on!"- but o'er the Past
    (Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies
    Mute, motionless, aghast!

    For, alas! alas! me
    The light of Life is o'er!
    "No more- no more- no more-"
    (Such language holds the solemn sea
    To the sands upon the shore)
    Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree
    Or the stricken eagle soar!

    And all my days are trances,
    And all my nightly dreams
    Are where thy grey eye glances,
    And where thy footstep gleams-
    In what ethereal dances,
    By what eternal streams. 

Do not stand at my grave and weep (by Mary Elizabeth Frye):

    Do not stand at my grave and weep
    I am not there. I do not sleep.
    I am a thousand winds that blow.
    I am the diamond glints on snow.
    I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
    I am the gentle autumn rain.
    When you awaken in the morning's hush
    I am the swift uplifting rush
    Of quiet birds in circled flight.
    I am the soft stars that shine at night.
    Do not stand at my grave and cry;
    I am not there. I did not die.

I've been reading poetry ever since I read one by Cocteau that physically moved me. Yes, I felt it in my body, not only in my mind. Since then, I've read too many. Here are some of my favorites. Delve deep into the greats and then the lesser known, you'll find the ones that move you.

Fernando Pessoa (if he were a french or english poet, he would be considered, I have absolutely no doubt about it, one of the greatest poets to have ever written)

W.H. Auden

Robert Desnos

Homer

Ovid

I'm not that much of a fan of beat poetry, but I recently got a hold of Mexico City Blues by Kerouac and discovered how much more I like his poetry than his prose.

You're right... I copied it from the top search result (http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html), which seems to be the 1920 version. There have been others since, and Wikipedia uses the newer wording.

Anne Michaels, Skin Divers. I don't think I can publish this poem here (or the collection of poems it refers to), but I love her imagery.

She's also written prose, but she writes it in a way that sounds almost like poetry, full of metaphor and imagery.

I think he himself wrote that :) Caleb Madriga. and it is indeed fantastic :)

Thanks :) Yes, it's a personal poem.

http://calebmadrigal.com/passion-not-spent/

he did

Checkout http://haiku.nytimes.com/

Sample Haiku:

    Gusts of wind rising
    up the chimney face blow his
    feathers the wrong way.

Plath and Dorothy Parker, never could choose between them.

Eminem has written some really good lines. His play with words is just fantastic.

Major points for dropping rap lines. I like you.

Mine is:

  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 say that for destruction ice
  Is also great
  And would suffice.

Bukowski.

http://hellopoetry.com/charles-bukowski/

Thanks so much! I only got a brief overview of Chinese poetry in school, so getting to appreciate more is really awesome.

Can you recommend a good English-language collection of his works? The poem you wrote was amazing.

Jehst and Kate Tempest, for me they're mind bending

The Snow Man is quite good:

  One must have a mind of winter
  To regard the frost and the boughs
  Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

  And have been cold a long time
  To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
  The spruces rough in the distant glitter

  Of the January sun; and not to think
  Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
  In the sound of a few leaves,

  Which is the sound of the land
  Full of the same wind
  That is blowing in the same bare place

  For the listener, who listens in the snow,
  And, nothing himself, beholds
  Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

This poem does in two stanzas at least part of what Hamlet does in five acts. It's even more brilliant once you 'decode' it, one of my favorites.

Of Mere Being

  The palm at the end of the mind,
  Beyond the last thought, rises
  In the bronze distance.

  A gold-feathered bird
  Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
  Without human feeling, a foreign song.

  You know then that it is not the reason
  That makes us happy or unhappy.
  The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

  The palm stands on the edge of space.
  The wind moves slowly in the branches.
  The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

And one of the best ones from Rumi

  What you seek is seeking you
  - Rumi

If you ever take a Sufi Islam class, it is introductions to quotes of Rumi like these that will ruin you forever.

God I love his work. There is a whole school of Sufi sects known as drunk Sufis, drunk on their love of God, so to speak, and Rumi is a fantastic artistic characterization of their mindset.

Yeah. I first thought it was from some Pamuk, but, no, you're right.

I absolutely agree. He is a true poet. He started his career in 1957 and he is still going! And the amazing thing about his poetry is that it caters to everyone. I and my father both enjoy listening to his poems(see the age difference) and it never gets old!

I only discovered Rumi relatively recently, but it was quite a revelation. This one really struck a chord with me:

https://gist.github.com/benshimmin/8da42a687eae6e47f30d

(Yes, putting poetry in a GitHub Gist seems weird, but at least I know it won't disappear in a hurry.)

This guy reads a lot of poems and I like his voice:

https://www.youtube.com/user/spokenverse/videos?sort=dd&shel...

Yes I know that doesn't answer your question. I've been reading and enjoying John Clare the past few days. One of his poems, read by the guy above, is in this video: https://vimeo.com/121024561 I love the poem and the music but I don't think the footage connects that well.

Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincas_Mykolaitis-Putinas

Goethe is fine too, and some Russian poets.

I'm from England but I gladly concede that the best poetry tends to come from countries east of my own.

Angus O'Reilly O'Patrick McGinney.

Great thread.

  Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
  Just keep going. No feeling is final.

  - Rainer Rilke

(http://www.onbeing.org/program/wild-love-world/feature/go-li...)

Belfast man checking in, poetry is one of the main traditions here and has a thriving local community, so I thought I would recommend some of my favourites from this part of the world.

Paul Muldoon,

Maybe something of a "poet's poet" but certainly worth checking out. His style is a casual one, but bursts with sidelong allusions to history, literature, art and etymological punnery. Perhaps of particular interest to people here, might be his novel-length poem Madoc, an hallucinogenic journey through time and place, in which "[he] supposes that Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey took up their (actual) fancy of founding a Pantisocratic community in North America."

Ciaran Carson,

Took a break from writing through most of the 70s to travel with his wife playing traditional music and steep himself in the Irish storytelling tradition. His books since then have been an, at time excitingly precarious, marriage of traditional storytelling and a modernist mock pedanticism. Worth checking out is his Belfast Confetti, a mix of essays and poems which explore the psychological relationship one has to one's city.

Leontia Flynn, A much younger poet, of the generation of artists who have had to deal with adapting to life and working in the 21st Century. Her last book, from 2011, Profit & Loss is a striking meditation on the changing role of memory in pre- and post- Internet society.

And for something different that I would particularly recommend to the HN crowd,

Sam Riviere,

An English poet of the current generation who deals with the cognitive fallout of the ever varied linguistic and cultural deluge one experiences day to day in 2015. I don't want to say too much about his writing as he is still so young, but certainly seek out his latest book, Kim Kardashian's Marriage.

The poetic reference to Rome being better than Rome reminds me of Edmund Spenser's adaptation of Bellay's poem about Rome. http://www.bartleby.com/153/23.html

I think the most famous stanza (an excerpt from a much, much longer poem) is

  Thou stranger, which for Rome in Rome here seekest,
  And nought of Rome in Rome perceiv’st at all,
  These same olde walls, olde arches, which thou seest,
  Olde palaces, is that which Rome men call.
  Behold what wreake, what ruine, and what wast,
  And how that she, which with her mightie powre
  Tam’d all the world, hath tam’d herselfe at last,
  The pray of Time, which all things doth devowre.
  Rome now of Rome is th’ onely funerall,
  And onely Rome of Rome hath victorie;
  Ne ought save Tyber hastning to his fall
  Remaines of all: O worlds inconstancie!
   That which is firme doth flit and fall away,
   And that is flitting doth abide and stay.

Bellay (and Spenser) claim that the only city that was ultimately able to conquer ancient Rome is ... modern Rome. I found that a striking observation.

"Without haste, but without rest."

"The only means to gain one's ends with people are force and cunning. Love also, they say, but that is to wait for sunshine, and life needs every moment."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Kendrick Lamar:

  If I think and act like you do
  The world would die
  From not seeing something new
  And if I don't speak on how I feel
  The world would lose out on
  What's really real
  And if should die before I wake
  I pray my music will take my place
  The World
  The Relevant

Сергей Есенин and Immortal Technique:

  Love...doesn't need a complicated metaphor
  And sometimes nothing needs to be said at all
  Sometimes a person you with is not your one and only
  And you just fuck with them because you afraid to be lonely
  And when you come back its too late
  So you overcompensate
  Like victims of rape
  Full of self hate
  Lost in the affection to strangers around you
  Instead of the only person that ever gave a fuck about you

millay and kipling. very different poets, but both resonate very strongly with me.

Definitely, Brodsky. Unfortunately, not many of his poems were written in English, and only a few were translated.

  All the huskies are eaten. There is no space
  left in the diary And the beads of quick
  words scatter over his spouse's sepia-shaded face
  adding the date in question like a mole to her lovely cheek.
  Next the snapshot of his sister. He doesn't spare his kin:
  what's been reached is the highest possible latitude!
  And like the silk stocking of a burlesque half-nude
  queen it climbs up his thigh: gangrene.

Hehehehehe.

Charles Baudelaire.

