I’ve never been into poetry but I thought I might give it a try. Normally I don’t read anything that doesn’t have the word “Christian” in the description (I mostly read bible study type books). Not sure that’s important for this experiment. Any suggestions? Romance would be nice but not of the sappy variety.

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Ukulele music I couldn't find anywhere else.
[colquhoun.info]

I was so enamored with the Norton Anthology of Poetry in college that I have taken it on every move and it has had a place on the shelf in every apartment since then.

It's a great survey of literature. There's something in there for everyone and you'll find something in there for yourself.

...Look for it used. The current price is insane.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/22/2022 10:03PM by Tiangou.

I like this poem. Sorry, no book recommendation

[www.phys.unm.edu]

[www.amazon.com]

Yeah, some sort of anthology is probably a sensible place to start.


Robert Frost:

[www.robertfrost.org]


[www.robertfrost.org]

[www.robertfrost.org]

[www.robertfrost.org]

Although not listed as poetry, I feel like every sentence of "On The Road" was poetry. Read it aloud and you will understand.
[www.penguinrandomhouse.ca]
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that I’d often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles. First reports of him came to me through Chad King, who’d shown me a few letters from him written in a New Mexico reform school. I was tremendously interested in the letters because they so naively and sweetly asked Chad to teach him all about Nietzsche and all the wonderful intellectual things that Chad knew. At one point Carlo and I talked about the letters and wondered if we would ever meet the strange Dean Moriarty. This is all far back, when Dean was not the way he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery. Then news came that Dean was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first time; also there was talk that he had just married a girl called Marylou.
One day I was hanging around the campus and Chad and Tim Gray told me Dean was staying in a cold-water pad in East Harlem, the Spanish Harlem. Dean had arrived the night before, the first time in New York, with his beautiful little sharp chick Marylou; they got off the Greyhound bus at 50th Street and cut around the corner looking for a place to eat and went right in Hector’s, and since then Hector’s cafeteria has always been a big symbol of New York for Dean. They spent money on beautiful big glazed cakes and creampuffs.

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San Antonio, TX (in the old city)


"All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
“Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." - Eli Weisel

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." - Theodore Roosevelt (1918)

"I don’t want to see religious bigotry in any form. It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it." - Billy Graham 1981

"Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise" - Barry Goldwater



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/23/2022 12:45AM by Rolando.

I like Coleridge. I first discovered his work through the metal band Iron Maiden. They did an epic version of Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. When I was in AP English in HS my teacher was shocked that I had it memorized. Mary Shelly cites it several times in Frankenstein. Some people say that her story is based loosely on his poem. I had to write a report about him. He was an interesting character. While writing Kubla Kahn he was under the influence of opioids. Someone knocked on his door and distracted him enough that by the time he got back to the work his high had worn off and he abandoned the project only partially complete. He published anyway as a fragment.

“…Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread...”


Iron Maiden’s version, with lyrics
[youtu.be]

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MacResource User Map: [www.zeemaps.com]#

I've had this book for a long time and read it often.

[www.thriftbooks.com]

Quote
Rolando
Although not listed as poetry, I feel like every sentence of "On The Road" was poetry.

It seems Steve Allen agrees. If anyone has a spare, just-under-seven-minutes bit of time, I recommend watching this clip of Kerouac reading from On the Road (accompanied on piano by Steve Allen.

Todd's beat-down-but-not-out keyboard

Davemachine,

For me, as a published poet, poetry is as much about the topic, the emotion, the rhythm of the words, the feelings brought out by it, the form, etc. A poem can be simple and accessible or astonishingly complex.

If I was learning about poetry, I'd start by reading it and I would go with poems that are very accessible. Crazy as it sounds, it'd be a book with poems geared towards children. Something like Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein.

The last thing you want to do is start with poems that possibly off-putting not due to topic but due to complexity. I enjoyed Shel's work tremendously and used the poem Spaghetti from Where The Sidewalk Ends for a presentation when I was in middle school. I memorized it, performed it in front of the class and spoke about why I liked it. It's been decades and I still have fond memories of that presentation.

Once you get a feel for poetry, you can slowly move to other poets, learn about style, forms, and everything else that makes it a wonderful form of writing.

Robert

You need to broaden your horizons .

amazon

Thank you for all of the good book recommendations. I bought two of them and wrote the others down on a list. As I was looking through them I remembered I own ”diary of an old soul“ by George McDonald. So now I have a few choices!

Here is one of the poems in George’s book that I really enjoyed.

Doubt swells and surges, with swelling doubt behind!
My soul in storm is but a tattered sail,
Streaming its ribbons on the torrent gale;
In calm, 'tis but a limp and flapping thing:
Oh! swell it with thy breath; make it a wing,
— To sweep through thee the ocean,
with thee the wind Nor rest until in thee its haven it shall find.

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Ukulele music I couldn't find anywhere else.
[colquhoun.info]

[pen.org]

[www.poetryfoundation.org]

[poets.org]

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Hurts like a bastid...