Recommend poetry to me?

[swan_tower]

So here’s the thing: I read very little (basically no) poetry. When I find a thing I like, I really like it . . . but the rest of it more or less bounces off my skull without leaving a mark. Result is that I don’t read much poetry, because the odds of me finding one of those things that will embed itself in my brain instead of poinging off my cranium are too low to make it worth the effort.

But! I have an internet at my disposal!

So those of you who are lovers of poetry: please recommend things to me that you think I would like. To assist in narrowing down that field, here are things I know I like in poetry:

* Narrative, because brain likey story.
* Aural devices, such as meter, rhyme, alliteration, and so forth. (With exceedingly rare exceptions, I bounce hardest of all off free verse.)
* Generally a darker mood; not sure why, but poems about how happy somebody is tend to draw less of my attention.
* Allusions to things I know about, be it mythology or pop culture or what have you.

I would also be interested in seeing the poetically-minded among you ramble on about why you like poetry: how you read it, what you think about when you consider a poem, etc. Theoretically we had a “poetry appreciation” segment in my high school English classes, but, well. High school.

I’ll put specific examples of what I like behind the cut, for space reasons.

I like “The Raven,” because it’s very aural; I like “Of the Awful Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles, Together with Some Account of the Participation of the Pugs and the Poms, and the Intervention of the Great Rumpus Cat” for the same reason, though that one’s pretty goofy. I appreciate a good classical Japanese haiku or tanka (uh, in translation; I don’t read well enough for the original), though I usually need footnotes to explain to me all the nuances — haiku and tanka are just about the only semi-decent poetry I’ve ever written, for which I blame credit the L5R game I’m running. To pick something more modern, I like Steven Eng’s “Storybooks and Treasure Maps.” I like Neil Gaiman’s “Instructions,” but mostly because I have a recording of him reading it; that doesn’t really register on me as poetry so much as a piece of interesting flash fiction.

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed — see here it is —
I hold it towards you.

I encountered this verse of Keats’ in Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, and it put shivers down my spine that have never gone away.

“And this is the word of Mary,
The word of the world’s desire:
‘No more of comfort shall ye get,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.'”

That’s from G.K. Chesterton’s Ballad of the White Horse, and again, it hits the “shivers down the spine” note for me — especially if I quoted the whole bit leading up to it, but I’m trying not to type up too much stuff here.

I should note that I’m leaving out Shakespeare’s blank verse, partly because Shakespeare, duh, and partly because the context of a play means I don’t relate to that stuff primarily as poetry.

(I’m also leaving out all Latin poetry because a lot of that relies on being able to tie your word order into knots.)

And if you’ve read this far — basically, the reason I’m posting this is because I’m still thinking thinky thoughts about description in prose, and I suspect my ability on that front might be improved by a greater poetic sensibility. Which I am unlikely to develop spontaneously, so I’m hoping that more extensive exposure to poetry will help me along . . . but to do that as anything other than a pointless chore, I need to find more poetry I like.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[okrablossom]

Carrie Jerrell's After the Revival [dark and musical]

Jenny Factor's Unraveling at the Name [musical, a little dark]

Richard Wilbur's Anterooms [musical, sometimes dark]

Mary Alexandra Agner's The Doors of the Body [sometimes dark, musical]

While not always musical nor always dark, I was greatly impressed by the poems in Raising Lilly Ledbetter, both for the huge range of poetic voices but also the range of topics.

[chomiji]

Maybe The Ballad of the Harp Weaver by Edna St. Vincent Millay?

Also, perhaps some of the longer portion of Housman's "A Shropshire Lad." For instance, LXII. Terence, this is stupid stuff (which is also wonderfully meta on the subject of poetry and why some subjects appeal to the writer, if not the reader).

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I love that bit of "A Shropshire Lad" and should have thought to include it in my list of poetry I like. :-D

[tipitiwitchet.livejournal.com]

Browning's My Last Duchess - dark story, sharply written, with loads of dark humor.

Dorothy Parker.  So witty.

