katsy

Poetry is arguably a dying art form. I happen to enjoy it. I'm not a fan of the inaccessible works you may get in your lit class-- not that the stuff isn't anthologized for a good reason.

I am not a poet, just a fan. Even if I did write, I doubt I would have the balls to share it, so kudos to those who do.

I really enjoy modern/contemporary poets and their works. There are several literary magazines and on-line publications with a lot of good stuff from some very relevant poets.

I'm creating this thread to share some poems that I love. PLEASE feel free to add any you please or share any poets you like.

Some of my favorites:
Pablo Neruda
Kim Addonizio
Ash Bowen
Sylvia Plath
Emily Dickinson
William Meredith, just to list a few

This is one of my all-time favorites. It's the actual poet, Geoffrey Brock(who teaches at Arkansas), reading the poem, and the crude animation is amusing. Below the video is the actual poem.



It was so simple: you came back to me
And I was happy. Nothing seemed to matter
But that. That you had gone away from me
And lived for days with him—it didn’t matter.
That I had been left to care for our old dog
And house alone—couldn’t have mattered less!
On all this, you and I and our happy dog
Agreed. We slept. The world was worriless.

I woke in the morning, brimming with old joys
Till the fact-checker showed up, late, for work
And started in: Item: it’s years, not days.
Item: you had no dog. Item: she isn’t back,
In fact, she just remarried. And oh yes, item: you
Left her, remember? I did? I did. (I do.)

Geoffrey Brock

__________________
Split the Lark-- and you'll find the Music - Emily Dickinson

katsy

I couldn't help but to share one more this evening. This is a freakin awesome poem. There is no doubt that in his time, Pablo, pulled more ass than a toilet seat.


“Sonnet XVII

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way than this:

where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep. ”
― Pablo Neruda

__________________
Split the Lark-- and you'll find the Music - Emily Dickinson

PoorOldPo

Really nice stuff man/ woman! Keep posting please!

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https://www.instagram.com/hennas.lullaby/

CLOSER

Wow.... this is unbelievable. Thank you.

katsy

^^ Neruda has many great poems, this one happens to be my favorite. His book of love sonnets is pretty amazing. Sonnet form isn't the easiest to write in and it's all been translated from Spanish. Imagine what is lost in translation. Neruda was pretty loved and famous. He's Chilean, supported communism, and served as a diplomat. There is a movie about him which I happen to enjoy: Il Postino.


And I'm a woman. And I'm afraid I've revealed myself to be a huge poetry nerd

This poem is a little dark and menacing. I like a strong last line. I found it in Best New Poets 2011.

Jennifer Luebbers
Recess

Spring, and a man took a girl to the woods by the schoolyard.
Police hovered in helicopters; they hemmed the trees in tape.

The recess monitor circled with a bronze bell, its rusty clapper

a tongue to warn. The jump rope was a thick braid touched
to the pavement, and a choir of mouths sang

Cinderella, dressed in yella, Went downtown to meet a fella.

How I wanted to be the girl gone missing. How I wanted the world
to watch. I thought to go to the woods in white,

weave a chain of daisies for my throat, a garland

of dandelion to stain my hands, a crown of pollen to seed
my hair. To tie my wrists with ropes

to a tree. To wait for the police, the priest, the teacher, my father--

any dangerous man who might come to save. Who among them
would unbind my wrists?

Who among them would bear the knife?

__________________
Split the Lark-- and you'll find the Music - Emily Dickinson

katsy

One more from Best New Poets 2011. Another poem on the darker side. The theme today seems to be child abuse.

Ash Bowen
How Gravity Hated Us

My sister was the first to learn how gravity hated
our family--a spinning plunge into the gorge

of echoy quartz when she failed to cling
to air like Father imagined. Her hollow bones

made him certain she'd been born
for flight so he'd splayed her among the tools of his shop

and stripped the rivets from her body,
took her inside his shower and shaved her

nose into a beak. Her talons scratched
for balance as she crept across her perch,

eyes rolling over the canyons as she stumbled
into free-fall and Earth climbed up to meet her.

She rose, coughing teeth into her palms,
shivering impact rubble from her shoulders,

trembling in the feathery shadow of our father
whose fingers were already fitting me with wings.

__________________
Split the Lark-- and you'll find the Music - Emily Dickinson

katsy

This is great. I love the letter to the father.

Anthony Farrington

HOW TO WRITE AN EROTIC LETTER

You must empty yourself first. Erase
everything you’ve written. If you’re naked,
revise all your clothes back on. Anyway,
they’re all you have. What matters
is the taking them off. Begin with a title
“Concerning insatiable carnal urges.”
Attach a handwritten note that says,
Keep your hair down and If you come here,
I’ll tell you something awful about someone perfect. Scathing
and lovely to hear. Remember,

each time, each letter is an entire love affair, say
‘A’ is for almost. ‘B’
is the emptiness that follows. The letter ‘O’
is what the body believes.

