Robert Frost for sure!

--
"The mountains are calling and I must go"-John Muir

walt whitman leaves of grass song of myself is AMAZING.
and i love love love jack kerouac
--

I like a lot. Off the top of my head, as far as classics are Lord Byron, T.S. Eliot, George Herbert, Hafiz, Robert Burns, Etheridge Knight, Theodore Roethke, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Donne, and Yeats, among others.

More current poets I like are Mary Oliver, Stephen Dunn, Jeffrey McDaniel, Wislawa Szymborska, and Wendell Berry. But there's a lot of good stuff out there.

--
Temporary is my time, Ain't nothin on this world that's mine, Except the will I found to carry on.
Free is not your right to choose, It's answering what's asked of you, To give the love you find until it's gone.

oh yeah, Docmike, meant to say Thomas and Blake! They're great. Blake is nuts, in an awesome way. I would love love love to see what he would do if he had all the artistic mediums and tools available today.

--
Temporary is my time, Ain't nothin on this world that's mine, Except the will I found to carry on.
Free is not your right to choose, It's answering what's asked of you, To give the love you find until it's gone.

ooh, Taryn, he's all over it.

this is my favorite of his, and of my favorite poems in general:

Manifesto:
The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

--
Temporary is my time, Ain't nothin on this world that's mine, Except the will I found to carry on.
Free is not your right to choose, It's answering what's asked of you, To give the love you find until it's gone.

Collected Poems: '57-'82 is a good chunk w/ a lot of his great pieces. Timbered Choir: Sabbath poems is pure beauty. Poems he wrote over the years while taking his sunday sabbath walk through the woods around his farmland.

Guy is a prophet, I think. Wish he was required reading for our country. think we'd be in a lot better shape in all manner of ways, economically, spiritually, agriculturally, politically, etc.

--
Temporary is my time, Ain't nothin on this world that's mine, Except the will I found to carry on.
Free is not your right to choose, It's answering what's asked of you, To give the love you find until it's gone.

I like that

--
iesseimarkovich.blogspot.com

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 live and lack of rum
he put a bullet through his brain
and no one spoke of him again

you smug faced crowd 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

Siegfried Sassoon

one of my favorites

Hah, Wonderful Gleam. Wasn't aware of Berry but you bet now I am.
Know what you mean about Blake, Crazy good:

"The five senses are the inlets to the soul"
"IF the doors of perception were cleansed they would appear to man as it is, infinite"

Sad one stirred but beautiful passion.

I read this one when someone dies by Dylan Thomas(excerpt):

Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

--

It's answering what's asked of you
To give the love you find until it's gone

Edgar allen poe ofcourse!!!!!!!

--
"For every year of knowledge gained, is a negative year I've earned"

Taking Isaac Watts to bed,man.
Goosebumps. As awesome as He is.

--

It's answering what's asked of you
To give the love you find until it's gone

Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden

I also like Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovani, Amiri Baraka (favorite), Maxin Kumin, Marge Piercy (To Be of Use is another favorite), and Theodore Roethke.

Charles Bukowski.

My favorite poem is Bluebird:

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

--
NORTH CAROLINA!!

lovewrites, many of the best prayers are poems and best poems are prayers anyways

--
Temporary is my time, Ain't nothin on this world that's mine, Except the will I found to carry on.
Free is not your right to choose, It's answering what's asked of you, To give the love you find until it's gone.

Love all those Poets. Frost my be my personal favorite but I am surpised no one mention Allen Ginsberg

America

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go f*** yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black [Slur Deleted]s.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

--
Do the best you can and that wont go unseen

April 29th is Poem In Your Pocket Day!

Carry a poem close to your heart (or hip, or bum)! April 29 is the penultimate day of National Poetry Month, and we intend to end April in style. Poetry lovers across the nation will be celebrating the third annual National Poem in Your Pocket Day. Verbosity welcomes you to join in the fun.

All you have to do is:
-Write out or print out a favorite poem
-Stick it in a pocket, leaving a bit of paper peeking out
-Whenever you see another poem-padded pocket, ask to share your poems

It promises to be a perfectly poetic day!

Facebook Event:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=109279299110789

I love this thread! Great idea!

I go in and out of poet-obsessions, but Wendell Berry/James Whitcomb Riley/Shel Silverstein will stand the test of time with me.

Within mainstream poetry, I always liked the Beat Poets/Timothy Leary as a youth. EE Cummings. I dig Maya Angelou and Everett Reuss. I have a close friend that is a professional poet (yes! they exist!) and really got me into local performance/slam poetry.

How many of us write poetry? Me...Notsomuch since I got my thyroid fixed/not plagued with depression anymore. Funny how that works. Got nuttin' to whine about.

lately i've been having a strange obsession over Sylvia Plath

--
"Pull back the curtains, let your poverty shine. Take off your shoes and have a glass of wine." -- The Ragbirds

I write Anj, gotta get a little use outta my college degree, though like you say, it comes easier when times is tough and emotions are fraught.
--
Temporary is my time, Ain't nothin on this world that's mine, Except the will I found to carry on.
Free is not your right to choose, It's answering what's asked of you, To give the love you find until it's gone.

Walt whitman, Poe, Sara Teasdale, Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson,
and Lewis Carroll (a bit of nonsense is always good and he wrote a few nice love poems that I like.)