Kim Addonizio. Modern and feminist.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Addonizio is new to me; I'll look her up. Parker I don't think I've ever read at any length above a brief quotation -- so she is eminently quotable, but I should look into what she says when she's using more than four lines. :-) Browning I like off and on. (Ditto the Romantics.)

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

"Ash Wednesday" by T.S. Eliot is one of my favorites. Sharp images, deep, deep resonance.

John Donne is acutely aware of human foibles, passions, and exalted states, and handles the language gorgeously.

Modern: my hands down favorite is "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver.

[cgbookcat1.livejournal.com]

Eliot also has some wonderful images in parts of his Four Quartets. I particularly like "Little Gidding."

Yes to the Mary Oliver!

[alessandriana.livejournal.com]

I would recommend absolutely everything by Edna St Vincent Millay (The Ballad of the Harp Weaver that chomiji recommended is a great place to start). I'm in your boat, I don't always like poetry, but I adore all of hers. Some other good ones: Elegy Before Death, Dirge Without Music, Journey.

Others:

On Death, Without Exaggeration by Wislawa Szymborska
The Old Astronomer to His Pupil by Sarah Williams
And Yet the Books by Czeslaw Milosz
A Wanderer's Song, John Masefield
Sea Fever, by John Masefield
Ode, Arthur O’Shaughnessy
THE FINAL CONNECTION, John M. Ford
Against Entropy, John M. Ford
The Explorer, Rudyard Kipling

[landofnowhere]

I am going to second the Edna St Vincent Millay recommendation.

[bloodstones.livejournal.com]

This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

If I were to describe my taste in poetry it wouldn't be that far from what you describe, but of my top 5 poems, this is the only one that really fits your criteria.

Two other favorites that don't fit your criteria at all (free verse), but have very powerful images are Tattered Kadish by Adrienne Rich (http://uwspoetry.blogspot.com/2007/05/three-poems-by-adrienne-rich.html) and Sex Without Love by Sharon Olds (http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/sharon_olds/poems/19521).

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

My criteria are not a straitjacket; they're just a way of saying "the odds are higher in this direction." The Keats poem I quoted has only meter going for it, of all the aspects I said I liked, and yet it's one of my favorite poems I've ever read.

Thanks for the links! I read all three of the Rich poems on that page, as well as the Olds; none of them were insta-love for me, but they gave me good things to think about.

[sovay]

To assist in narrowing down that field, here are things I know I like in poetry

I may not be able to help very much, because most of the English-language poets I like best (outside of some obvious and strong exceptions like Housman and Kipling) are more in the direction of free verse than formal poetry, but I'll send you a raft of poems when I get back to my apartment this afternoon and see if any of them stick.

(I don't keep a list of favorite poets. Usually I just glance at my bookshelves. My bookshelves are presently in storage, so this will be interesting.)

This is a diagnostic question rather than an ego-fluff: do you like my poetry? Because if so, that increases the chances that you'll enjoy some of the people I consider influences or who I think do similar things to my own work.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I would be very grateful for a raft of poems! (As noted above, I adore the "Terence, this is stupid stuff" portion of "A Shropshire Lad," though I'm not sure I've read much more Housman than that. It's another data point.)

My response to your poetry is similar to my response to a great many other poems, which is that I find individual turns of phrase beautiful, but the poem itself leaves me feeling like I'm sliding over the surface, never quite figuring out how to sink into it and see the shape the whole thing makes together.

(That is one of two failure modes of poetry for me. The other is where I read it and think, "there's no there there." A lot of poems fail to convince me there even is a shape that would be meaningful, if only I could figure out how to get inside it. Whether or not this is because those are all objectively bad poems, I don't feel qualified to speculate.)

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Question: what's the difference between poetry and song? Like a story-poem and a ballad?

Stuff I liked:

Tolkien (Gimli's chant in Moria, Galadriel's lament ("I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold, and leaves of gold their grew")

Poe's Annabel Lee

John Donne.

Andrew Marvell (To His Coy Mistress, The Garden)

I haven't plumbed them much, but Pope, Dryden, and Kipling seem promising.

