<p>I’ve been working on lesson plans (English literature) for a teaching class I’m taking. In so doing, I’ve rediscovered how much I love poetry - well, at least <em>some</em> poetry. </p>
<p>We have threads on here for favorite books, movies, television shows - what about poetry? Any favorite poets/poems? Recommendations?</p>
<p>I really like Anne Sexton, Wendell Berry, Dickinson, Brodsky, Larkin, Auden…</p>
<p>James Merrill (Lost in Translation, for example), Ezra Pound (The River Merchant’s Wife, Na Audiart, et al), Yeats ( Lapis Lazuli), Wallace Stevens (The Emperor of Ice Cream, The Idea of Order at Key West, et al), Robert Frost, Keats, Shelley, Elizabeth Bishop, Rochester (A Satyr against Mankind), just to name a few off the top of my head.</p>
<p>I always feel like I’m not supposed to, but I still love e.e. cummings. </p>
<p>I like all those war poets like Wilfred Owen.</p>
<p>Speaking of war poems, I really like Peter Viereck’s “Vale from Carthage”. “Roman, you’ll see your Forum Square no more. What’s left but to say this of any war?”</p>
<p>I can still recite most of Tennyson’s “Ullyses.”</p>
<p>I love Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>And I love Richard Wilbur’s response to it: [Richard</a> Wilbur: “A Prelude” : The New Yorker](<a href=“http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2010/05/03/100503po_poem_wilbur]Richard”>A Prelude | The New Yorker)</p>
<p>There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;</p>
<pre><code>And frogs in the pools, singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
–Sara Teasdale
</code></pre>
<p>A friend, who wrote a book for high school students on how to understand poetry, introduced me to Mary Oliver and Richard Wilbur. I found both poets were extremely readable. In fact, my friend and I went to a Mary Oliver poetry reading in NYC in October. I loved hearing her read her poems. She read from her new book Dog Songs.</p>
<p>Keats, Donne, Yeats, Stevens, Dickinson come to mind from the past.</p>
<p>More contemporary favorites are Galway Kinnell and Seamus Heaney (still mourning his recent passing.)</p>
<p>Robert Frost hands down. Only poet I ever read to the max. My D used quotes from Frost in some art she did without even realizing it was my favorite of all time.
Emily Dickinson is a close second.
My dad (91) however can recite Tiger, Tiger burning bright by William Blake to this day.
I love Shel Silverstein for his whimsey and loved Cummings growing up.
“Leaves of Grass” is worth a bit of exploration. I didn’t appreciate it until I got older but was glad I was introduced to it in HS.
“How Do I Love Thee?” by Browning–How many songs have THAT theme? As good now as it was then.
I do think most poems need to be read aloud so that you can’t speed read them. They need a bit more time to savor the words and meaning and imagery than regular prose. My HS English teacher read most poems aloud (admittedly, he was great at it) -it didn’t matter that it was printed in front of us. We read them aloud in class (we were pretty good too!)–total fun.</p>
<p>I assumed HS age–is that correct?</p>
<p>Love Dover Beach. Also love Wilfred Owen and the other Great War poets. The problem with naming anyone is all of the poets one leaves out. I forgot to mention Robert Pinsky. At dinners years ago we would pass around the Norton Anthology, and people would read their favorites aloud.</p>
<p>I love so many of the above mentioned, thanks for bringing them back to mind.</p>
<p>Would like to add Auden, his “stop the clocks” came to me today for some reason.</p>
<p>Also Sharon Olds, fantastic.</p>
<p>Some Edna St Vincent Millay, some Robert Bly. Definitely Richard Wilbur, Mary Oliver, Pablo Neruda, Rainer Rilke.</p>
<p>Neruda’s Keeping Quiet.</p>
<p>Those of you who like Dover Beach may be interested in Anthony Hecht’s anti-idealist twist:
[The</a> Dover *****- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More](<a href=“http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16424]The”>The Dover ■■■■■ by Anthony Hecht - Poems | Academy of American Poets)</p>
<p>My favorite poet is Milton.</p>
<p>I am not much of a poetry buff but I recently heard this one on one of my favorite podcats, Interfaith Voices, & I really loved it:</p>
<p>The Mower
By Philip Larkin
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found<br>
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,<br>
Killed. It had been in the long grass.</p>
<p>I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.<br>
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world<br>
Unmendably. Burial was no help:</p>
<p>Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence<br>
Is always the same; we should be careful</p>
<p>Of each other, we should be kind<br>
While there is still time.</p>
<p>Love, love, love so many of these.</p>
<p>I memorized “Dover Beach” in high school. I recently found Mary Oliver again. And the “stop the clocks” poem makes me think of “Four Weddings and a Funeral.” I love that poem.</p>
<p>Yes, Gouf - high school age.</p>
<p>I love this part from Tennyson’s “Ulysses”:</p>
<p>Come, my friends,
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.</p>
<p>And this, from Anne Sexton. It says different things to me at different times of my life:</p>
<p>Courage
It is in the small things we see it.
