Favorite Poets, I'm sure you all have at least one, maybe two, maybe more! Options

[*superstitious*]

My personal favorite is Dorothy Parker. She has such wit and biting sarcasm and a unique style, especially for her day and age. She was happy in her unhappiness, a total walking contradiction. She was one of the first writers of The New Yorker.

I could really go on for days. She has been a constant source of inspiration, both as a brilliant writer and as a woman of strength and undeniable character.

One of my favorite poems:

Bohemia

Authors and actors and artists and such
Never know nothing, and never know much.
Sculptors and singers and those of their kidney
Tell their affairs from Seattle to Sydney.
Playwrights and poets and such horses' necks
Start off from anywhere, end up at sex.
Diarists, critics, and similar roe
Never say nothing, and never say no.
People Who Do Things exceed my endurance;
God, for a man that solicits insurance!

For more information:
Dorothy Parker Society

List yours if you have favorites (I'm sure someone has to!) If you could, write a little about them. What makes them your favorite? Have they inspired you? Perhaps share a favorite poem.

(I'm sure this has been done before, but a fresh one isn't such a terrible thing, is it?)

[dustbunny]

Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.





Missing Father Report by Naomi Lazard

Your help is urgently needed.
If you have any information
regarding the whereabouts
of the following individual
contact us immediately.

Subject is, or was, about 45
at the time of disappearance.
last seen dissolving slowly,
first the back of his neck
then his shoulders went away,
his legs left too. In the end
his face vanished without warning,
the mouth open, still speaking.

We have no indication why
this person, of all people,
should have disappeared.
Reliable witnesses have stated
that not even his eyes endured,
not even the tips of his fingers.

You will know him by certain signs,
by the innocent look of his hair
falling over his forehead
in moments of emotional upheaval,
by his hands which are fine
and arrive like delicate instruments
of mercy.
You will also know him
by his eyes which have an unblinking
quality like those of a horse
or some other friendly, domesticated
animal. You will know him
if you are prepared.

There is no history of mental disease,
no police file. Disappearance was,
for all practical purposes,
voluntary. Subject's last
formal statement, for the record,
was "I love you,"
or something like that.



oops just realized it's POETS not poems..ah well I haven't had much time to delve into poetry so I'm not actually familiar with any poets yet.