John Milton Thomas Campion Samuel Taylor Coleridge Robert Bridges Ted Hughes Seamus Heaney Charles Baudelaire Paul Verlaine Edgar Allan Poe

... just for fun Clark Ashton Smith for projecting a Lovecraftian view of the cosmos into poetic form.

Hart Crane, far and away...

Ted Hughes's Metamorphosis. Such a sick translation of Ovid.

My ex-girlfriend (not Portuguese) when she wanted to "paper cut me" used to say that every Portuguese is a poet. Seeing Portugal with the distance of an expat this is (un)fortunately true.

The most relevant of us is certainly Fernando Pessoa.[1]

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Pessoa

Keith Douglas ww2 war poet

"The noble horse with courage in his eye, clean in the bone, looks up at a shellburst: away fly the images of the shires but he puts the pipe back in his mouth. Peter was unfortunately killed by an 88; it took his leg away, he died in the ambulance. I saw him crawling on the sand, he said It's most unfair, they've shot my foot off."

David Huerta is one of my all time favourites. Check out "Abres y Cierras" (Open and Close)[1]

http://www.beforesaying.com/images2/Open%20and%20Close%20(En...

Thats a tough question to answer. Between bukowsky , Edgar Alan Poe, Shakespeare, a few of miltons work, Gulzar, Tolkien, you can imagine the choice to be tough! But here is an unlikely candidate I find particularly interesting because of his simplicity and yet intricacy of expression. Vikram Seth. His work "golden gate" is just a masterpiece with so many hidden gems. To have a story spannig a good 700pages in verse itself is astounding. Here are some of his smaller beauties

Awake

    *Awake for hours and staring at the ceiling 
    Through the unsettled stillness of the night 
    He grows possessed of the obsessive feeling 
    That dawn has come and gone and brought no light.*

And this, which happens to be the name of the small book of his selected short poems

    *All you who sleep tonight 
    Far from the ones you love, 
    No hand to left or right 
    And emptiness above -

    Know that you aren't alone 
    The whole world shares your tears, 
    Some for two nights or one, 
    And some for all their years.*

PS: pardon the bad formatting. Long form text entry via a tiny screen is still a pain point :)

Dean Young. Elegy on Toy Piano is a phenomenal book.

A correspondence:

Python - Robert Frost

Ruby (Matz) - Kay Ryan

Ruby (dhh) - Fred Seidel

JavaScript - e e cummings

Brainfuck - John Ashbery

Java - Auden

C - Shakespeare

Haskell - Anne Carson

Pascal - Longfellow

Of course it's Spanish and about sex, indirectly. I think I prefer the German poets and their poems about nature, the human struggle, etc. (I'm sure someone will provide some examples of German poets that write about sex)

My favorite single book of poetry was actually written by my best friend. It's called God's Livestovk Policy, and it's a completely brilliant commentary on how we relate to each other and power figures. It's brutally funny as well as beatiful language.

http://www.lesfigues.com/book/gods-livestock-policy/

Other than that, I'm a huge fan of romantic era German poetry. Heine's Wenn ich in deine Augen seh is haunting

Wenn ich in deine Augen seh, So schwindet all mein Leid und Weh; Doch wenn ich küsse deinen Mund, So werd ich ganz und gar gerund.

Wenn ich mich lehn an deine Brust, Kommts über mich wie Himmelslust; Doch wenn du sprichst: Ich liebe dich! So muß ich weinen bitterlich.

    The heart can think of no devotion
    Greater than being shore to ocean -
    Holding the curve of one position,
    Counting an endless repetition. 

    Robert Frost

Sergei Yesenin

1) Catullus 2) Robinson Jeffers 3) Rimbaud 4) Shakespeare

Catullus is the greatest, though.

I'm partial to Larkin and Heaney, but I have to say my favourite poem is this one by Lawrence Raab -

    Attack of the Crab Monsters

    Even from the beach I could sense it---
    lack of welcome, lack of abiding life,
    like something in the air, a certain
    lack of sound.  Yesterday
    there was a mountain out there.
    Now it's gone.  And look

    at this radio, each tube neatly
    sliced in half.  Blow the place up!
    That was my advice.
    But after the storm and the earthquake,
    after the tactic of the exploding plane
    and the strategy of the sinking boat, it looked

    like fate and I wanted to say, "Don't you see?
    So what if you're a famous biochemist!
    Lost with all hands is an old story."
    Sure, we're on the edge
    of an important breakthrough, everyone
    hearing voices, everyone falling

    into caves, and you're out
    wandering through the jungle
    in the middle of the night in your negligée.
    Yes, we're way out there
    on the edge of science, while the rest
    of the island continues to disappear until

    nothing's left except this
    cliff in the middle of the ocean,
    and you, in your bathing suit,
    crouched behind the scuba tanks.
    I'd like to tell you
    not to be afraid, but I've lost

    my voice. I'm not used to all these
    legs, these claws, these feelers.
    It's the old story, predictable
    as fallout---the re-arrangement of molecules.
    And everyone is surprised
    and no one understands

    why each man tries to kill
    the thing he loves, when the change
    comes over him. So now you know
    what I never found the time to say.
    Sweetheart, put down your flamethrower.
    You know I always loved you.

Hilarious, sad, and sweet. It wasn't until decades after I first read this that I found out that this wasn't just metaphor, it's pretty much an accurate synopsis of the Roger Corman film of the same name.

  At dawn, the moon,
  like a creature of fantasy,
  stole into my room
  and woke me from some
  lazy and unproductive sleep.
  Her face quickly illuminated
  the underside of my soul
  and my own being stood
  revealed in the naked light.
  Sighing in wonder,
  I faced my Self, which said:
  "Your life so far has chased
  the illusion of control:
  You will not meet me on that path.
  One flash of my glance
  is worth a thousand years of piety."
  
  Overcome by waste and loss,
  my soul endarkened itself with shame.
  But my moon-faced Self,
  whose radiance equaled the sun,
  filled a cup of Direct Experience
  and urged me to drown my despair:
  "No bouquet... no flavor...
  but this wine can wash away
  your being's whole historical library."
  
  I finished the cup in one gulp,
  and, intoxicated by its purity,
  fell to the earth.
  Since then I am not sure
  whether I am here or not.
  Neither sober nor drunk,
  sometimes I feel the joy of
  my soul's eyes looking through mine.
  Other times I feel the curl of its hair
  and my life bobs and weaves.
  Sometimes, from sheer habit,
  I'm back on the compost heap.
  And sometimes,
  when that glance finds me again,
  I am back in the Rose Garden.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmud_Shabistari

THE ROAD TO WISDOM

The road to wisdom? -- Well, it's plain and simple to express: Err and err and err again but less and less and less.

~Piet Hein

Two spaces in front of each line should work.

  One space is not enough,
  Yet two suffice.

Rimbaud: “Jadis, si je me souviens bien, ma vie était un festin où s'ouvraient tous les coeurs, où tous les vins coulaient.”

Wilfred Owen:

Parable of the Old Man and the Young

  So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
  And took the fire with him, and a knife.
  And as they sojourned both of them together,
  Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
  Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
  But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?

  Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
  and builded parapets and trenches there,
  And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
  When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
  Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
  Neither do anything to him. Behold,
  A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;

  Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
  But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
  And half the seed of Europe, one by one. 

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

  Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, 
  Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, 
  Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs 
  And towards our distant rest began to trudge. 
  Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots 
  But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; 
  Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots  
  Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
  Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling, 
  Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; 
  But someone still was yelling out and stumbling, 
  And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime... 
  Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, 
  As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. 
  In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, 
  He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. 
  If in some smothering dreams you too could pace 
  Behind the wagon that we flung him in, 
  And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, 
  His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; 
  If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood 
  Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, 
  Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
  Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, 
  My friend, you would not tell with such high zest  
  To children ardent for some desperate glory, 
  The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est 
  Pro patria mori.

Smile, Smile, Smile

  Head to limp head, the sunk-eyed wounded scanned
  Yesterday's Mail; the casualties (typed small)
  And (large) Vast Booty from our Latest Haul.
  Also, they read of Cheap Homes, not yet planned;
  For, said the paper, "When this war is done
  The men's first instinct will be making homes.
  Meanwhile their foremost need is aerodromes,
  It being certain war has just begun.
  Peace would do wrong to our undying dead, --
  The sons we offered might regret they died
  If we got nothing lasting in their stead.
  We must be solidly indemnified.
  Though all be worthy Victory which all bought,
  We rulers sitting in this ancient spot
  Would wrong our very selves if we forgot
  The greatest glory will be theirs who fought,
  Who kept this nation in integrity."
  Nation? -- The half-limbed readers did not chafe
  But smiled at one another curiously
  Like secret men who know their secret safe.
  This is the thing they know and never speak,
  That England one by one had fled to France
  (Not many elsewhere now save under France).
  Pictures of these broad smiles appear each week,
  And people in whose voice real feeling rings
  Say: How they smile! They're happy now, poor things. 

A more pleasant piece by Sir Philip Sydney:

  My true-love hath my heart, and I have his,
  By just exchange one for the other given:
  I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss;
  There never was a bargain better driven.
  His heart in me keeps me and him in one,
  My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides;
  He loves my heart for once it was his own;
  I cherish his because in me it bides.
  His heart his wound receivèd from my sight;
  My heart was wounded with his wounded heart;
  For as from me on him his hurt did light,
  So still methought in me his hurt did smart:
  Both equal hurt, in this change sought our bliss,
  My true love hath my heart and I have his.

