Your favorite poem and why

[Glo]

I am a simple person with simple pleasures [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img].

Shel Silverstein - Smart


My dad gave me a dollar
`Cause I'm his smartest son
And I swapped it for two shiny quarters
`Cause two is more than one!

And then I took the quarters
And traded them to Lou
For three dimes --- I guess he don't know
That three is more than two!

Just then, along came old blind Bates
And just ‘cause he can't see
He gave me four nickels for my three dimes,
And four is more than three!

And I took the nickels to Hiram Coombs
Down at the feed-seed store,
And the fool gave me five pennies for them,
And five is more than four!

And then I went and showed my dad,
And he got red in the cheeks
And closed his eyes and shook his head ---
Too proud of me to speak!




But in truth, I really loved The Highwayman, By Alfred Noyes.

[maltaille]

[ QUOTE ]
Being "pro-America" made her less than popular? Pre WW2? OK

[/ QUOTE ]

From wikipedia:
Her reputation was damaged by poetry she wrote in support of the Allied war effort during World War II. Merle Rubin noted: "She seems to have caught more flak from the literary critics for supporting democracy than Ezra Pound did for championing fascism."

Without knowing exactly why, I would guess it has something to do with many of the cultural concepts popular at the time, such as eugenics and "Europe's war," being things she vehemently, and publicly, opposed. While "pro-America" was a quote, I suspect it was meant in a similar way to people who suggest that the current US regime is anti-American - it all depends on what your idea of things American is. It might be more accurate to describe her as pro-democracy, pro-global citizenship, pro opposing the ideals that are (and were then) popularly associated with fascism, and in the specifics of the time, pro joining the war. Not a popular viewpoint.

[Blarg]

I could see how being pro-interventionist could irritate a lot of people. We were pretty sick of Europe's constant costly wars and it seemed like we had only just finished one before they were starting to screw up all over again. I confess complete ignorance regarding this lady's life, even to the point of not knowing whether she was American or not.

[Blarg]

That's a pretty good one, whiskeytown. A simple but unusual concept well done.

[DustinG]

I can't really say why this is my favorite. I really like Clampitt's style though and she is probably my favorite poet.


A Whippoorwill in the Woods

by Amy Clampitt



Night after night, it was very nearly enough,
they said, to drive you crazy: a whippoorwill
in the woods repeating itself like the stuck groove
of an LP with a defect, and no way possible
of turning the thing off.

And night after night, they said, in the insomniac
small hours the whipsawing voice of obsession
would have come in closer, the way a sick
thing does when it’s done for—or maybe the reason
was nothing more melodramatic



than a night-flying congregation of moths, lured in
in their turn by house-glow, the strange heat
of it—imagine the nebular dangerousness, if one
were a moth, the dark pockmarked with beaks, the great
dim shapes, the bright extinction—

if moths are, indeed, after all, what a whippoorwill
favors. Who knows? Anyhow, from one point of view
insects are to be seen as an ailment, moths above all:
the filmed-over, innumerable nodes of spun-out tissue
untidying the trees, the larval

spew of such hairy hordes, one wonders what use
they can be other than as a guarantee no bird
goes hungry. We’re like that. The webbiness,
the gregariousness of the many are what we can’t abide.
We single out for notice

above all what’s disjunct, the way birds are,
with their unhooked-up, cheekily anarchic
dartings and flashings, their uncalled-for color—
the indelible look of the rose-breasted grosbeak
an aunt of mine, a noticer

of such things before the noticing had or needed
a name, drew my five-year-old attention up to, in
the green deeps of a maple. She never married,
believed her cat had learned to leave birds alone,
and for years, node after node,

by lingering degrees she made way within for
what wasn’t so much a thing as it was a system,
a webwork of error that throve until it killed her.
What is health? We must all die sometime.
Whatever it is, out there

in the woods, that begins to seem like
a species of madness, we survive as we can:
the hooked-up, the humdrum, the brief, tragic
wonder of being at all. The whippoorwill out in
the woods, for me, brought back

as by a relay, from a place at such a distance
no recollection now in place could reach so far,
the memory of a memory she told me of once:
of how her father, my grandfather, by whatever
now unfathomable happenstance,

carried her (she might have been five) into the breathing night.
“Listen!” she said he’d said. “Did you hear it?
That was a whippoorwill.” And she (and I) never forgot.

[John Cole]

Very nice.

[John Cole]

BTW, I'm sure it's a typo, but the poem is by Yeats, a sort of free style version of a poem by Ronsard.

[John Cole]

Here's a Poem by the translator of Hikmet's poem--in case you're interested.



Visionary Company

Last night when our son said, "The two of you
are beautiful," I knew he wasn't falling
for how the shadows at our candle-lit

dinner for three erased the lines the years
have raked across our faces, but perhaps
buttering us up & learning to trade

words for love. Putting myself in his place,
I sat back at the right hand of my father,
who manfully watched me play his opposite

versus his understudy, as when, my hair
silvered for King Lear's Kent like his, it happened
I kissed him good-bye on the mouth for good,

& across the blond table from my mother,
whose blue shadow-box hung over my head
& in whose teal-flecked eyes I could do no wrong,

wrong as I was in so much that I did
or failed to do, like telling her the fall
she died I'd be a father in the spring.

I saw my parents vanish in the time
it took our candle to burn down to nothing
—both, to my mind, beautiful in that light.

--Randy Blasing

[cosimaninja]

siegfried sassoon- suicide in the trenches.


I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.




You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.






i just love all poetry from the 1st WW

[Blarg]

I'm fascinated by that time too, and Sassoon can really be great.

Here's one from Philip Larkin that I often paste in whenever favorite poetry threads pop up:

High Windows

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's f*cking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives--
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.


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"The sun-comprehending glass" might be my favorite thing I've ever read.