Who's the greatest American poet?

[Arkham House]

Poll question: Who's the greatest American poet?

For purposes of this poll, I am *not* including T.S. Eliot, who is hereby regarded as "British"...and my vote goes to Frost...

[RetroLounge]

1. Other

Dr. Seuss is the best...

RL

[miss_american_pie]

2. ...

:spank:

[RetroLounge]

5. Thank you ma'am

may I have another?

RL

[miss_american_pie]

8. No

:P

[RetroLounge]

9. Tease

:9

RL

[1monster]

22. Naw. Ogden Nash

THE DUCK

Behold the duck.
It does not cluck.
A cluck it lacks'
It quacks.
It is especially fond
Of a puddle or a pond.
And when it sups,
Its bottom ups.


THE TERMITE

Some primal termite knocked on wood
And tasted it and found it good.
And that is why your Cousin May
Fell through the parlor floor today.


THE PERFECT HUSBAND

He tells you when you have too much lipstick
And helps you with your girdle when your hipsstick.


THE PANTHER

The panther is like the leopard
Except it hasn't been peppered.
Should you behold a panther crouch
Prepare to say ouch
Better yet, if called by a panther
Don't anther.


THE TREE
I think that I shall never see
A billborad lovely as a tree.
Indeed unless the billboard fall
I'll never see a tree at all.


CELERY

Celery raw
Developes the jaw.
Celery stewed
Is more quietly chewed.


From THE PEOPLE UPSTAIRS

I might love the people upstairs wonderous
If, instead of above us, they just lived underus.

I rest my case. :D

[RetroLounge]

81. I found a copy of his book, The Zoo, recently

It totally rocks!

RL

[Arugula Latte]

88. I think he also wrote: "Candy is dandy. But liquor is quicker."

:D

[JVS]

3. Uncle Shelby!

[RetroLounge]

82. Yes, he was brilliant...

:hi:

RL

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

4. Tupac Shakur.

Prove me wrong, busters.

[JVS]

Luther Campbell aka Luke Skywalker was better than him

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

72. ...

:rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:

Proof is unnecessary. Completely and totally unnecessary. :rofl:

[Road Scholar]

6. Frost. Too easy.

[alcibiades_mystery]

12. Ugh

And that's all I'll say about that.

[SOteric]

7. Where are Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder?

:shrug:

[Arkham House]

10. Or Hart Crane, or Williams, or Longfellow, or Anne Sexton...

...or Sylvia Plath, or Sandberg, or whomever...the four guys I mentioned are the ones who seem to be the summit of critical acclaim...

[tigereye]

85. thank you!

just what I was thinking...

and Diane de Prima....

[Wetzelbill]

11. I am surprised to find I do not have a favorite....

I love poems and so on, but I can't think of one poet who is my absolute favorite. Maybe James Welch. Sherwin Bitsui. Joy Harjo. Luci Tapahonso. People like that, but they wouldn't qualify as the greatest American poet.

I love Pablo Neruda, Tennyson, Dylan Thomas, Lorca.. lots of foreign poets.

Yeah, I think it would be hypocritical of me to pretend I think "one" American poet is the best just on a quick judgement. I would have to look into it a lot more. Bukowski is awesome, but his poetry is a little different, I wouldn't categorize him as a gorgeous poet, just an unbelievably interesting one.

Frost is great though. "Stopping By the Woods On A Snowy Evening" is some top-notch work.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

13. Of those listed, I like Walt Whitman the best......

Though the others are all in second place!

It is hard to decide...

Plus, I adore ee cummings.....


:hi:

[tinfoilinfor2005]

15. I'm with you Miss Peggy,

O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart! 5
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

etc. etc.

Always gets to me!

[miss_american_pie]

14. Other: Ezra

Since you ruled out Eliot.

[Merrick]

16. Bukowski

I'll take the Buk over some asshole carrying on about snowy meadows and dew drops any day.

[StellaBlue]

17. I chose Frost, with difficulties.

GREAT list.

Thinking of our cultural output is the only thing that really makes me proud of America anymore.

Robert Frost. Rock 'n roll. Blue jeans.

[zanne]

66. You beat me to it, StellaBlue.

I would just add Blues and Jazz to the abbreviated list. I also wonder who will be considered as the greatest poets of the second half of the 20th century. And, if our hopes and prayers matter at all, who will be a great poet in the 21st century? Will there be any, or will we have wasted all our talented young poets on TV commercials? Do you think American culture will continue to produce wonderful poets, musicians and artists, or is it the end of an era?

[Spider Jerusalem]

18. Ezra Pound...

or maybe WH Auden (who can be regarded as 'American' for illogical reasons that make as much sense as whatever your reasons for deciding Eliot counts as 'British' are).

[otherlander]

19. Sorry, Emily....I was going to vote for you...

I really was. I mean, I LOVE your style of writing and the whole thing about death as peace...but somebody's gotta stick up for Langston.