Shel Silverstein [0] has been on my bookshelf. I enjoyed reading Falling Up [1] as a way to help my kids understand that poetry is more than rhyming.

From The Little Boy And the Old Man [2]:

Said the little boy, "Sometimes I drop my spoon."

Said the old man, "I do that too."

The little boy whispered, "I wet my pants."

"I do that too," laughed the little old man.

Said the little boy, "I often cry."

The old man nodded, "So do I."

"But worst of all," said the boy, "it seems Grown-ups don't pay attention to me."

And he felt the warmth of a wrinkled old hand. "I know what you mean," said the little old man.

[0] http://www.shelsilverstein.com/

[1] http://www.shelsilverstein.com/books/falling/

[2] http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poems/best/shel_silverstein

Philip Larkin has been mentioned already in this thread. The following two poems by Larkin inspire me in a backwards sort of way.

This first one, "Next, Please" reminds me that we can't just wait for something amazing to happen in our lives, thinking that some day it surely will all on its own. We need to be proactive and make things happen.

  Next, Please

  Always too eager for the future, we
  Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
  Something is always approaching; every day
  Till then we say,

  Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear
  Sparkling armada of promises draw near.
  How slow they are! And how much time they waste,
  Refusing to make haste!

  Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks
  Of disappointment, for, though nothing balks
  Each big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked,
  Each rope distinct,

  Flagged, and the figurehead with golden tits
  Arching our way, it never anchors; it's
  No sooner present than it turns to past.
  Right to the last

  We think each one will heave to and unload
  All good into our lives, all we are owed
  For waiting so devoutly and so long.
  But we are wrong:

  Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
  Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
  A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
  No waters breed or break.

Second is Larkin's Poem "To Failure", which remindes me that I likely will not fail spectacularly, but slowly everyday, almost without notice, when I let the day slip away without achieving at least one small step towards a goal.

  To Failure

  You do not come dramatically, with dragons
  That rear up with my life between their paws  
  And dash me butchered down beside the wagons,
  The horses panicking; nor as a clause
  Clearly set out to warn what can be lost,
  What out-of-pocket charges must be borne,
  Expenses met; nor as a draughty ghost
  That’s seen, some mornings, running down a lawn.

  It is these sunless afternoons, I find,
  Instal you at my elbow like a bore.
  The chestnut trees are caked with silence. I’m
  Aware the days pass quicker than before,
  Smell staler too. And once they fall behind
  They look like ruin. You have been here some time.

Finally, as technical people, we can get so absorbed in what we are doing that we forget the importance of fostering the relationships around us with those we love:

  Without Mercy, the Rains Continued (by David St. John)

  There had been 
  A microphone hidden

  Beneath the bed 
  Of course I didn't realize it

  At the time & in fact 
  Didn't know for years

  Until one day a standard 
  Khaki book mailer

  Arrived & within it 
  An old

  Stained cassette tape 
  Simply labeled in black marker

  "Him / Me / September 1975" 
  & as I listened I knew something

  Had been asked of me 
  Across the years & loneliness

  To which I simply responded 
  With the same barely audible

  Silence that I had chosen then

I have this one tacked up on my wall. Not only is it inspirational, but I am impressed by the syllabic structure of the poem (alternating 11/10 syllables, iambic). Having never really studied poetry before, I found this really cool.

If, by Rudyard Kipling

    If you can keep your head when all about you   
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   
    If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;   
    If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
    Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

    If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   
    If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;   
    If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
    Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

    If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
    And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
    If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   
    And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

    If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
    If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
    If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   
    Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Images by Tyrone Green

Dark and lonely on a summer's night.

Kill my landlord. Kill my landlord.

Watchdog barking. Do he bite?

Kill my landlord. Kill my landlord.

Slip in his window. Break his neck.

Then his house I start to wreck.

Got no reason. What the heck?

Kill my landlord. Kill my landlord.

C-I-L my land lord!

(as performed by Eddie Murphy on SNL)

I love this poem. It's also one of my favorites. As a non-religious person, the poem inspires me to always look for hope, no matter what. Thanks for posting!

Don't forget the clerihew.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerihew

I once wrote one about Jon Johansen (although that was only my second-best-known poem about him).

Robinson Jeffers!

You can visit the stone Tor House in Carmel, just 90 minutes south of the SF Bay Area:

http://www.torhouse.org/

~ ~ ~ ~

The Beauty of Things

To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things — earth, stone and water, Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars — The blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts, frenzies and passions, And unhuman nature its towering reality — For man’s half dream; man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock And water and sky are constant — to feel Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural Beauty, is the sole business of poetry. The rest’s diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas, The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.

For people who live in Brooklyn or have connections to it, you might be interested in Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" where he emphasizes his power to, through his poetry, be mentally or spiritually united with future generations crossing the East River:

http://www.bartleby.com/142/86.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_Brooklyn_Ferry

It's one of the more intensely second-person poems I've come across, with its repeated focus on the reader's presence and what the reader has in common with the poet.

I learned about this poem from the novel 10:04 by Ben Lerner, in which it figures prominently. The novel is an interesting meditation on nostalgia, modernity, introspection, and being a writer (although I fear readers might like it much less if they don't share some of the author's nostalgias).

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/books/review/1004-by-ben-l...

I love Kipling, especially his more humorous work. Case in point:

  I go to concert, party, ball --
    What profit is in these?
  I sit alone against the wall
    And strive to look at ease.
  The incense that is mine by right
    They burn before her shrine;
  And that's because I'm seventeen
    And She is forty-nine.

  I cannot check my girlish blush,
    My color comes and goes;
  I redden to my finger-tips,
    And sometimes to my nose.
  But She is white where white should be,
    And red where red should shine.
  The blush that flies at seventeen
    Is fixed at forty-nine.

  I wish I had Her constant cheek;
    I wish that I could sing
  All sorts of funny little songs,
    Not quite the proper thing.
  I'm very gauche and very shy,
    Her jokes aren't in my line;
  And, worst of all, I'm seventeen
    While She is forty-nine.

  The young men come, the young men go
    Each pink and white and neat,
  She's older than their mothers, but
    They grovel at Her feet.
  They walk beside Her 'rickshaw wheels --
    None ever walk by mine;
  And that's because I'm seventeen
    And She is foty-nine.

  She rides with half a dozen men,
    (She calls them "boys" and "mashers")
  I trot along the Mall alone;
    My prettiest frocks and sashes
  Don't help to fill my programme-card,
    And vainly I repine
  From ten to two A.M. Ah me!
    Would I were forty-nine!

  She calls me "darling," "pet," and "dear,"
    And "sweet retiring maid."
  I'm always at the back, I know,
    She puts me in the shade.
  She introduces me to men,
    "Cast" lovers, I opine,
  For sixty takes to seventeen,
    Nineteen to foty-nine.

  But even She must older grow
    And end Her dancing days,
  She can't go on forever so
    At concerts, balls and plays.
  One ray of priceless hope I see
    Before my footsteps shine;
  Just think, that She'll be eighty-one
    When I am forty-nine.

All the "classics" have been listed already, so I'll mention someone more modern who I think programmers would enjoy: Christian Bök. Check out Crystallography and Eunoia.

So many. To name a few:

Marge Piercy (see below)

Robert Frost (if you read him carefully)

Philip Larkin

William Stafford

---

To be of use – by Marge Piercy

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2006/09....

  The people I love the best
  jump into work head first
  without dallying in the shallows
  and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
  They seem to become natives of that element,
  the black sleek heads of seals
  bouncing like half-submerged balls.
  
  I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
  who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
  who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
  who do what has to be done, again and again.
  
  I want to be with people who submerge 
  in the task, who go into the fields to harvest 
  and work in a row and pass the bags along,
  who are not parlor generals and field deserters
  but move in a common rhythm
  when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
  
  The work of the world is common as mud.
  Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
  But the thing worth doing well done
  has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
  Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
  Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
  but you know they were made to be used.
  The pitcher cries for water to carry
  and a person for work that is real.

HW Longfellow : Psalm of life Rudyard kipling; If

Galway Kinnell

Just had to add my favorite, William Carlos Williams:

  so much depends
  upon

  a red wheel
  barrow

  glazed with rain
  water

  beside the white
  chickens.

You should all subscribe to the writers almanac podcast. A free poem & other good stuff in < 5 minutes every day. http://writersalmanac.org/podcast/

Did a quick search for a few poets (the usual, Robert Creeley, William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Lorraine Neidecker, Robert Zukofsky), thinking about trying to champion at least one of them (Neidecker, probably).

Then I remembered, this is hacker news, these are programmers. Before I was a programmer, I was a poet and a poetry teacher. One of the things that started drawing me towards programming and technology were poets like bpNichol and his fantastic "First Screening". He wrote it on an Apple IIe using BASIC in 83-84 and folks have been "translating" it throughout the past 30 years to keep it accessible on newer PCs.