Metrical translations of Homer, e.g. from Chapman, Pope, and Dryden, or later ones, likewise.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Question: what's the difference between poetry and song? Like a story-poem and a ballad?

As a general rule, I think poetry usually tries to be more verbally artful. I've read and/or heard enough ballads to know that many of them have meter and rhyme, but are not very good poetry. :-P

Having said that, I do share in the view that says song lyrics are a poetic form, one that obeys slightly different rules from the non-musical kind. And there are some damn good song lyrics out there, ones that would pass muster without the music (there's an Enter the Haggis song with the line "like ships we were made / to dance on our graves," which gives me a little shiver every time).

I am piling up the recs for future reading!

[landofnowhere]

Recommend poetry! This is a thing I can do!

I've had this anthology A Poem A Day since I was 12, and for several years as a teenager I would read it daily. Here are some recommendations, courtesy of my angsty teenage self:

(And see also this friends-only entry, which has a lot of overlap)

One Art, by Elizabeth Bishop (absolute favorite, villanelle, so highly structured, dark mood, tells a story. If you like the form, you should seek out other vilanelles. She also wrote "Casabianca", not to be confused with the earlier poem of the same name, which it references.)

Richard Cory, by Edwin Arlington Robinson (dark, has characterization nad story, memorable but not a favorite)
The opening to Endymion by Keats (the anthology cuts off after "from our dark spirits", which I think is about the right point to cut off before getting Keats overdose. The first line is a cliche now, but the bit that comes right after is great!)

The Way We Live, by Kathleen Jamie: modern, doesn't rhyme, but really fun to read aloud.

Accidents of Birth, by William Meredith: kind of similar to the above.

Archibald McLeash! Ars Poetica is the one in my anthology, and the one everyone knows, but I prefer "You, Andrew Marvell"

Gerard Manley Hopkins: a little hard to get into, because he uses alliteration more than rhyme, but much fun to read. Lots in the anthology, including "The Windhover", but "Spring and Fall" is the one that sticks with me most; it's actually a sonnet, also my grandfather loved it.

("Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; /And yet you wíll weep and know why.")

The book just fell open to "Harp-Song of the Dane Women" by Kipling, which I don't remember beyond the first line "What is a woman that you forsake her", but which you'd probably like.

Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold (I actually discovered this first by reading Fahrenheit 451). Deservedly famous, though I find the first verse a bit dull, but it increases in intensity as it goes.

William Butler Yeats: lots of stuff, but I'll suggest When You Are Old (translation of a longer poem).

[sovay]

The book just fell open to "Harp-Song of the Dane Women" by Kipling, which I don't remember beyond the first line "What is a woman that you forsake her", but which you'd probably like.

That's one of my favorites.

She has no strong white arms to fold you,
But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you—
Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I second the general recs A. E. Housman, also definitely "My Last Duchess." You might also like John Donne.

A few specific recs; these aren't all narrative, exactly, but they're at least about specific things. I picked them because they rhyme and they have (for me) that "shiver down my spine" quality that comes from a combination of the meaning and the language. I think a lot of my favorite poems don't rhyme and/or don't tell stories, so I will think more about some that do both.

Thomas Nashe, "A Litany in Time of Plague."
http://www.bartleby.com/101/167.html

William Ernest Henley, "Invictus."
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/51642

Housman, "To an Athlete Dying Young."
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/46452

Millay, "Recuerdo." https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/14404

W. H. Auden, "Stop All the Clocks": http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/auden.stop.html

ETA: And I can talk about why I like these, but it would probably make more sense if you've already read them. Let me know if you read any and I'll explain why I like it. These are all fairly short.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I've read them all, and would love to hear your thoughts on as many as you feel like discussing. I thought they all were fine, but the only one that particularly made a mark on me was "Stop All the Clocks," in its second half.

Rhyme and/or story are not essential, btw. I am still interested in poems that don't fit those criteria.