Oh, silver tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!
In a Harlem cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.
A dancing girl whose eyes are bold
Lifts high a dress of silken gold.
Oh, singing tree!
Oh, shining rivers of the soul!
Were Eve's eyes
In the first garden
Just a bit too bold?
Was Cleopatra gorgeous
In a gown of gold?
Oh, shining tree!
Oh, silver rivers of the soul!
In a whirling cabaret
Six long-headed jazzers play.


:smoke::smoke::loveya::smoke::smoke:
:woohoo:

[txwhitedove]

20. Other, not on list ... e e cummings

Tumbling-hair:

Tumbling-hair
picker of buttercups
violets
dandelions
And the big bullying daisies
through the field wonderful
with eyes a little sorry
Another comes
also picking flowers

[Merrick]

21. Steven Jesse Bernstein

no longer with us - stabbed himself in the neck. Now that's a real poet.

[EFerrari]

23. Ezra Pound. Hard choices, though.

:)

[idgiehkt]

24. GWENDOLYN BROOKS!

Hands down!


From "The Lovers of the Poor"
"...Mantels, and hostess gowns, and sunburst clocks,
Turtle soup, Chippendale, red satin "hangings,"
Aubussons and Hattie Carnegie. They Winter
In Palm Beach; cross the Water in June; attend,
When suitable, the nice Art Institute;
Buy the right books in the best bindings; saunter
On Michigan, Easter mornings, in sun or wind.
Oh Squalor! This sick four-story hulk, this fibre
With fissures everywhere! Why, what are bringings
Of loathe-love largesse? What shall peril hungers
So old old, what shall flatter the desolate?
Tin can, blocked fire escape and chitterling
And swaggering seeking youth and the puzzled wreckage
Of the middle passage, and urine and stale shames
And, again, the porridges of the underslung
And children children children. Heavens! That
Was a rat, surely, off there, in the shadows? Long
And long-tailed? Gray? The Ladies from the Ladies'
Betterment League agree it will be better
To achieve the outer air that rights and steadies,
To hie to a house that does not holler, to ring
Bells elsetime, better presently to cater
To no more Possibilities, to get
Away. Perhaps the money can be posted.
Perhaps they two may choose another Slum!
Some serious sooty half-unhappy home!--
Where loathe-lover likelier may be invested.
Keeping their scented bodies in the center
Of the hall as they walk down the hysterical hall,
They allow their lovely skirts to graze no wall,
Are off at what they manage of a canter,
And, resuming all the clues of what they were,
Try to avoid inhaling the laden air."

[BlueIris]

44. Abortions will not let you forget.

You remember the children you got that you did not get.
The small damp pulps with little or no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence, or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb,
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim, killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness, I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?--
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled, or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.

"the mother," A Street in Bronzeville, 1945

[tigereye]

87. isn't she great?

sadly, people tend to forget about her and Nikki Giovanni, when they shouldn't.

[Dangerously Amused]

25. RetroLounge.

Like, DUH!

[Wetzelbill]

43. and I thought I was your favorite

this is for you. The prettiest one I have. :(

Emerald sails freely in the blue-green sea
While I lie awash in the wave’s foaming
crest. Lulling, basking, dreaming that Marx
does not matter. Was not raining in my ears.
Ahead there is illumination. Bright. Golden
Blinding. Flashing brilliant rainbows. Green.
Blue. Red. Yellow. Black. Each one shimmering
in thrall. “Liberation is a historical and not a
mental act” both she and Marx say. This makes
me long for freedom. Liberty from gorgeous
colors. From this wave’s flashing tidal pull.
Ebbing constantly. Continuously. Endlessly.
Etched, scorched into my mind. Sometimes I
believe turquoise is the color of Goddesses.

Sometimes I wish to be springtime holding
close the emerald beauty of this world.

[Dangerously Amused]

45. I do adore your poems, dear,

...but honestly it is your prose that really captures my heart.


You have a way of unveiling the poignancy that others miss in everyday moments. I thought your dream story last night was amazing. I loved it, and I wrote to tell you so, too... sadly my words of admiration disappeared into the ether...


And thank you for that lovely poem with such stunning visuals. I will have most excellent dreams tonight for sure...


:loveya:

[Wetzelbill]

91. well that's for the best

I typically hate my poetry anyway, but usually like my prose. :)

Yeah I woke up and my dream thread was gone. I have no clue what happened. :)

[tigereye]

89. that's very nice Bill

beauty and Marx.

[Wetzelbill]

92. yeah I was in a lecture

about Marx at the time I wrote it. Sitting next to a beautiful woman. :) She had a turquoise ring on so I told her I would write a poem for her with the word "turquoise" in it. So there you go. :)

[RetroLounge]

83. ...

:blush::blush::blush::blush:

RL

[aaronbees]

26. Elizabeth Bishop

Such a tough call between her and Walt Whitman for me ... but she's the master of controlled emotion.