There's a lot of poetry and hacker ethos coming together to keep this little gem alive:

I recommend the .mov[1] version as the Javascript[2] version is a bit too nice (fonts, no flickering, etc), but you can also run the original code[3] in an emulator.

Or, for an entirely different experience, read the source code[4].

Read all about it here: http://vispo.com/bp/introduction.htm

1: http://vispo.com/bp/firstscreening.mov

2: http://vispo.com/bp/first-screening-javascript-version/first...

3: http://vispo.com/bp/emulatedversion.htm

4: http://vispo.com/bp/download/FirstScreeningBybpNichol.txt

Some non-English poets:

Faiz: Your feet bleed, Faiz, something surely will bloom as you water the desert simply by walking through it.

Ahmad Faraz: ... All those with outspoken mouths have become torn bodies. Those with unbowed heads have been led to the gallows and the rope.

All the Sufis and saints, every Sheikh and Imam hope to find favour at the court of the rulers. The dignitaries of the law courts wait to take oaths like beggars squatting at the side of the road. ... Look at the principles of those unworldly loyalists who are with you look around! So the condition of saving your life is to place your pen and slate in the killing fields. If not you will be the only target of the archers this time. Therefore surrender your integrity. Seeing the treaty I spoke to the messenger. He does not know what history teaches. When the night martyrs the sun the morning sculpts a new one. ... My pen does not commend that protector who is proud of besieging his own city. My pen is not the bowl of the simple fool who renders praise-poems to the usurpers.

My pen is not the tool of the housebreaker who makes a hole in the roof of his own home. My pen is not the friend of the midnight thief who scales the walls of lamp less houses.

My pen is not the prayer beads of the missionary who always keeps account of his worshipful deeds. My pen is not the scale of the judge who places a double veil over his face.

My pen is the pious gift of my people. My pen is the court of my conscience. ...

Houellebecq:

    ~~~
    De jeunes bourgeoises circulent entre les rayonnages
    du Monoprix, élégantes et sexuelles comme des oies.
    Il y a probablement des hommes, aussi; je m'en fiche
    pas mal. On a beau ne plus imaginer de mots possibles
    entre soi et le reste de l'humanité, le vagin reste
    une ouverture.
    ~~~

It's Klingon.

Minor disclaimer - the incident this poem is about had not happened. It's German war propaganda.

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_at_Krojanty

Not that it matters for poetry.

Lots of other people have suggested Neruda, which makes me happy, because he's fantastic.

I think my favorite poem is probably "Under Milk Wood", by Dylan Thomas (folks have posted some of his other work, which sheepishly I don't really like). I love this poem so much that even hearing it in a VW ad didn't diminish it. It's quite long, but the beginning is my favorite part:

  To begin at the beginning:

  It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-
  black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and- 
  rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, 
  crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. 

  The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the 
  snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled 
  middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the 
  Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and 
  dumbfound town are sleeping now.

  Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen 
  and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the 
  undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, \
  policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie 
  bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, 
  bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. 

  The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and 
  the jollyrogered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in  
  the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wet-nosed 
  yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and 
  needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.

  You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing.

  Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep.

  And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the darkest-before- dawn 
  minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the 
  Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, 
  the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride.

  Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional salt slow 
  musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row, it is the grass 
  growing on Llareggub Hill, dewfall, starfall, the sleep of birds in 
  Milk Wood.

  Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in bonnet and 
  brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow, coughing 
  like nannygoats, suckling mintoes, fortywinking hallelujah; night in 
  the four-ale, quiet as a domino; in Ocky Milkman's lofts like a mouse 
  with gloves; in Dai Bread's bakery flying like black flour. 

  It is to-night in Donkey Street, trotting silent, with seaweed on its 
  hooves, along the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot, text and 
  trinket, harmonium, holy dresser, watercolours done by hand, china dog 
  and rosy tin teacaddy. It is night neddying among the snuggeries of 
  babies.

Another good one by Philip Larkin:

Vers de Société

My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps To come and waste their time and ours: perhaps You’d care to join us? In a pig’s arse, friend. Day comes to an end. The gas fire breathes, the trees are darkly swayed. And so Dear Warlock-Williams: I’m afraid—

Funny how hard it is to be alone. I could spend half my evenings, if I wanted, Holding a glass of washing sherry, canted Over to catch the drivel of some bitch Who’s read nothing but Which; Just think of all the spare time that has flown

Straight into nothingness by being filled With forks and faces, rather than repaid Under a lamp, hearing the noise of wind, And looking out to see the moon thinned To an air-sharpened blade. A life, and yet how sternly it’s instilled

All solitude is selfish. No one now Believes the hermit with his gown and dish Talking to God (who’s gone too); the big wish Is to have people nice to you, which means Doing it back somehow. Virtue is social. Are, then, these routines

Playing at goodness, like going to church? Something that bores us, something we don’t do well (Asking that ass about his fool research) But try to feel, because, however crudely, It shows us what should be? Too subtle, that. Too decent, too. Oh hell,

Only the young can be alone freely. The time is shorter now for company, And sitting by a lamp more often brings Not peace, but other things. Beyond the light stand failure and remorse Whispering Dear Warlock-Williams: Why, of course—

WH Auden. I can't quote, but he has a poem in which he is thankful for a well developed super ego. I wanted to find a poem of his for our wedding, but he is too cynical even as he is moral.

Simon Armitage. Lovely northern English rhythms.

http://simonarmitage.com/

My Party Piece from Book of Matches

  My party piece:
  I strike, then from the moment when the matchstick
  conjures up its light, to when the brightness moves
  beyond its means, and dies, I say the story
  of my life -
  
  dates and places, torches I carried,
  a cast of names and faces, those
  who showed me love, or came close,
  the changes I made, the lessons I learnt -
  
  then somehow still find time to stall and blush
  before I'm bitten by the flame, and burnt.
  
  A warning, though, to anyone nursing
  an ounce of sadness, anyone alone:
  don't try this on your own; it's dangerous,
  madness.

George Herbert, Du Fu, T S Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wm Blake, WB Yeats, Li Po, Mallarme, 2 Dylans, Dante, Sappho, Homer

Great thread. Emily Dickinson

  I'm nobody! Who are you?
  Are you nobody, too?
  Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell!
  They'd banish -- you know!

  How dreary to be somebody!
  How public like a frog
  To tell one's name the livelong day
  To an admiring bog!

Charles Bukowski: All The Way, one of the most motivational poem i have experienced in life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6_QUhUPrF4

  Don't imitate me;
  it's as boring
  as the two halves of a melon.

poet Matsuo Basho

Almost all of the poetry I know well came from a single audio collection that I was happily exposed to many years ago; it's called Exact Change and each track is still available on the U.Penn web site [0]. All of the poets are well-known in their fields, some well-known enough to be known to the public, and I have wound up taking many to heart. Among my favorites are the ones by Jack Spicer, John Godfrey, and Kamau Brathwaite. Take a moment to listen, it's very revealing to hear a poem read by its author.

[0] http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Exact-Change.html

Pablo Neruda, Nicanor Parra and Pablo Picasso (he wrote great prose poems). I also like Fransisco de Quevedo and Miguel de Cervantes (yes, Cervantes was also a poet).

John Peale Bishop is pretty hilarious:

  Famously she descended, her red hair
  Unbound and bronzed by sea-reflections, caught
  Crinkled with sea-pearls. The fine slender taut
  Knees that let down her feet upon the air,

  Young breasts, slim flanks and golden quarries were
  Odder than when the young distraught
  Unknown Venetian, painting her portrait, thought
  He'd not imagined what he painted there.

  And I too commenced with that golden cloud:
  Lipped her delicious hands and had my ease
  Faring fantastically, perversely proud.

  All loveliness demands our courtesies.
  Since she was dead I praised her as I could
  Silently, among the Barberini bees.

Philip Larkin. Kate Tempest.

As I age, I grow ever fonder of Tennyson, particularly his "Ulysses", from which:

...Come, my friends, 'T is not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174659

edit: sorry, can't format correctly

Stephen Crane

  In the desert
  I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
  Who, squatting upon the ground,
  Held his heart in his hands,
  And ate of it.
  I said, “Is it good, friend?”
  “It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

  “But I like it
  “Because it is bitter,
  “And because it is my heart.”

Wislawa Syzmborska, for me. When lighthearted, she has depth, and when dark, she keeps a glimmer of light.

  The Joy of Writing

  Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
  For a drink of written water from a spring
  whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
  Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
  Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
  she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
  Silence - this word also rustles across the page
  and parts the boughs
  that have sprouted from the word "woods."

  Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
  are letters up to no good,
  clutches of clauses so subordinate
  they'll never let her get away.

  Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
  of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
  prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
  surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

  They forget that what's here isn't life.
  Other laws, black on white, obtain.
  The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
  and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
  full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
  Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
  Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
  not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof's full stop.

  Is there then a world
  where I rule absolutely on fate?
  A time I bind with chains of signs?
  An existence become endless at my bidding?

  The joy of writing.
  The power of preserving.
  Revenge of a mortal hand.