The child’s first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.</p>
<p>Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.</p>
<p>Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.</p>
<p>Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you’ll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you’ll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you’ll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.</p>
<p>Milton…</p>
<p>any one mention Langston Hughes or Pablo Neruda yet?</p>
<p>If I were teaching poetry, I would try to show examples of the way poets use language and how topics and styles have changed over time. </p>
<p>Examples:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Take John Donne. Everyone loves his best work. But kids need to know he was a preacher and that his lines about the bell tolling refer to the actual practice of ringing the bell when a person died. So if a person was 22, the bell would toll 22 times. You can ground him in his time and in his purpose.</p></li>
<li><p>Another preacher poet is Hopkins. I would teach The Windhover and/or Pied Beauty to show how he used language playfully and with melodic force, again to make a point but also because the beauty of the language and its play is a celebration of life:
“For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; / For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; /Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;Skies as couple-coloured as a brinded cow.”</p></li>
</ol>
<p>or “I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding / Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding …” </p>
<ol>
<li><p>I’d show how the Romantics shifted poetry from the descriptive / celebratory to the imaginative. Keats Ode to a Nightingale is perhaps the most obvious choice in all of poetry to discuss with a group of kids. It’s like a pop song with better lyrics. </p></li>
<li><p>I’d discuss a bit about the “Moderns” with the cool touch that you can listen to TS Eliot read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. His somewhat affected style draws out the o’s: in the room the women come and go talking of michelangelo. Perhaps the other best choice of poem to discuss with kids.</p></li>
<li><p>I’d show the shift to contemporary poetry and then to confessional, personal poetry (as driven by Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, though a better choice of poem would be For the Union Dead). After thinking about it for a minute, I’d use Roethke’s My Papa’s Waltz and of course Williams This Is Just to Say, but there are so many choices. Pick a few of Berryman’s Dream Songs: very appealing to kids with their darkness. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>Contemporary poetry is when subject matter opens up. You can write about anything. An example I found compelling is Randall Jarrell’s The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner. You can show what a ball turret is and how this poem is different from “war poems” about sacrifice, how it turns the concept of a war poem on its head. The whole thing is:</p>
<p>“From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.”</p>
<p>Compare that to Kipling’s Charge of the Light Brigade:</p>
<p>"Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
“Charge for the guns!” he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.”</p>
<p>And then to Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth. The difference is clear in the titles. Poetry changes with society. Language changes. Poetry teaches. I dare anyone to look up the life expectancy of a ball turret gunner. You can’t look at war the same. And yet, in those years, Jarrell could not be nearly as brutal in his language as we can today. </p>
<ol>
<li>There’s so much. Langston Hughes. It’s hard to stop but I must.</li>
</ol>
<p>English, not American, Lit, right? So many of both nationalities already listed. I still recall being exposed to a variety of poets in HS English class (it wasn’t called language arts back then). Lergnon’s post #18 shows how to do it well. The idea is to expose them to a variety of styles so they have tools to choose poems they may enjoy on their own. Pointing out how rhythm and other aspects vary opens up a new world. It is essential to read some poems out loud- have students do it. Don’t forget limericks and other common forms to show not all poetry has to be formal.</p>
<p>You got some favorite lines going in my head. Bobbie Burns Scottish accent as done by an English teacher. The beating of the drum (e e cummings? it was cool to find an author not using caps). An explanation of surrounding circumstances helps people relate. Poetry evokes images and reflects its current culture.</p>
<p>It would be great to have students pick a form/style they like and try their hands at creating their own after presenting authors.</p>
<p>Add Billy Collins and Donald Hall. Oxcart Man, a children’s picture book illustrated by Barbara Cooney, is my all time favorite Donald Hall. Collins is a lot of fun, good for HS students.</p>
<p>A great aunt was a teacher “on the prairie” and would visit her sister, my grandmother, and teach us bits of poetry. One piece was R L Stevenson’s epitaph “under the wide and starry sky.” She told a story about Robert Burns, a notorious drunkard. He was lying in a gutter and a contemporary English poet (whose name I’ve forgotten, I was around 9 when I heard the story) was walking by and made disparaging remarks - probably about his nationality (State) and condition (state). Burns raised his head and said “there’s room to pass, you English ass, between the wall and I.” The moral was that even in a drunken stupor the man had a gift for language. This aunt’s husband was a WW I veteran from a Canadian regiment that wore kilts. Burns was beloved. I’ve tried to find a source for that story and failed. True or not, I’ve no doubt it was repeated, on the prairie, a hundred years ago.</p>