Poetry - Do you read any poetry? If so what do you like?

[watt price tully]

Given the Nobel prize recently has brought the subject of poetry to the public imagination I thought it might be interesting in the off season to see what people think. Art can make people feel, think, have strong views, debate enjoy have passion etc

So a simple thread. "Poechry" as my oldest daughter once spelt it in early primary school doesn't have to be reified, academic or mystified.

I love some haiku poetry, especially Haiku Bob who writes some brilliant Haiku about Collingwood as seen on the Footy Almanac website .

Lots of forms of poetry from Haiku to classical English, Welsh, Irish, Scottish, American, Australian, performance & indeed workers Poetry that I still have in the bookshelves!!

Poetry from
e

e cummings

let alone "our" John Clarke.

What about you?

[Mugwump]

[Pies4shaw]

My favourites are e e cummings, Yeats, the other Dylan (Thomas), Borges, Enright, Plath and Seth. And, of course, Ray Davies.

[HAL]

Have you told many people about your favourites are e e cummings Yeats the other Dylan Thomas Borges Enright Plath and Seth?

[David]

One thing I will always be grateful to my mother for is that, for all of the isolation, authoritarianism and superstition she and my father forced upon us, she deliberately immersed us in (particularly English and American) poetry from an early age. She had cassette tapes with work by Wordsworth, Blake, Burns, Keats, Suckling, Poe, Alfred Noyes and so many other names I wouldn't be able to remember. She had the complete works of Shakespeare on the shelf, which my brother and I would read from and even act out with our stuffed toys, and of course the King James Bible was a constant presence too. And when I reached teenage years, she made sure to include study of poetry in the home-schooling curriculum.

I can't think of any other art form which we were more actively exposed to. So, it was profoundly disillusioning to reach the public high school system and broader world and realise that poetry, at least of the kind that I had grown up with, was more or less an obsolete art form. The only poetry that was given any regard by the arbiters of culture (literary journals and academia) seemed like a weird mutation, devoid of rhyme or rhythm or profundity.

Having studied modern and postmodern poetry for a year at Monash University, I can now appreciate those forms too, albeit on a less visceral level than the old classics. But I feel saddened to think that there may never be another Wordsworth or Keats; someone who can devote their creative lives to writing in that older, more structured mode and actually having their work read. Society seems to have no use for that kind of writing any more; and, indeed, poetry as a whole has been deemed much too niche and unprofitable to take its place among the other great art forms now. It lives on in spoken-word poetry slams, song lyrics and the angst-filled diaries of teenagers.

[think positive]

Fail!


http://www.neatorama.com/neatobambino/2 ... te-Poetry/

[Mugwump]

One thing I will always be grateful to my mother for is that, for all of the isolation, authoritarianism and superstition she and my father forced upon us, she deliberately immersed us in (particularly English and American) poetry from an early age. She had cassette tapes with work by Wordsworth, Blake, Burns, Keats, Suckling, Poe, Alfred Noyes and so many other names I wouldn't be able to remember. She had the complete works of Shakespeare on the shelf, which my brother and I would read from and even act out with our stuffed toys, and of course the King James Bible was a constant presence too. And when I reached teenage years, she made sure to include study of poetry in the home-schooling curriculum.

I can't think of any other art form which we were more actively exposed to. So, it was profoundly disillusioning to reach the public high school system and broader world and realise that poetry, at least of the kind that I had grown up with, was more or less an obsolete art form. The only poetry that was given any regard by the arbiters of culture (literary journals and academia) seemed like a weird mutation, devoid of rhyme or rhythm or profundity.

Having studied modern and postmodern poetry for a year at Monash University, I can now appreciate those forms too, albeit on a less visceral level than the old classics. But I feel saddened to think that there may never be another Wordsworth or Keats; someone who can devote their creative lives to writing in that older, more structured mode and actually having their work read. Society seems to have no use for that kind of writing any more; and, indeed, poetry as a whole has been deemed much too niche and unprofitable to take its place among the other great art forms now. It lives on in spoken-word poetry slams, song lyrics and the angst-filled diaries of teenagers.

well, you owe your mother something, at least. I don't think any other form of literature has the capacity to create wonder and magnify life that poetry has, and even if it is a dead art form (which I half-doubt), I consider the body of remembered poetry in English to be as powerful and important as the body of painting stored in the great galleries. Even if it is never again augmented, it's one of the joys of being alive. To answer the question, the poet i guess i open most often is Yeats, but large slabs of Auden, Keats, Coleridge, Eliot, Tennyson, Donne, Larkin, Hardy, and of course Shakespeare are all part of the bric-a-brac of my mental antique shop. Stephen Edgar is a fine Australian poet, though i have never really got Les Murray. There are lots of great individual poems by modern writers (Ondaatje and Attwood have both written fine things), but poetry does seem to have doissolved into specks of gold rather than great lodes of individual genius, since Lowell and Plath.