                    ~~~ The Palace ~~~
                 by Rudyard Kipling, 1902

  When I was a King and a Mason -- a Master proven and skilled --
  I cleared me ground for a Palace such as a King should build.
  I decreed and dug down to my levels. Presently, under the silt,
  I came on the wreck of a Palace such as a King had built.

  There was no worth in the fashion -- there was no wit in the plan --
  Hither and thither, aimless, the ruined footings ran --
  Masonry, brute, mishandled, but carven on every stone:
  "After me cometh a Builder. Tell him, I too have known."

  Swift to my use in my trenches, where my well-planned ground-works grew,
  I tumbled his quoins and his ashlars, and cut and reset them anew.
  Lime I milled of his marbles; burned it, slacked it, and spread;
  Taking and leaving at pleasure the gifts of the humble dead.

  Yet I despised not nor gloried; yet, as we wrenched them apart,
  I read in the razed foundations the heart of that builder's heart.
  As he had risen and pleaded, so did I understand
  The form of the dream he had followed in the face of the thing he had planned.

  When I was a King and a Mason -- in the open noon of my pride,
  They sent me a Word from the Darkness. They whispered and called me aside.
  They said -- "The end is forbidden." They said -- "Thy use is fulfilled.
  "Thy Palace shall stand as that other's -- the spoil of a King who shall build."

  I called my men from my trenches, my quarries, my wharves, and my sheers.
  All I had wrought I abandoned to the faith of the faithless years.
  Only I cut on the timber -- only I carved on the stone:
  "After me cometh a Builder. Tell him, I too have known!"

I am fond of alliterative poetry, and I think this poem is relevant to HN:

http://alliteration.net/poetry/website.htm

Georg Trakl, an austrian.

The following was written a few days before his death and is an expression of his experience as a medic after the battle of Gródek in the first world war (translated from german by Eric Plattner & Joseph Suglia):

  Grodek 

  This evening the autumn woods are alive
  with exploding arms, the golden fields
  and blue lakes—and above it all the sun
  unfurls the dark. Night surrounds
  the dying men, the unhinged moan
  of crushed mouths.
  And still, in the willows,
  the red cloud, the abiding God, bloodshed itself,
  begins the harvest in mute fury, the moon’s coolness.
  All roads rupture into black rot.
  Under the golden spray of night and stars
  the sister’s shadow staggers across the acquiescent grove
  to greet the ghosts of heroes, their blossoming skulls.
  And beyond human ears the dark flutes of autumn whisper.
  O noble mourning!—you brazen altars,
  the searing flame of the spirit nurtures a vaster ache,
  the grandsons unborn.

  High Flight
  By John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

  Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
  And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
  Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
  Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
  You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
  High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
  I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
  My eager craft through footless halls of air. . . .

  Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
  I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
  Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
  And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
  The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
  Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc

Gerard Manley Hopkins[1], G.K. Chesterton[2] and John Bradburne[3].

    Spring and Fall
    
    to a young child
    
    Margaret, are you grieving
    Over Goldengrove unleaving?
    Leaves, like the things of man, you
    With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
    Ah! as the heart grows older
    It will come to such sights colder
    By and by, nor spare a sigh
    Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
    And yet you will weep know why.
    Now no matter, child, the name:
    Sorrow’s springs are the same.
    Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
    What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
    It is the blight man was born for,
    It is Margaret you mourn for.
    
    – Hopkins, 1880
    
    
    A Little Litany
    
    When God turned back eternity and was young,
    Ancient of Days, grown little for your mirth
    (As under the low arch the land is bright)
    Peered through you, gate of heaven—and saw the earth.
    
    Or shutting out his shining skies awhile
    Built you about him for a house of gold
    To see in pictured walls his storied world
    Return upon him as a tale is told.
    
    Or found his mirror there; the only glass
    That would not break with that unbearable light
    Till in a corner of the high dark house
    God looked on God, as ghosts meet in the night.
    
    Star of his morning; that unfallen star
    In that strange starry overturn of space
    When earth and sky changed places for an hour
    And heaven looked upwards in a human face.
    
    Or young on your strong knees and lifted up
    Wisdom cried out, whose voice is in the street,
    And more than twilight of twiformed cherubim
    Made of his throne indeed a mercy-seat.
    
    Or risen from play at your pale raiment's hem
    God, grown adventurous from all time's repose,
    Or your tall body climbed the ivory tower
    And kissed upon your mouth the mystic rose.
    
    – Chesterton
    
    
    Love
    
    Love is a short disease, a long desire,
    A strong and lasting healing; love is like
    An angler landing fish, a hand at lyre,
    A roadhog flogging home his motor-bike;
    Love is a deep unsleeping thing, leaps time
    And steeps amidst eternity for rest
    And love is like three candles lighting rhyme
    And metre I am making for the best;
    An Alleluiatic sequence shows
    A little of love's eloquence that lasts;
    Love has three lights, one to another glows,
    A third proceeds between: naught overcasts
    True love because it knows that it possesses,
    Being possessed, a zest above distresses.
    
    – Bradburne, 1971

There are a couple of rare recordings of John Bradburne reciting his own poetry[4]. Much of his work was completely unknown until after his death in 1979 – he wrote about 6,000 poems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Manley_Hopkins

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton

[3] http://www.johnbradburnepoems.com/

[4] http://vimeo.com/michaelbradleyjr/love

[&] http://vimeo.com/michaelbradleyjr/mombe

From Westerners, Raymond Carver, he is just plain raw. I like that. From east, Molana Rumi, Sohrab Sepehri.

Edna St. Vincent Millay is certainly one of my favorites. Here's one:

  I, being born a woman and distressed
  By all the needs and notions of my kind,
  Am urged by your propinquity to find
  Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
  To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
  So subtly is the fume of life designed,
  To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
  And leave me once again undone, possessed.
  Think not for this, however, the poor treason
  Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
  I shall remember you with love, or season
  My scorn wtih pity, -- let me make it plain:
  I find this frenzy insufficient reason
  For conversation when we meet again.

I like extended figures, but also sumptuous language and formal rigor. Ah heck, I love each poet for their own quirks and idiosyncrasies. Stephen Dobyns. John Bricuth. Wallace Stevens. Weldon Kees.

Shakespeare. Donne. Marvell.

You're right, sorry for the typo

Seems appropriate about now:

Spring, by Edna St Vincent Millay.

To what purpose, April, do you return again?

Beauty is not enough.

You can no longer quiet me with the redness

Of little leaves opening stickily.

I know what I know.

The sun is hot on my neck as I observe

The spikes of the crocus.

The smell of the earth is good.

It is apparent that there is no death.

But what does that signify?

Not only under ground are the brains of men

Eaten by maggots,

Life in itself

Is nothing,

An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,

April

Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Clouds Gathering by Charles Simic

    It seemed the kind of life we wanted.
    Wild strawberries and cream in the morning.
    Sunlight in every room.
    The two of us walking by the sea naked.

    Some evenings, however, we found ourselves
    Unsure of what comes next.
    Like tragic actors in a theater on fire,
    With birds circling over our heads,
    The dark pines strangely still,
    Each rock we stepped on bloodied by the sunset.

    We were back on our terrace sipping wine.
    Why always this hint of an unhappy ending?
    Clouds of almost human appearance
    Gathering on the horizon, but the rest lovely
    With the air so mild and the sea untroubled.

    The night suddenly upon us, a starless night.
    You lighting a candle, carrying it naked
    Into our bedroom and blowing it out quickly.
    The dark pines and grasses strangely still.

Japan by Billy Collins

    Today I pass the time reading
    a favorite haiku,
    saying the few words over and over.

    It feels like eating
    the same small, perfect grape
    again and again.

    I walk through the house reciting it
    and leave its letters falling
    through the air of every room.

    I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it.
    I say it in front of a painting of the sea.
    I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf.

    I listen to myself saying it,
    then I say it without listening,
    then I hear it without saying it.

    And when the dog looks up at me,
    I kneel down on the floor
    and whisper it into each of his long white ears.

    It's the one about the one-ton temple bell
    with the moth sleeping on its surface,

    and every time I say it, I feel the excruciating
    pressure of the moth
    on the surface of the iron bell.

    When I say it at the window,
    the bell is the world
    and I am the moth resting there.

    When I say it at the mirror,
    I am the heavy bell
    and the moth is life with its papery wings.

    And later, when I say it to you in the dark,
    you are the bell,
    and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,

    and the moth has flown
    from its line
    and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed.

“You may forget but let me tell you this: someone in some future time will think of us” ― Sappho, The Art of Loving Women

Charles Bukowski, Leonard Cohen, and a lot of poets in another language that few people on here will know.

Favourite? I don't know... Blake? Poe? Various Japanese classics? Currently reading "Paradise Lost" by Milton. But what I've probably listened to most, lately, is Kate Tempest:

    I know now, first hand,
    That regretting love will empty you
    Of all that makes you love
    And all that lovers pay attention to.

