Over Christmas I had the chance to grab coffee with my most literary of friends and we got to talking poetry. Specifically, my lack of knowledge about it due to a high school curriculum that consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s poorer plays and witless rhyming couplets.
I said that I’m willing to give it a second chance, but that I had absolutely no idea where to begin. This led to a slew of recommendations that I’ve decided to share with the interpipes community.
So here, without further ado, is a selection of recommended poems. Before sharing them though, a note on how to read them. JB recommends the following three rules to get the most out of each poem:
- Read them out loud
- Read slowly
- Follow the punctuation, not the line breaks. If there’s a line break, don’t stop: keep going until the next comma or period
Here are the poems:
Philip Larkin
High Windows
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Break
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Like an outdated combine harvester,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
Break
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
Break
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
Break
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.
Sad Steps
Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.
Break
Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
There’s something laughable about this,
Break
The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)
Break
High and preposterous and separate –
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,
Break
One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare
Break
Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can’t come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.
Toads
Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?
Break
Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison –
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion.
Break
Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts-
They don’t end as paupers;
Break
Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-
they seem to like it.
Break
Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets – and yet
No one actually starves.
Break
Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:
Break
For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,
Break
And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.
Break
I don’t say, one bodies the other
One’s spiritual truth;
But I do say it’s hard to lose either,
When you have both.
Break
Annus Mirabilis
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Break
Up to then there’d only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.
Break
Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.
Break
So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Edna St-Vincent Millay
I Shall Forget You Presently, My Dear
I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favorite vow.
Break
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And oaths were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far,—
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.
Intention To Escape From Him
I think I will learn some beautiful language, useless for commercial
Purposes, work hard at that.
I think I will learn the Latin name of every songbird, not only in
America but wherever they sing.
(Shun meditation, though; invite the controversial:
Is the world flat? Do bats eat cats?) By digging hard I might
deflect that river, my mind, that uncontrollable thing,
Turgid and yellow, srong to overflow its banks in spring,
carrying away bridges
A bed of pebbles now, through which there trickles one clear
narrow stream, following a course henceforth nefast—
Break
Dig, dig; and if I come to ledges, blast.
Leonard Cohen
What I’m doing here
I do not know if the world has lied
I have lied
I do not know if the world has conspired against love
I have conspired against love
The atmosphere of torture is no comfort
I have tortured
Even without the mushroom cloud
still I would have hated
Listen
I would have done the same things
even if there were no death
I will not be held like a drunkard
under the cold tap of facts
I refuse the universal alibi
Break
Like an empty telephone booth passed at night
and remembered
like mirrors in a movie palace lobby consulted
only on the way out
like a nymphomaniac who binds a thousand
into strange brotherhood
I wait
for each one of you to confess
E.E. Cummings
Look at this
look at this)
a 75 done
this nobody would
have believed
would they no
kidding this was my particular
Break
pal
funny aint
it we was
buddies
i used to
Break
know
him lift the
poor cuss
tenderly this side up handle
Break
with care
fragile
and send him home
Break
to his old mother in
a new nice pine box
Break
(collect
Kitty, Sixteen, 5’11”, White, Prostitute
“kitty”. sixteen, 5′ 11″, white, prostitute.
Break
ducking always the touch of must and shall,
whose slippery body is Death’s littlest pal,
Break
Break
skilled in quick softness. Unspontaneous. cute.
Break
Break
the signal perfume of whose unrepute
focusses in the sweet slow animal
bottomless eyes importantly banal,
Break
Break
Kitty. a whore. Sixteen
you corking brute
amused from time to time by clever drolls
fearsomely who do keep their sunday flower.
The babybreasted broad “kitty” twice eight
Break
Break
–beer nothing, the lady’ll have a whiskey-sour–
Break
Break
whose least amazing smile is the most great
common divisor of unequal souls.
Elizabeth Bishop
Filling Station
Oh, but it is dirty!
–this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!
Break
Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it’s a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.
Break
Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.
Break
Some comic books provide
the only note of color–
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.
Break
Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)
Break
Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO–SO–SO–SO
Break
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.
Thomas Hardy
In The Cemetery
“You see those mothers squabbling there?”
Remarks the man of the cemetery.
“One says in tears, ”Tis mine lies here!’
Another, ‘Nay, mine, you Pharisee!’
Another, ‘How dare you move my flowers
And put your own on this grave of ours!’
But all their children were laid therein
At different times, like sprats in a tin.
“And then the main drain had to cross,
And we moved the lot some nights ago,
And packed them away in the general foss
With hundreds more. But their folks don’t know,
And as well cry over a new-laid drain
As anything else, to ease your pain!”