If she writes in a letter,
Sometimes our bodies are too much for us,
quote her. How she turns you on
turns her on. You can
quote me on that.

I am remembering the sweep of your hair, the light
on your breasts, your beautiful eyes expanding;
I am remembering the slickness inside you—
how wet, how deliciously warm. I think
of your uncontrollable breath; I think
of your nipples kissing my chest; I think
of your mouth on my neck and the sweet taste
of your tongue in my mouth.

Set aside nothing for later. Call this,
I was kissing and sucking and wanting so badly
to **** you silly, silly. And erase it. But enjoy it first.

Feel free to write a pretend letter to her father.
Quote from it: “Dear her father, Sir, we are sorry to inform you, sir,
of the mysterious demise of your daughter. It seems she was somehow—
sorry to say this indelicately—****ed to death…obviously
a scandalous affair. Ropes and long-necked bottles and,
oh, we mustn’t go on. A man was dead too, sir—exhaustion it seems
or dementia. With sincere regrets,
I am yours.”

If she uses the word **** in her letters
you use the word ****
but at the end of the letter only. This
is not prudery, it is teasing
and she will appreciate it.

I want my face in your hair,
your perfume in my breath,
my finger tips softly
touching the sides of your ribs, your waist,
your thighs, your breast, your face—what is important here,
in this letter, your hand must touch her, in this letter,
so she wants, over and over, what is not there.

If you’re foolish enough to write Oh God prematurely,
you deserve what you don’t get. As a cautionary measure,
delete all references to god: Jesus it feels so good and Holy ****.
Consider keeping: God, you are so slick; so goddamn delicious.
But you’ve already used slick once. Now three times. There is nothing wrong
with I want to hear your voice coming and coming
but admit, it’s a one-shot phrase.

Damp cotton will open caves in your mind.
Promise her: I need you
electric in my mouth. Write: Concerning the art of seduction
and leave it at that. Tease her: Truth or dare? End
before you’ve said everything. Realize

everything you are, in this letter, precedes you—
which is the loneliness of writing. What you want
is never now. That’s the essence of desire. What she reads is always past;

that’s despair. Think about how—
if she could—she would swallow the world
(pillow and all) take it all inside—
all of you—so it could come shattering out
again. But don’t fool yourself,

this letter needs to be filled with sorrow. Write:
Sometimes I wish I could be in your body
so I could feel what you feel. Sometimes,
I wish you could be in my body—your own name amazingly
on the tip of your new tongue, the smell of you
(I mean me) in your fresh mind,
seeing your old body arch away from your new body,
hearing seeing feeling what was once you
hold her breath; hearing her becoming, coming

apart all around you. And then your own foreign release
beyond your whole body. The cracking—
it feels so open—this desire, almost to weep. Then
weep. In the space of a letter you once were.

__________________
Split the Lark-- and you'll find the Music - Emily Dickinson

katsy

This poem is GREAT. Read it. Another love poem. My spouse and I have a similar agreement. My favorite line: "I tell you you do not/know me if you think I will not/kill you."

The Promise by Sharon Olds

With the second drink, at the restaurant,
holding hands on the bare table,
we are at it again, renewing our promise
to kill each other. You are drinking gin,
night-blue juniper berry
dissolving in your body, I am drinking Fume,
chewing its fragrant dirt and smoke, we are
taking on earth, we are part soil already,
and wherever we are, we are also in our
bed, fitted, naked, closely
along each other, half passed out
after love, drifting back
and forth across the border of consciousness,
our bodies buoyant, clasped. Your hand
tightens on the table. You're a little afraid
I'll chicken out. What you do not want
is to lie in a hospital bed for a year
after a stroke, without being able
to think or die, you do not want
to be tied to a chair like a prim grandmother,
cursing. The room is dim around us,
ivory globes, pink curtains,
bound at the waist - and outside,
a weightless, luminous, lifted-up
summer twilight. I tell you you do not
know me if you think I will not
kill you. Think how we have floated together
eye to eye, nipple to nipple,
sex to sex, the halves of a creature
drifting up to the lip of matter
and over it - you know me from the bright, blood-
flecked delivery room, if a lion
had you in its jaws I would attack it, if the ropes
binding your soul are your own wrists, I will cut them.

__________________
Split the Lark-- and you'll find the Music - Emily Dickinson

katsy

“What Do Women Want?”

By Kim Addonizio

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what’s underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I’m the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment
from its hanger like I’m choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.

__________________
Split the Lark-- and you'll find the Music - Emily Dickinson

Dougdenslowe

This strike me as "short stories".I like my poems to rhyme.