    (Verse from "Best Intentions", Kate Tempest)

It's interesting to see that many seem to have fallen in love with poetry that's been translated to English. While there's nothing wrong with translation, I do think it is a little curious that some seem to prefer translated poetry, to native language authors (Much as it'd be a bit curious to hold up Blake as one's favourite poet in Spanish). At least one should make note of not just the original author, but also the translator -- as the end result is very much a team effort.

[edit: Somewhat apropos, perhaps:

  "Kate Tempest - 13 Commandments"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DktpzYOHTXo ]

Rudyard Kipling, William Wordsworth, Edgar Allan Poe

William Wordsworth, Edgar Allan Poe and Rudyard Kipling

elicura chihuailaf

    Georgia Dusk (by Jean Toomer)
    

    The sky, lazily disdaining to pursue
       The setting sun, too indolent to hold
       A lengthened tournament for flashing gold,   
    Passively darkens for night’s barbecue,

    A feast of moon and men and barking hounds,   
       An orgy for some genius of the South
       With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth,   
    Surprised in making folk-songs from soul sounds.

    The sawmill blows its whistle, buzz-saws stop,
       And silence breaks the bud of knoll and hill,
       Soft settling pollen where plowed lands fulfill   
    Their early promise of a bumper crop.

    Smoke from the pyramidal sawdust pile
       Curls up, blue ghosts of trees, tarrying low   
       Where only chips and stumps are left to show   
    The solid proof of former domicile.

    Meanwhile, the men, with vestiges of pomp,   
       Race memories of king and caravan,
       High-priests, an ostrich, and a juju-man,
    Go singing through the footpaths of the swamp.

    Their voices rise . . the pine trees are guitars,   
       Strumming, pine-needles fall like sheets of rain . .   
       Their voices rise . . the chorus of the cane
    Is caroling a vesper to the stars . .

    O singers, resinous and soft your songs
       Above the sacred whisper of the pines,
       Give virgin lips to cornfield concubines,
    Bring dreams of Christ to dusky cane-lipped throngs.

Hovis Presley is my favourite:

I rely on you

I rely on you like a Skoda needs suspension like the aged need a pension like a trampoline needs tension like a bungee jump needs apprehension I rely on you like a camera needs a shutter like a gambler needs a flutter like a golfer needs a putter like a buttered scone involves some butter I rely on you like an acrobat needs ice cool nerve like a hairpin needs a drastic curve like an HGV needs endless derv like an outside left needs a body swerve I rely on you like a handyman needs pliers like an auctioneer needs buyers like a laundromat needs driers like The Good Life needed Richard Briers I rely on you like a water vole needs water like a brick outhouse needs mortar like a lemming to the slaughter Ryan's just Ryan without his daughter I rely on you

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Der Zauberlehrling

  Hat der alte Hexenmeister 
  Sich doch einmal wegbegeben! 
  Und nun sollen seine Geister 
  Auch nach meinem Willen leben. 
  Seine Wort´ und Werke 
  Merkt ich und den Brauch, 
  Und mit Geistesstärke 
  Tu ich Wunder auch. 

  Walle! walle 
  Manche Strecke, 
  Daß, zum Zwecke, 
  Wasser fließe 
  Und mit reichem, vollem Schwalle 
  Zu dem Bade sich ergieße. 

  Und nun komm, du alter Besen! 
  Nimm die schlechten Lumpenhüllen; 
  Bist schon lange Knecht gewesen: 
  Nun erfülle meinen Willen! 
  Auf zwei Beinen stehe, 
  Oben sei ein Kopf, 
  Eile nun und gehe 
  Mit dem Wassertopf! 

  Walle! walle 
  Manche Strecke, 
  Daß, zum Zwecke, 
  Wasser fließe 
  Und mit reichem, vollem Schwalle 
  Zu dem Bade sich ergieße. 

  Seht, er läuft zum Ufer nieder, 
  Wahrlich! ist schon an dem Flusse, 
  Und mit Blitzesschnelle wieder 
  Ist er hier mit raschem Gusse. 
  Schon zum zweiten Male! 
  Wie das Becken schwillt! 
  Wie sich jede Schale 
  Voll mit Wasser füllt! 

  Stehe! stehe! 
  Denn wir haben 
  Deiner Gaben 
  Vollgemessen! - 
  Ach, ich merk es! Wehe! wehe! 
  Hab ich doch das Wort vergessen! 

  Ach, das Wort, worauf am Ende 
  Er das wird, was er gewesen. 
  Ach, er läuft und bringt behende! 
  Wärst du doch der alte Besen! 
  Immer neue Güsse 
  Bringt er schnell herein, 
  Ach! und hundert Flüsse 
  Stürzen auf mich ein. 

  Nein, nicht länger 
  Kann ichs lassen; 
  Will ihn fassen. 
  Das ist Tücke! 
  Ach! nun wird mir immer bänger! 
  Welche Miene! welche Blicke! 

  O, du Ausgeburt der Hölle! 
  Soll das ganze Haus ersaufen? 
  Seh ich über jede Schwelle 
  Doch schon Wasserströme laufen. 
  Ein verruchter Besen, 
  Der nicht hören will! 
  Stock, der du gewesen, 
  Steh doch wieder still! 

  Willsts am Ende 
  Gar nicht lassen? 
  Will dich fassen, 
  Will dich halten 
  Und das alte Holz behende 
  Mit dem scharfen Beile spalten. 

  Seht, da kommt er schleppend wieder! 
  Wie ich mich nur auf dich werfe, 
  Gleich, o Kobold, liegst du nieder; 
  Krachend trifft die glatte Schärfe. 
  Wahrlich! brav getroffen! 
  Seht, er ist entzwei! 
  Und nun kann ich hoffen, 
  Und ich atme frei! 

  Wehe! wehe! 
  Beide Teile 
  Stehn in Eile 
  Schon als Knechte 
  Völlig fertig in die Höhe! 
  Helft mir, ach! ihr hohen Mächte! 

  Und sie laufen! Naß und nässer. 
  Wirds im Saal und auf den Stufen. 
  Welch entsetzliches Gewässer! 
  Herr und Meister! hör mich rufen! - 
  Ach, da kommt der Meister! 
  Herr, die Not ist groß! 
  Die ich rief, die Geister 
  Werd ich nun nicht los. 

  "In die Ecke, 
  Besen! Besen! 
  Seids gewesen. 
  Denn als Geister 
  Ruft euch nur, zu seinem Zwecke, 
  Erst hervor der alte Meister."

I've been reading a lot of Aleksa Šantić for the past few years, but I haven't seen any translations to English that really do him justice (not that I've been looking for them).

    Last night, returning from the warm hamam
    I passed by the garden of the old Imam
    And lo, in the garden, in the shade of a jasmine,
    There with a pitcher in her hand stood Emina.

    What beauty! By iman I could swear,
    She would not be ashamed if she were at the sultan’s!
    And the way she walks and her shoulders move...
    -- Not even an Imam’s amulet could help me!

    I offered her salaam, but by my dīn,
    Beautiful Emina would not even hear it.
    Instead, scooping water in her silver pitcher,
    Around the garden she went to water the roses.

    A wind blew from the branches down her lovely shoulders
    Unraveling those thick braids of hers.
    Her hair gave off a scent of blue hyacinths,
    Making me giddy and confused!

    I nearly stumbled, I swear by my faith,
    But beautiful Emina did not come to me.
    She only gave me a frowning look,
    Not caring, the naughty one, that I am crazy for her!

This entry contains links to articles explaining some of the more archaic words:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emina_%28poem%29

I adore the nonsense poems of Edward Lear. He's most famous for The Owl and The Pussycat, but The Nutcracker and The Sugartongs is one of my favourites to read aloud: http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ns/nutcrackers.html

When read aloud, the rhythm is impeccable and almost addictive.

Another shout out has to go to A A Milne, particularly for Disobedience, which again is a delight to read aloud: http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~ridge/local/disobedience.html

Recently been into Bukowski, alongside Shelley, Frost and Tennyson remain favs

I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

– Percy Shelley

if you’re going to try, go all the way. otherwise, don’t even start.

if you’re going to try, go all the way. this could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs and maybe your mind.

go all the way. it could mean not eating for 3 or 4 days. it could mean freezing on a park bench. it could mean jail, it could mean derision, mockery, isolation. isolation is the gift, all the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. and you’ll do it despite rejection and the worst odds and it will be better than anything else you can imagine.

if you’re going to try, go all the way. there is no other feeling like that. you will be alone with the gods and the nights will flame with fire.

do it, do it, do it. do it.

all the way all the way.

you will ride life straight to perfect laughter, its the only good fight there is.

I've always enjoyed the Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll. It is full of emotive gibberish that creates wonderful imagery and feeling out of meaningless sounds. Which is all poetry really is in the end!

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand; Long time the manxome foe he sought— So rested he by the Tumtum tree And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.

   Ek herhaal jou

   Ek herhaal jou
   sonder begin of einde
   herhaal ek jou liggaam
   Die dag het ’n smal skadu
   en die nag geel kruise
   die landskap is sonder aansien
   en die mense ’n ry kerse
   terwyl ek jou herhaal
   met my borste
   wat die holtes van jou hand namaak

- Ingrid Jonker

The poem is in Afrikaans and the poet is South African.

