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]

I read a lot of poetry, and I think we are a lot poorer for the fact that poetry doesn't have much place in modern life. There are song lyrics, and they fill the role that poetry used to fill in an age before the gramophone, but they are really not the same thing.

We obsess over prime ministers and business people and celebrities, and idolise science and technology, yet the really durable interest of humanity lies in artists � writers, painters and composers. Few people will pay to visit the home of a historic figure from the sciences (unless they are a real giant, like Darwin), but thousands of people will visit the Holmes replica flat at 221B Baker Street, or visit Stratford-Upon-Avon, or Jane Austen�s or AA Milne�s birthplace, or whatever.

I often listen to poetry in the car, and I get as much pleasure out of it as I can from any song. Good song lyrics are usually simple and clean, but poetry lets the words carry weight.

At the moment I am reading/listening to �The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket�, by Robert Lowell. The poem concerns the drowning of his cousin, and connects this with the monstrous power of the Atlantic and the white whale myth, in words that move like the deep swell of the ocean itself. Like many good poems, it is not always immediately obvious quite what is being said, but the words roll and thunder, and after a while, the picture becomes clear like one of those puzzles that turn 3D if you look at them for long enough.

��. And blue-lunged combers lumbered to the kill�.

Just say it aloud, a few times - that mysterious music of syllable and menace is not like any other experience.

Lowell's great epic is at the more difficult edge, but there are thousands of great poems in English, this extraordinary, sappy and tensile language that we got from the unique fusion of French and Germanic (and augmented with words from many colonial adventures, too). I do not really understand why poetry does not seem to speak to modern English speakers the way it used to, but I suppose it is because of the loss of a unified culture, and the dreadful flattening of speech and perception that occurred when �global�, �business� and academic English became popular. It�s a pity.

[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/2014/04/19/Poem-I-Hate-Poetry/

[Mugwump]

[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