[geminiwench.livejournal.com]

I am going to throw up some poetry performances that might be inspiring. I know my main trouble with poetry is that I must be in the right place in my mind, the right place in my heart, to open myself up to poetry sometimes... or especially to specific poems. However, I find live performances will draw you to the moment, their personal cadence will drag you under, and the writer resonating with their abstractions and trying to shake you too... most can tumble you deep until you forget to look for a way out and you simply stop breathing air and start soaking in pure truth.

Buddy Wakefield - "Hurling Crowbirds at Mockingbars"
Poem starts at just after 2 min. mark
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9wUoVhdN0A

Gemineye - "Penny for your Thoughts"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCmnTUGPdXA

Mary Lambert - "I Know Girls"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7tlFfKCESg
She is a singer, songwriter, and she is a poet... this is a poetry piece while she accompanies herself on piano,.. no a song, but nearly sounds like one.

Josh Ritter - "Thin Blue Flame"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mcy9qdmca3E
Josh is also a singer, songwriter, and a poet. His novel "Bright's Passage" is full of WONDERFUL prose. This video is a song,(song starts a little after 1 min) but it is also one of the most beautiful pieces of poetry full of serious truth about war, about the war that gets brought home, and what in the world god may (or may not) have to do with war in general. There are so many evocative landscape lines,.. "trees were a fist shaking themselves at the clouds" "the lake was a diamond in the valley's hand" and from there it falls into a world of feeling and fighting.

Joanna Newsom - "Monkey Bear"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thAunSuinVc
Joanna is a songstress unlike anything you've ever heard. I cannot tell you how much I LOVE Newsom. I have been listening to her for 7 or 8 years and.... she just gets better and better, and her in concert? Mind = blown. Also, you said you like narratives.. and she does WONDERFUL narrative stories set to music. Please try her. If you want to hear more.. try the songs "Book of Right-On" and "Emily" after that.. listen to the whole "Have One On Me" album because O SO GOOD!! She does not write songs in the normal Western-style ballad, she does verse compositions.

I read St. Vincet Millay because SHE IS WONDERFUL, but I also have a deep love of Tennyson, and I recently discovered a book of poetry by Ray Bradbury "When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" which is SO WONDERFUL and mostly about memory. He was such a smooth writer, that reading his verse felt like reading his books, and only on inspection you can see it is actually a very strict set of rhyming verse but its so smooth, the cadence comes out totally natural. No forcing. I love reading Rumi (of course!) and also have a few books of James Whitcomb Riley's work. I've had some tastes of James Baldwin which I enjoyed *a lot* and especially like picking up and browsing "Poetry in Praise of Practically Nothing" by Samuel Hoffenstein, because I like his impudence and humor.

I like audio, and there is a great free recording from librivox of Tennyson's "Idylls of the King" which makes me cry at the end EVERY TIME! Its a good 40+ minutes long and SO worth it!

If you like reading prose (and not just poetry) if you haven't already tried Nabokov, please do. NOT "Lolita"... but "Pale Fire" is HILARIOUS and so is "Invitation to a Beheading" which was my first introduction to his writing and made me fall in love with his sense for words and cadence. O god. So good. I am re-reading "Invitation..." right now and it is even BETTER than I remembered... LOVE this book. So DAMN good.

[brooksmoses]

Have you read Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate?

It's ... well, it's not typical poetry, because it's at novel length, but it's also sonnet-form stanzas. And it's sort of a "literature"-genre story, about Silicon Valley, and kind of about bittersweetness of relationships changing as life happens. So, by the numbers, it pegs the meter on three of your four criteria and seems reasonably good on the last.

I quite like it, but I also know a number of people who've bounced off of it. (I'm not entirely sure I know anyone else who's liked it, come to think of it!) In any case, if it works for you it might be an interesting middle ground between prose and poetry for description, since it's doing poetic descriptions but the larger structure is prose-like.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Also Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, if you find a verse translation of it. I think Douglas Hofstadter did one.