For those who are interested, an English language Dutch film about her was made a few years ago called Black Butterflies.

I can however not say that I have seen any translations that do justice to the original.

MY PRAYER ANSWERED

I asked for Strength,

God gave me difficulties to face.

I asked for Wisdom,

God gave me problems to solve.

I asked for Courage,

God gave me danger to overcome.

I asked for Love,

God gave me troubled people to help.

I asked for Favours,

God gave me opportunities.

I received nothing I wanted;

I received everything I needed.

My PRAYER has been answered.

-Vedanta Kesari

Adam Asnyk - "Daremne żale"

    Daremne żale - próżny trud,
    Bezsilne złorzeczenia!
    Przeżytych kształtów żaden cud
    Nie wróci do istnienia.

    Świat wam nie odda, idąc wstecz,
    Znikomych mar szeregu -
    Nie zdoła ogień ani miecz
    Powstrzymać myśli w biegu.

    Trzeba z żywymi naprzód iść,
    Po życie sięgać nowe...
    A nie w uwiędłych laurów liść
    Z uporem stroić głowę.

    Wy nie cofniecie życia fal!
    Nic skargi nie pomogą -
    Bezsilne gniewy, próżny żal!
    Świat pójdzie swoją drogą.

I love the rhytm of this poem. My rough translation.

    Useless remorses, toil in vain
    Impotent spells and curses.
    Outlived shapes won't be back.
    There will be no miracles.

    World won't return you,
    going back,
    translucent ghosts and spirits.
    Neither with sword nor with fire
    you'll stop a thought that's running.

    You're to go forward with alive ones
    You're to reach for a new life.
    Instead of wearing stubbornly
    withered crown of laurels.
    
    You won't turn back the waves of life
    Complains won't be of help.
    Impotent angers, remorse in vain
    World will go its own way.
    

Also Jacek Kaczmarski songs are great. And I loved the poems in Stanisław Lem "Cyberiad". Translated by Michael Kandel.

    Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
    Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
    Their indices bedecked from one to n,
    Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
    Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
    And every vector dreams of matrices.
    Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
    It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

    In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
    Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways. 
    Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
    We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
    
    I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
    Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
    And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
    And in our bound partition never part.
        
    For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
    Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
    Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers, 
    Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
    
    Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
    Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
    A root or two, a torus and a node:
    The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
    
    Ellipse of bliss, converse, O lips divine!
    The product of our scalars is defined!
    Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
    cuts capers like a happy haversine.
    
    I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
    I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
    Bernoulli would have been content to die,
    Had he but known such a squared cosine 2 phi!

Zbigniew Herbert.

http://wchambliss.tumblr.com/post/107743541105/apollo-and-ma...

http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/zbigniew-herbert/why-th...

https://books.google.pl/books?id=nqeWAwAAQBAJ&printsec=front...

Czeslaw Milosz. "Gift" [1] and "A Song on the End of the World" [2].

Philip Larkin. Almost everything he wrote.

Robert Frost.

Ted Hughes. The Birthday Letters. Esp. "You Hated Spain" [3]

T S Elliot. Four Quartets. Preludes.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17245-2004Aug...

[2] http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179559

[3] https://philosopherpoet.wordpress.com/2008/04/05/you-hated-s...

While hardly a pleasant person himself, Berthold Brecht had some compelling ones (especially as an antidote for all the roses and moons and lips ;))

   THE CRUTCHES

   Seven years I could not walk a step.
   When I to the great physician came
   He demanded: Why the crutches?
   And I told him: I am lame.

   He replied: That's not surprising.
   Be so good and try once more.
   If you're lame, it's those contraptions.
   Fall then! Crawl across the floor!

   And he took my lovely crutches
   Laughing with a fiend's grimace
   Broke them both across my back and
   Threw them in the fireplace.

   Well, I'm cured now: I can walk.
   Cured by nothing more than laughter.
   Sometimes, though, when I see sticks
   I walk worse for some hours after.

  Lullaby

  W. H. Auden, 1907 - 1973
  
   Lay your sleeping head, my love,
  Human on my faithless arm;
  Time and fevers burn away
  Individual beauty from
  Thoughtful children, and the grave
  Proves the child ephemeral:
  But in my arms till break of day
  Let the living creature lie,
  Mortal, guilty, but to me
  The entirely beautiful.
  
  Soul and body have no bounds:
  To lovers as they lie upon
  Her tolerant enchanted slope
  In their ordinary swoon,
  Grave the vision Venus sends
  Of supernatural sympathy,
  Universal love and hope;
  While an abstract insight wakes
  Among the glaciers and the rocks
  The hermit’s carnal ecstasy.
  
  Certainty, fidelity
  On the stroke of midnight pass
  Like vibrations of a bell,
  And fashionable madmen raise
  Their pedantic boring cry:
  Every farthing of the cost,
  All the dreaded cards foretell,
  Shall be paid, but from this night
  Not a whisper, not a thought,
  Not a kiss nor look be lost.
  
  Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
  Let the winds of dawn that blow
  Softly round your dreaming head
  Such a day of welcome show
  Eye and knocking heart may bless,
  Find the mortal world enough;
  Noons of dryness find you fed
  By the involuntary powers,
  Nights of insult let you pass
  Watched by every human love.

Noah Warren - http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/248624

Goethe (german), here's a translation of the Zauberlehrling (The Sorcerer's Apprentice)

  That old sorcerer has vanished 
  And for once has gone away! 
  Spirits called by him, now banished, 
  My commands shall soon obey. 
  Every step and saying 
  That he used, I know, 
  And with sprites obeying 
  My arts I will show.

    Flow, flow onward 
    Stretches many 
    Spare not any
    Water rushing, 
    Ever streaming fully downward 
    Toward the pool in current gushing.
    
  Come, old broomstick, you are needed, 
  Take these rags and wrap them round you! 
  Long my orders you have heeded, 
  By my wishes now I've bound you. 
  Have two legs and stand, 
  And a head for you. 
  Run, and in your hand 
  Hold a bucket too.

    Flow, flow onward 
    Stretches many, 
    Spare not any 
    Water rushing, 
    Ever streaming fully downward 
    Toward the pool in current gushing.
    
  See him, toward the shore he's racing 
  There, he's at the stream already, 
  Back like lightning he is chasing, 
  Pouring water fast and steady. 
  Once again he hastens! 
  How the water spills, 
  How the water basins 
  Brimming full he fills!

    Stop now, hear me! 
    Ample measure 
    Of your treasure 
    We have gotten! 
    Ah, I see it, dear me, dear me. 
    Master's word I have forgotten!
    
  Ah, the word with which the master 
  Makes the broom a broom once more! 
  Ah, he runs and fetches faster! 
  Be a broomstick as before! 
  Ever new the torrents 
  That by him are fed, 
  Ah, a hundred currents 
  Pour upon my head!

    No, no longer 
    Can I please him, 
    I will seize him! 
    That is spiteful! 
    My misgivings grow the stronger. 
    What a mien, his eyes how frightful!
    
  Brood of hell, you're not a mortal! 
  Shall the entire house go under? 
  Over threshold over portal 
  Streams of water rush and thunder. 
  Broom accurst and mean, 
  Who will have his will, 
  Stick that you have been, 
  Once again stand still!

    Can I never, Broom, appease you? 
    I will seize you, 
    Hold and whack you, 
    And your ancient wood 
    I'll sever, 
    With a whetted axe I'll crack you.
    
  He returns, more water dragging! 
  Now I'll throw myself upon you! 
  Soon, 0 goblin, you'll be sagging. 
  Crash! The sharp axe has undone you. 
  What a good blow, truly! 
  There, he's split, I see. 
  Hope now rises newly, 
  And my breathing's free.

    Woe betide me! 
    Both halves scurry 
    In a hurry, 
    Rise like towers 
    There beside me. 
    Help me, help, eternal powers!
    
  Off they run, till wet and wetter 
  Hall and steps immersed are Iying. 
  What a flood that naught can fetter! 
  Lord and master, hear me crying! - 
  Ah, he comes excited.
  Sir, my need is sore. 
  Spirits that I've cited
  My commands ignore.

    "To the lonely 
    Corner, broom! 
    Hear your doom. 
    As a spirit 
    When he wills, your master only 
    Calls you, then 'tis time to hear it."

The recently passed Tomas Tranströmer, I love his writing. He can go from personal headspace to outer space in a cherry blossom in a moment during a car crash:

--

  After a Death 
  (translated by Robert Bly)

  Once there was a shock
  that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
  It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
  It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.

  One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun
  through brush where a few leaves hang on.
  They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
  Names swallowed by the cold.

  It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
  but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
  The samurai looks insignificant
  beside his armor of black dragon scales.