John Clarke's book of Australian verse is probably the best thing he did, too !

[Tannin]

Curiously enough, no. I love language, and I adore well-crafted writing, but nearly all poetry is too rich for my taste. To me, poetry is a bit like salt or sugar or olives: a little hint of it makes a plain dish appetising and improves it immeasurably, but I don't care to sit down to a bowl of the pure thing.

Good song lyrics are an exception, of course, as are poems which read like normal text and just happen to be classified as "poetry" even though they are equally well heard as wonderfully well-written prose. (If that last is not clear to you, consider as a well-known example, the great Australian bush poets like Lawson and Patterson. I could read them any day.)

[Tannin]

A modern version of that great tradition - well, 40 years old now - is Dave Warner's classic suburban series, written at around te same time as the Pistols were Saving the Queen.

Well you hit the pub at nine
And you're looking for a root.
Leave alone when it closes.
Stash some tinnies in the boot.

It's a mug's game.

[watt price tully]

On Red Symons this morning (ABC radio 774 or 3LO as some us remember it) Leonard Cohen (speaking of poets) said with respect to the Nobel prize for literature that awarding Dylan the prize was akin to trying to put a badge on Mt Everest. Then some wag said that the nobel prize for chemistry was going to be awarded to Keith Richard

Speaking of poetry I got this on my email yesterday:

What Banjo would write today?

I had written him a text
Which I'd sent, hoping the next
Time he came in mobile coverage
He'd have time to say hello.
But I'd heard he'd lost his iPhone,
So I emailed him from my smart phone,
Just addressed, on spec, as follows:
clancy@theoverflow

And the answer redirected
Wasn't quite what I'd expected
And it wasn't from the shearing mate
Who'd answered once before.
His ISP provider wrote it
And verbatim I will quote it:
'This account has been suspended:
You won't hear from him any more.'

In my wild erratic fancy
Visions come to me of Clancy:
Out of reach of mobile coverage
Where the Western rivers flow.
Instead of tapping on the small screen,
He'd be camping by the tall green
River gums, a pleasure
That the town folk never know.

Well, the bush has friends to meet him
But the rest of us can't greet him:
Out there, even Telstra's network
Doesn't give you any bars.
He can't blog the vision splendid
Of the sunlit plains extended
Or tweet the wondrous glory
Of the everlasting stars.

I am sitting at the keyboard,
I'm too stressed out to be bored
As I answer all the emails
By the deadlines they contain.
While my screen fills with promotions
For 'Viagra' and strange potions
And announcements of the million-dollar
Prizes I can claim.

But the looming deadlines haunt me
And their harassing senders taunt me
That they need response this evening
For tomorrow is too late!
But their texts, too quickly ended,
Often can't be comprehended
For their writers have no time to think
They have no time to wait.

And I sometimes rather fancy
That I'd like to trade with Cla ncy:
Just set up an email bouncer
Saying 'Sorry, had to go.'
While he faced an inbox jamming
Up with deadlines and with spamming
As he signed off every message:
clancy@theoverflow


-with apologies to A.B. (& quot;Banjo") Paterson

[stui magpie]

^

LOL

I'm not a big poetry fan, had to do some of them pommy buggers at school like Elliot and Donne, but zero interest.

I do quite like the Banjo's stuff tho.

[ronrat]

[qThen some wag said that the nobel prize for chemistry was going to be awarded to Keith Richard

When I did leaving English lit in 1976 we were all assigned different poets and and a poem as a essay and I drew Keith Richards and Sympathy for the Devil. Great stuff. Dad would come home and say "homework again son" while the stereo blared.

I reckon he could rewrite it and still be bloody good given world events.

Keith Richards has survived everything a chemist could throw at him so why not.

[think positive]

/\Keith and Ben cousins!
On topic!
Poetry in motion!

[watt price tully]

Saw this bloke last month or so at the Caravan Club as part of "In Oakleigh Tonight"

Ian Bland "on footy"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc1QHMkmxQI