[difrancis.livejournal.com]

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh. Novel length poem narrative. Very good. Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Patti White is contemporary and I love her Tackle Box collection. Several good narrative poems there. Highly recommended. Robert Browning, just about anything. Most of his stuff is narrative. My Last Duchess is one of my favorites. Short, but really twisty and dark. Yeats' Easter 1916. Wilfred Owens--poetry from WWI. Oh, and this is amazing: http://www.foothillspublishing.com/2013/id67.htm

[difrancis.livejournal.com]

Oh, and Tennyson's Ulysses. And The Lotus Eaters. Love those.

[mojave-wolf.livejournal.com]

All the people I thought of off the top of my head are people I can't imagine you haven't already read, but if you've actively avoided poetry in the past maybe you somehow managed to miss these, or read them when you were very young and might appreciate more now? Keeping in mind that much as I USED to love reading poetry, my last big time poetry reading kick was in the previous century ...

Keats was one of the first two people I thought of, and the one I thought you most likely to enjoy, but you already covered him, and I assume you read La Belle Dame sans Merci? That's a hella narrative if not.

The other I thought of right away was Byron, less sure you'd like him. My favorite Byron poems tended more toward the lyrical and less the narrative, but Don Juan is totally narrative and very structured; more witty than dark tho and very long.

Of the next batch of people, a couple of people already got Kipling, which leaves me with ...

Remember I said "long"? Milton is totally narrative, incredibly high quality, but wow long. My only issue with him is just how long, and I LOVE his writing. Paradise Lost is something you'll wanna read in small doses rather than trying to get through the whole thing, but Samson Agonistes is something you can knock back in a fairly quick sitting iirc and also very good.

William Blake has a lot of beautiful stuff that might suit what you are looking for better than anyone else I've named.

And Coleridge. Very much Coleridge.

I know this is a lot of old traditional stuff, but thus with the narrative and what is typically thought of as structure. Plath is ultra dark, has narrative, and structure but hmmmmm, maybe shoulda recommended more of her and some other mid century people? She's one of my favorites and does at least sorta fit your bill but for some reason worried you might bounce off her.

Ranking that last group in best guess

[mojave-wolf.livejournal.com]

Tier 1
Blake, Coleridge, Milton (and La Belle Dame sans Merci by Keats that has narrative and should be just your thing but I can't imagine you haven't read it already)

Tier 2
The completely nothing like each other at all Kipling & Plath

Tier 3
Byron (you might love some of his shorter, non-narrative stuff but I think you'll hate Don Juan, narrative and all)

[xahra99.livejournal.com]

Not a massive fan of poetry, but I do like short fiction. Started reading the e-zine Goblin Fruit 'cause I'm a fan of Amal El-Mohtar, and here are a couple of good ones. Not much narrative, but dark and fantasy-y.

'Kites', by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
She drags the dragon through the setting sun.
It parts the orange ocean with its claws.
There is no string. She wields the beast, the run
of tail over the water silk, by caw:
a song to summon spirits from the dirt.
Her voice stampedes the murmur of black veins
that plead us please fill raw this earth.
With shivering gold wings, the dragon tames
a brewing war stuck deep in belly's gut.
Silent are all who watch her trick the wind.
They cannot smile or grin or laugh or cut
a word from blocks of words or mend
their longing to fly high as kites. They puff
their pipes while she, so far from them, smokes night.

and 'Exauguratio' by Sonia Taafe
Do not come back, your face a moire of shadows
from furry-winged gulls, your fingers clutching my ankles
with last week's news and tumbling chip wrappers,
telling me in the conversations of strangers
here you are still, awaiting me.
Do not wake me rapping the windows
with wayward crows, tousle my hair
with a passing train, rearrange graffiti
like milk bottles upon my doorstep
I loved this city before you stole its skin
signed every window with the wild scrawl of your pride.
Do not come here, pretending to centuries
before we missed buses, built bookshelves, dyed our hair.
This place's heart is stronger than your breaking.
These streets know you are not their only dead.

...and there's always 'Against Entropy' by John M Ford.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

Rather than reading single poems in a scattershot manner, I recommend you pick up a book by a single author. From what you've listed, I recommend Robert Frost, and in particular the collections "A Boy's Will" and "North of Boston". I have them both in an edition called, cleverly, "Poems by Robert Frost".

