Poetry

Someone saw an earlier post about books and poetry and asked me about my favorites.

I am going to try and break it down into 4 posts: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Short Stories (yeah, they are fiction but they are a special genre) and Poetry.

So let's attack the poets first, they are the easiest (?).

I will try and maybe introduce some newer/contemporary poets or ones that maybe not everyone is familiar with. I love the old standards of Whitman and Byron and Browning and Joyce and others but here are some that are maybe overlooked. Here is a short list of my absolute favorite contemporaries (as of 7 pm on October 20) with one representative poem from each:

ee cummings (next to of course god america)
Emily Dickinson (hope is the thing with feathers)
William Carlos Williams (Red Wheelbarrow and This Is Just To Say)
Robert Frost (not Road Not Taken or Stopping by the Woods which are both good but Fire and Ice)
Mary Oliver (lots of good stuff...how about When Death Comes)
Langston Hughes (I Too Sing America and The Weary Blues)
Major Jackson (How to Listen)

So, not a complete list in any way. And the above does not include my current favorite poet...

Drum roll please:

Billy Collins (probably my absolute favorite right now). He is the poet laureate and a huge proponent of getting more poetry into the schools. His poems and fresh, refreshing, deep, easy to read. Check out his website: http://www.billy-collins.com/ You can even listen to some of his poems there which is great...I think that until you hear a poem, especially as it is read by the poet, you never understand or grasp it's depth. He also maintains the wonderful website Poetry180.com at the Library of Congress. It is an attempt to get the public re-interested in poetry. It is designed to be used in classrooms (one poem a day for the entire school year: hence the 180...it also signifies a 180 in our thinking about poetry). The poets are like Collins, young, fresh, new (no Tennyson, Elliot, Keats, or other old stoddgies (though I do admit to liking them also)). If you are like me, a lot of the poets will be new to you. The site also has additional resources on poetry and literature. In the introduction to the website he re-affirms the above by saying, "I have selected the poems you will find here with high school students in mind. They are intended to be listened to, and I suggest that all members of the school community be included as readers. Listening to poetry can encourage students and other learners to become members of the circle of readers for whom poetry is a vital source of pleasure." Anyway, on to his stuff.

Here is a great sample of his stuff:

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.