I've just sent my thoughts on Norm's Poets in English poll to him. Look here for further information on the poll and the original call for poets.
Its a semi-considered list and its not intended to be definitive because I'm not sure I have favourites above all else. Like music, poetry is tied to the soul and offers different kinds of comfort at different moments. When I want ascerbic humour, nothing beats Dorothy Parker; when I want something witty and insightful I love Eleanor Brown; when I want to 'hear' the poetry in my head, I like Liz Lochhead...
hmm, so many women... William Blake for comment on religion and society, the Mersey poets for a 1960s feel, e.e. cummings for being an early joint favourite of me and Cloud, and of course the current poet of the moment, Mr Robert Allen Zimmerman...
Anyway, my final choices are:
Elizabeth Barett Browning: for conveying love and narrative so beautifully
Emily Dickinson: for the beauty and elaborate simplicity of her language and her writing style
WH Auden: for being one of the first poets who moved me
PB Shelley: for bringing a poets voice to politics
If I REALLY have to drop to 3, I'll have to take Auden out... sniff.
10 comments:
At least you've got half of Sheets and Kelly. No room for Toilets?
Okay, never mind Duffman being "lost", now I'm utterly confused. I get "Sheets and Kelly" (nice bit of Spoonerism), but "Toilets"???!!
My dear girl, where did you go to school? T S Eliot (anag).
And to continue whimsical allusions to schooldays, do you know William Dunbar's "Lament for the Makars"?" That'll chill you.
I'm still working my way through the Dunbar poem - thanks, I think...
And apologies for not getting "Toilets": you see, if you will muddle Spoonerisms and anagrams together it just confuses me.
I guess it would REALLY wind you up if I said that Eliot's best writing was in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats....?! Seriously though, whilst I admire the erudition of Eliot (and Pound), their allusions to classical literature, philosophy etc, as poetry it doesn't really move me. Maybe I am a rather old fashioned girl, a Romantic at heart, who is moved more by the sentiment than the form. Whilst I can infinitely admire formalist compositions, for me poetry is about more than simply the form and the rhythm: it is also about conveying emotion in ways that prose is not always capable of doing.
And you know what: if you read this blog, you'll know where I went to school (just ask Duffman: such topics usually set him off on a long rant).
My apologies: the allusion to school was poetic licence; it certainly wasn't my intention to intrude or be rude. I meant something like: what did you lot do at the back of the class while the dimbos at the front wrote so slowly? We did little word games and such. Anyway, Eliot is a great advert for plagiarism: ooh, the outrage I felt when I learnt that the best chunk of one of his best poems was lifted straight from a 16th Century sermon by Lancelot Andrewes! The Horror!
Bugger, it was a 17th Century sermon. Perhaps I'd better shut up now.
"what did you lot do at the back of the class while the dimbos at the front wrote so slowly?"
Yeah, I can tell you have a real sensitivity for those with learning difficulties...
...and for the record, as an easger little beaver student I usually sat near the front of the class anyway.
Sorry for crankiness, just turned up to teach a session only to find that timetabling managed to double-book the room (in fact they neatly seem to have managed to have had our session erroneously booked in yesterday as well/instead of today for a different time slot). I am NOT a happy bunny....
Apologies to timetabling: it was, in fact, the dumbass lecturer who insisted they were in the right room (and had been for several weeks) that was in the wrong.
And the other booking: that's for later in the term.
Oops. Casting aspersions....
Casting them at me too, I'm afraid. I'm much too old to have been allowed to choose my seat in a classroom, or to share a room with the poor souls with "Learning Difficulty".
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