For specific poems in the volume, take a look at "The Death of the Hired Man." I'm sure you've heard the saying "Home is the place where they have to take you in." It's taken from this poem, where the line actually is "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." Think about that for a moment, and read the poem.

I also like "Mending Wall", though that might be more for the take off of it that a friend wrote called "Ending Mall" ("there's something in nature that doesn't love a mall"), but either way it's worth reading.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

We happen to own a book that is the complete poetry of Robert Frost, so on a whim, I just picked that up and read all the poems from "A Boy's Will." Of them, I liked "Into His Own" (the middle sagged for me, but I appreciated the ending) and "The Demiurge's Laugh" (stronger in the middle than at the end, that time). The rest . . . a lot of those poems are pastoral, if that's the correct word for a poem that's mostly about evoking the natural world or the seasons or something in that vein. He does a very nice job of evoking it, and when I'm done reading the poem I shrug and move on. I admire the vivid detail, but I feel no compulsion to revisit any poem of that type. Which always leaves me wondering if I missed something.

But I'll continue on into "North of Boston" and see what I think.

I am so, so sorry to keep spamming this comment thread

[mojave-wolf.livejournal.com]

Many, many apologies. My brain just keeps re-triggering on poetry related stuff and different parts of the thread/post for some reason. I promise to stop after this one.

Why I love poetry (even if I'd mostly quit reading it for the last decade or so, and haven't been really immersed in it for even longer) -- the state of mind it puts me in / what it makes me think of. Emotional evocation. Resonance. Sense of wonder. All these things. Which could probably all be applied to every single form of art, now I think on it. They just do it in different ways. You have now inspired me to go back and hunt up books by Plath, Yeats, the romantics in general (i.e. the aforementioned Blake (Tyger tyger burning bright" & all that), Byron (So We'll Go No More A-Roving etc) & Coleridge (Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan) plus Shelley & some others).

Auden sounds like a good call too. You might appreciate him & Yeats (The Second Coming his best known and probably his best & should appeal to fantasists) as well. Maybe Bishop & Merwin, since you liked Rich (which would be a good sign for Plath as well, tho she's a little ... well, you said dark was good; try Lady Lazarus, or Daddy, or Ariel; all those are incredible).

Gah, I used to love all this stuff and I'm trying to push you towards it just from the impressionistic memory, so that's a good sign it's worth checking out again, at least for me. =)

Re: I am so, so sorry to keep spamming this comment thread

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

No need to apologize! I asked for recs and thoughts; I am delighted to receive them.

I should have said up front that the Romantics are more often my speed than other poetic movements. Still more miss than hit, but more hits than I usually get. I should revisit Byron now that I'm not speed-reading his collected poetry in search of a title (for the short story that wound up being "To Rise No More" (http://www.swantower.com/writing/to-rise-no-more/)).

Because I mentioned it in a comment above: I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about the kind of poem whose purpose seems to purely be the evocation of the natural world or something to that effect. Those are among the type where I say "good job describing that thing, it sure was vivid" and then move on with my life -- and I'm never quite sure if I'm supposed to get more out of it. I don't imagine all those poems are actually deep metaphors for something more complicated, but on the other hand I get the impression that people who are fans of that kind of thing will revisit them with pleasure, whereas I feel no compulsion to do that whatsoever.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

Oh, and for a completely different kind of poem, Shel Silverstein's "Where the Sidewalk Ends" and "A Light in the Attic" is a hilarious set of off-beat children's poems.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I love Shel Silverstein, but I definitely put him in a different mental box (the same one "Of the Awful Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles" goes in, more or less).

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

And this is my last suggestion, but two of my all-time favorite poems ever are by John M. Ford:

"Against Entropy" (mentioned above)

"110 Stories" (this one will make you cry)

I don't think you'll forget either of these two, once you've read them.

[between4walls.livejournal.com]

If you liked Chesterton's The Ballad of the White Horse, you might also like his Lepanto, though that's not dark. But it has a few shivery moments. "We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under the sun/Of sorrow and of knowledge and endurance of things done."