Margaret Atwood
This Is A Photograph Of Me
It was taken some time ago
At first it seems to be
a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flecks
blended with the paper;
Break
then, as you scan
it, you can see something in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.
Break
In the background there is a lake,
and beyond that, some low hills.
Break
(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned.
Break
I am in the lake, in the center
of the picture, just under the surface.
Break
It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or how small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion.
Break
but if you look long enough
eventually
you will see me.)
P.K. Page
Deaf-Mute In A Pear Tree
His clumsy body is a golden fruit
pendulous in the pear tree
Break
Blunt fingers among the multitudinous buds
Break
Adriatic blue the sky above and through
the forking twigs
Break
Sun ruddying tree’s trunk, his trunk
his massive head thick-knobbed with burnished curls
tight-clenched in bud
Break
(Painting by Generalic. Primitive.)
Break
I watch him prune with silent secateurs
Break
Boots in the crotch of branches shift their weight
heavily as oxen in a stall
Break
Hear small inarticulate mews from his locked mouth
a kitten in a box
Break
Pear clippings fall
soundlessly on the ground
Spring finches sing
soundlessly in the leaves
Break
Break
A stone. A stone in ears and on his tongue
Break
Through palm and fingertip he knows the tree’s
quick springtime pulse
Break
Smells in its sap the sweet incipient pears
Break
Pale sunlight’s choppy water glistens on
his mutely snipping blades
Break
and flags and scraps of blue
above him make regatta of the day
Break
But when he sees his wife’s foreshortened shape
sudden and silent in the grass below
uptilt its face to him
Break
then air is kisses, kisses
Break
stone dissolves
Break
his locked throat finds a little door
Break
and through it feathered joy
flies screaming like a jay
Charles Bukowski
History Of A Tough Motherfucker
he came to the door one night wet thin beaten and
terrorized
a white cross-eyed tailless cat
I took him in and fed him and he stayed
grew to trust me until a friend drove up the driveway
and ran him over
I took what was left to a vet who said,”not much
chance…give him these pills…his backbone
is crushed, but is was crushed before and somehow
mended, if he lives he’ll never walk, look at
these x-rays, he’s been shot, look here, the pellets
are still there…also, he once had a tail, somebody
cut it off…”
I took the cat back, it was a hot summer, one of the
hottest in decades, I put him on the bathroom
floor, gave him water and pills, he wouldn’t eat, he
wouldn’t touch the water, I dipped my finger into it
and wet his mouth and I talked to him, I didn’t go any-
where, I put in a lot of bathroom time and talked to
him and gently touched him and he looked back at
me with those pale blue crossed eyes and as the days went
by he made his first move
dragging himself forward by his front legs
(the rear ones wouldn’t work)
he made it to the litter box
crawled over and in,
it was like the trumpet of possible victory
blowing in that bathroom and into the city, I
related to that cat-I’d had it bad, not that
bad but bad enough
one morning he got up, stood up, fell back down and
just looked at me.
“you can make it,” I said to him.
he kept trying, getting up falling down, finally
he walked a few steps, he was like a drunk, the
rear legs just didn’t want to do it and he fell again, rested,
then got up.
you know the rest: now he’s better than ever, cross-eyed
almost toothless, but the grace is back, and that look in
his eyes never left…
and now sometimes I’m interviewed, they want to hear about
life and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed,
shot, runover de-tailed cat and I say,”look, look
at this!”
but they don’t understand, they say something like,”you
say you’ve been influenced by Celine?”
“no,” I hold the cat up,”by what happens, by
things like this, by this, by this!”
I shake the cat, hold him up in
the smoky and drunken light, he’s relaxed he knows…
it’s then that the interviews end
although I am proud sometimes when I see the pictures
later and there I am and there is the cat and we are photo-
graphed together.
he too knows it’s bullshit but that somehow it all helps.
Update: my second most literate friend has sent me another great poem that needs to be added to this post:
Thomas Kinsella
Mirror in February
The day dawns, with scent of must and rain,
Of opened soil, dark trees, dry bedroom air.
Under the fading lamp, half dressed — my brain
Idling on some compulsive fantasy —
I towel my shaven jaw and stop, and stare,
Riveted by a dark exhausted eye,
A dry downturning mouth.
Break
It seems again that it is time to learn,
In this untiring, crumbling place of growth
To which, for the time being, I return.
Now plainly in the mirror of my soul
I read that I have looked my last on youth
And little more; for they are not made whole
That reach the age of Christ.
Break
Below my window the wakening trees,
Hacked clean for better bearing, stand defaced
Suffering their brute necessities;
And how should the flesh not quail, that span for span
Is mutilated more? In slow distaste
I fold my towel with what grace I can,
Not young, and not renewable, but man.