Hovis Presley:

I rely on you

I rely on you

like a Skoda needs suspension

like the aged need a pension

like a trampoline needs tension

like a bungee jump needs apprehension

I rely on you

like a camera needs a shutter

like a gambler needs a flutter

like a golfer needs a putter

like a buttered scone involves some butter

I rely on you

like an acrobat needs ice cool nerve

like a hairpin needs a drastic curve

like an HGV needs endless derv

like an outside left needs a body swerve

I rely on you

like a handyman needs pliers

like an auctioneer needs buyers

like a laundromat needs driers

like The Good Life needed Richard Briers

I rely on you

like a water vole needs water

like a brick outhouse needs mortar

like a lemming to the slaughter

Ryan's just Ryan without his daughter

I rely on you

Rumi (on Conscience)

This that we are now created the body, cell by cell, like bees building a honeycomb.

The human body and the universe grew from this, not this from the universe and the human body.

... and Allen Ginsberg

Happy indeed we live, friendly amidst the hostile. Amidst hostile men we dwell free from hatred.

Happy indeed we live, friendly amidst the afflicted (by craving). Amidst afflicted men we dwell free from affliction.

Happy indeed we live, free from avarice amidst the avaricious. Amidst the avaricious men we dwell free from avarice.

Happy indeed we live, we who possess nothing. Feeders on joy we shall be, like the Radiant Gods.

Victory begets enmity; the defeated dwell in pain. Happily the peaceful live, discarding both victory and defeat.

There is no fire like lust and no crime like hatred. There is no ill like the aggregates (of existence) and no bliss higher than the peace (of Nibbana). [17]

Hunger is the worst disease, conditioned things the worst suffering. Knowing this as it really is, the wise realize Nibbana, the highest bliss.

Health is the most precious gain and contentment the greatest wealth. A trustworthy person is the best kinsman, Nibbana the highest bliss.

Having savored the taste of solitude and peace (of Nibbana), pain-free and stainless he becomes, drinking deep the taste of the bliss of the Truth.

Good is it to see the Noble Ones; to live with them is ever blissful. One will always be happy by not encountering fools.

Indeed, he who moves in the company of fools grieves for longing. Association with fools is ever painful, like partnership with an enemy. But association with the wise is happy, like meeting one's own kinsmen.

Therefore, follow the Noble One, who is steadfast, wise, learned, dutiful and devout. One should follow only such a man, who is truly good and discerning, even as the moon follows the path of the stars.

-- Sukhavagga: Happiness http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/dhp/dhp.15.budd.h...

Ogden Nash, for his skill in turning pain into absurdity

William Blake - The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Lots of good poets already mentioned so I should mention Alexander Blok: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Blok

Unfortunately, the English translations are not really as moving as Russian originals.

Dambudzo Marechera - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dambudzo_Marechera

  The lives of small men are like spiders' webs;
  they are studded with minute skeletons of greatness.
  Excerpt from House of Hunger

THE BAR-STOOL EDIBLE WORM

  I’m against everything
  Against war and those against
  War. Against whatever diminishes
  Th’ individual’s blind impulse.

  Shake the peaches down from 
  The summer poem, Rake in ripe
  Luminosity; dust; taste. Lunchtime
  News – pass the Castor Oil, Alice.

THERE’S A DISSIDENT IN THE ELECTION SOUP!

  I have no ear for slogans
  You may as well shut up your arse
  I run when it’s I LOVE YOU time
  Don’t say it I’ll stick around
  I run when it’s A LUTA time
  I run when it’s FORWARD time
  Don’t say it we’ll fuck the whole night
  The moon won’t come down
  At first awkwardly, excruciatingly embarrassing
  But with Venus ascending, a shout and leap of joy

  When the sheets are at last silent
  Don’t ask “What are you thinking?”
  Don’t ask “Was it good?”
  Don’t feel bad because I’m smoking
  They ask and feel bad who are insecure
  Who say after the act “Tell me a story”
  And you may as well know
  Don’t talk of “MARRIAGE” if this reconciliation
  is to last.

SHOCK: FOR BETTINA

  Like meteorites, through my long
  Isolated heart-atmosphere, you
  Burst incandescent over my platinum history.
  My future in earthquake reeled; my present only on 
  Seismograph could point to the cataclysm – no
  Evidence of you attached to my stone and flesh,
  Only nightmarish passions which I can still hear
  When you shake your head. Shake it vigorously.
  Nuclear tests of underground love!

Langston Hughes is the only poet to get me interested in poetry. I'm surprised that not a single other person here has mentioned him. Perhaps I shouldn't be.

Some really inspiring versification in here, and it would be difficult to surpass the aesthetic and philosophic achievements already mentioned.

However, for sheer technical brilliance, perhaps a word should be said for the ElectroBard from Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad, whose verbal virtuosity was such that when challenged:

“compose a poem- a poem about a haircut! But lofty, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter S!!"

the response was instant:

    Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
    She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
    Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
    Silently scheming
    Sightlessly seeking
    Some savage, spectacular suicide."

... and if you think that's good, just imagine how great it was before being translated into English! (By Michael Kandel iirc)

Nicanor Parra

Sekou Sundiata blew my mind when I was introduced to his work in the mid-90s. To me he's the bridge from Ginsberg, kerouac, Boroughs etc to more modern stuff like Saul Williams, Buddy Wakefield, etc

Rumi, Bukowski, Gibran, Poe.

One of my favourite poems is by Charles Bukowski and it has this wonderful recursive quality to it. It's called "Oh Yes".

there are worse things than being along but it often takes decades to realize this and most often when you do it's too late and there's nothing worse than too late.

Henry David Thoreau & Walt Whitman

Nature Poem by Henry David Thoreau

  O Nature! I do not aspire
  To be the highest in thy choir, -
  To be a meteor in thy sky,
  Or comet that may range on high;
  Only a zephyr that may blow
  Among the reeds by the river low;
  Give me thy most privy place
  Where to run my airy race.

  In some withdrawn, unpublic mead
  Let me sigh upon a reed,
  Or in the woods, with leafy din,
  Whisper the still evening in:
  Some still work give me to do, -
  Only - be it near to you!

  For I'd rather be thy child
  And pupil, in the forest wild,
  Than be the king of men elsewhere,
  And most sovereign slave of care;
  To have one moment of thy dawn,
  Than share the city's year forlorn.

Pioneers! O Pioneers! by Walt Whitman

It's a long one so here is the first part:

  COME, my tan-faced children,
  Follow well in order, get your weapons ready;
  Have you your pistols? have you your sharp edged axes?
  Pioneers! O pioneers!

  For we cannot tarry here,	 
  We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,	         
  We, the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend,  
  Pioneers! O pioneers! ...

A physicist's poem:

To wonder as we wander through this world of mysteries many, is to fulfill the purpose of man's creation and destiny; and he who does not wonder, or the mysteries have not moved, should be interred in the dampest earth, for he is dead and never lived. (Source: the author of a very old Penguin book I once had on relativity)

http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/07/12/buckminster-fuller-e...

I love Bukowski's "Pulled Down Shade"

"what I like about you she told me is that you're crude -- look at you sitting there a beercan in your hand and a cigar in your mouth and look at your dirty hairy belly sticking out from under your shirt. you've got your shoes off and you've got a hole in your right stocking with the big toe sticking out. you haven't shaved in 4 or 5 days. your teeth are yellow and your eyebrows hang down all twisted and you've got enough scars to scare the shit out of anybody. there's always a ring in your bathtub your telephone is covered with grease and half the crap in your refrigerator is rotten. you never wash your car. you've got newspapers a week old on the floor. you read dirty magazines and you don't have a tv but you order deliveries from the liquor store and you tip good. and best of all you don't push a woman to go to bed with you. you seem hardly interested and when I talk to you you don't say anything you just look around the room or scratch your neck like you don't hear me. you've got an old wet towel in the sink and a photo of Mussolini on the wall and you never complain about anything and you never ask questions and I've known you for 6 months but I have no idea who you are. you're like some pulled down shade but that's what I like about you: your crudeness: a woman can drop out of your life and forget you real fast. a woman can't go anywhere but UP after leaving you, honey. you've got to be the best thing that ever happened to a girl who's between one guy and the next and has nothing to do at the moment. this fucking Scotch is great. let's play Scrabble."

Favourite poets: Rumi, Neruda, Herrick, Byron, Keats, Frost...

Hafez, Rumi, Adunis, Paz, Forough, Elliot, Qabbani, Passolini, Lorca, Ginsberg, Blake. :)

Loving the discovery of poets here.

I'd like to point out: http://www.reddit.com/user/Poem_for_your_sprog

All the comments he/she posts are poems in response to the post or comment. The comments usually are guilded.

L'infinito - Giacomo Leopardi

http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mdt26/poems/leopardi1.html

  Always dear to me was this lonely hill,
  And this hedge, which from me so great a part
  Of the farthest horizon excludes the gaze.
  But as I sit and watch, I invent in my mind
  endless spaces beyond, and superhuman
  silences, and profoundest quiet;
  wherefore my heart
  almost loses itself in fear. And as I hear the wind
  rustle through these plants, I compare
  that infinite silence to this voice:
  and I recall to mind eternity,
  And the dead seasons, and the one present
  And alive, and the sound of it. So in this
  Immensity my thinking drowns:
  And to shipwreck is sweet for me in this sea.

Robert Frost

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.

Leon DeGreiff http://www.banrepcultural.org/blaavirtual/literatura/antolo/...