Yeats uses lots of aural devices and is quite dark in his way- one with (a little bit of) story is Adam's Curse. Also his On a Political Prisoner.

Byron's "The Vision of Judgment" is a narrative, rhyming poem about George III at the pearly gates, satirizing the sycophantic tributes at his death. It's wonderful, generous and liberal. Here's my favorite bit:

""God save the king!" It is a large economy
In God to save the like; but if he will
Be saving, all the better; for not one am I
Of those who think damnation better still:
I hardly know too if not quite alone am I
In this small hope of bettering future ill
By circumscribing, with some slight restriction,
The eternity of Hell's hot jurisdiction."


Narrative, rhyming-- Longfellow's The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.

Also Marlowe's Hero and Leander-- heroic couplets, about young lust, cheerful but with an undertone of darkness.

Furthermore, I think the Elizabethan/Jacobean play are very helpful for poetic description, even though you put Shakespeare in a separate category. I especially recommend John Webster's Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil-- he really has a way with metaphor and poetic diction. Plus, strong female characters.

[carbonel]

I like poems that rhyme and tell a story, but I'll read just about anything by Jo Walton and John M. Ford. Jo has a poetry page here: http://www.jowaltonbooks.com/poetry/

Annoyingly, though, you can't tell from the title if the poem is actually available on the website or only listed. Or at least that's what I encountered.

My favorite Donne poem is "Song: Go and catch a falling star," which can be found here and zillions of other places:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44127

I also have a sneaking fondness for James Whitcombe Riley's "Little Orphant Annie," probably because my favorite substitute teacher spent a class on it when I was in grade school:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Orphant_Annie

And for story poems, there's always "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes, though I want to nitpick the plot -- how can you tie a gun to someone's breast in a way that will stay put?
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/43187

[aishabintjamil.livejournal.com]

I can't resist this one. The thing I love about poetry is the rhythm, the way the words seem to follow inevitably after one another. I could sit here recommending things all night, but I'll try to hit some highlights.

While he's not politically correct, I think Kipling hits a lot of your criteria. I think you might particularly enjoy a piece called "The Last Rhyme of True Thomas" (http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/last_rhyme_of_true_thomas.html). I also recommend The Fairies Siege (http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/fairies_siege.html).

Since you mentioned liking darker topics, I think you might enjoy Robert E. Howard's verse. There's a selection available on-line here. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Robert_Ervin_Howard/Poetry

W. B. Yeats has some poems with lovely rhythm. I'm particularly partial to "Into the Twilight", "Easter 1916" and "Red Hanrahan's Song About Ireland".

Robert W. Service wrote a lot of narrative poems, mostly either about life in the Yukon territories, or about World War I. His style is similar to Kipling's. I discovered him at 9 or 10 via a collection my grandfather owned. My mother promptly took it away from me and hid it when she found me happily memorizing a gruesome little balled called "The Cremation of Sam McGee".

Another somewhat obscure favorite of mine is Fiona MacLeod. Fiona was a pseudonym of William Sharp, but the styles of the work he published under his own name and the work under hers are very distinctive. The FM material is very Celtic in content and viewpoint. You can find a selection of them on-line here; http://www.sundown.pair.com/SundownShores/Volume_VII/contents.htm. I think you might particularly enjoy one called "The Bugles of Dreamland". http://www.sundown.pair.com/SundownShores/HillsofDream/poems.htm#THE%20BUGLES%20OF%20DREAMLAND.

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting this, as it's such a relief to find I'm not alone in my difficulty connecting with poetry. That being said, I've found that John Donne, George Herbert and especially Gerard Manley Hopkins hit me right between the eyes -- but a lot of that connection for me is not merely verbal but spiritual, so they may or may not work the same way for you.

On a more modern note, Erin Bow (author of The Scorpion Rules) was a published poet before she became a YA author, and she's written some amazing stuff here on her website.

[mojave-wolf.livejournal.com]

Not Swan Tower, but ...

One does NOT have to be a Christian to appreciate Hopkins. =)

Donne never worked for me, tho maybe should retry. Herbert I don't recall ever reading.