"One Art"
by Elizabeth Bishop


The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.


--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

[idgiehkt]

27. Bravo!

thanks for posting that.

[aaronbees]

36. That Gwendolyn Brooks poem is wonderful, too....

Her poems remind me so much of Chicago neighborhoods and her lines are so muscular and jammed with great imagery; she is so underrated.

[momophile]

28. Mason Williams

I've loved him since I was a kid.

[5thGenDemocrat]

29. Theodore Roethke

Maybe not the greatest (I doubt he'll win in this poll), but he's one of the best and, better, is probably the most famous graduate of my old high school (Saginaw (MI) Arthur Hill).
John
FUN FACT: Just about all of Emily Dickinson's poems can be sung to "The Yellow Rose of Texas."

[6000eliot]

30. A tie: Whitman and Dickinson

[Rowdyboy]

52. Wish I'd seen your post before mine (see #51) Whitman/Dickenson

is my choice too. My favorite of her works is VERY passionate...

"Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port,
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!"

[swag]

31. Can't say at all.

Poetry is too elastic and boundless to be another hundred yard dash.

[saltpoint]

34. Especially when it is described as ably as it is in your post, swag.

Very nice. Thank you.

[swag]

75. Glad you liked it, but I feel like a bit of a pedantic ass having posted

that.

No disrespect intended to the original poster, who started an enjoyable thread, or to anybody who thinks there is a greatest American poet.

Good to see you as usual, Old Crusoe.

[blondeatlast]

37. Wish I'd said that, but you are spot-on. nt

[Rabrrrrrr]

32. Edgar Allen Poe

[RagingInMiami]

49. How come he wasn't in the poll?

Despite what I said in my post, I think you may be right.

[johnnie]

57. I was going to say Poe also

But I was too lazy to type it last night.

[saltpoint]

33. Walt Whitman. "When lilacs last in dooryards bloomed..."

Also love Robert Duncan, Adrienne Rich, Robert Bly, Anne Sexton, and Gwendolyn Brooks.

And Galway Kinnell's no slouch, either.

[Rowdyboy]

51. Whitman by a whisker over Dickenson.....

This piece leaves me weak in the knees....

"When I heard at the Close of the Day"


WHEN I heard at the close of the day how my name had been receiv’d with plaudits in the capitol,
still it was not a happy night for me that follow’d;
And else, when I carous’d, or when my plans were accomplish’d, still I was not happy;
But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health, refresh’d, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn,
When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in the morning light,
When I wander’d alone over the beach, and undressing, bathed, laughing with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise,
And when I thought how my dear friend, my lover, was on his way coming, O then I was happy;
O then each breath tasted sweeter—and all that day my food nourish’d me more—and the beautiful day pass’d well,
And the next came with equal joy—and with the next, at evening, came my friend;
And that night, while all was still, I heard the waters roll slowly continually up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands, as directed to me, whispering, to congratulate me,

For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,
In the stillness, in the autumn moonbeams, his face was inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I was happy."

No other piece of poetry moves me like this.

[saltpoint]

63. It's lovely. Of course it's kept out of high school literature textbooks

but it should be put in to high school literature textbooks so students of that age might see and understand intimacies perhaps different from their own or not, but in any case so they were given a much better model than anything they'll see on MTV.

[BlueIris]

35. Adrienne Rich.

I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains' enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses its momentum and before running up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
you life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and lside
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by flourescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some of the words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because the is nothing else left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

--from "Dedications," in An Atlas of the Difficult World, 1991

[saltpoint]

64. Rich is sublime. I love her collection DIVING INTO THE WRECK.

[BlueIris]

69. It's one to own, for sure.

[Nicole]

38. Maya Angelou

Still I Rise
by Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise
I rise
I rise.


edit to add:
I can't pick a greatest but Maya ranks among the best for me.

[hfojvt]

39. 33 posts and no mention of

Rod McKuen? :hide:

[BlueIris]

40. ACK. How could I have neglected to mention Sharon Olds?

Sorry, kids. I'm just too close to her writing at the moment to have remembered that she always gets my vote for Greatest American Poet. Oops. Sorry, Ms. Rich. You'll have to share.

When I came to sex in full, not sex
by fits and starts, but day and night,
when I lived with him, I thought I could go crazy
with shock and awe. In Latin class,
my jaw would go slack, when I would remember
the night, the morning, the in, the out, the
in, the long torso of the beloved
lowered lifted lowered. When he wasn't
there, when he worked 36 On,
8 Off, 36 On, 8 Off,
I'd sit myself down and memorize Latin
so as not to go mad--my brain felt
like a planet gone oval, wobbling out of
orbit, pulling toward a new ellipsis,
I learned a year of Latin in a month,
aced the test, made love, wept, when he was
working all night I'd believe that a burglar might be
climbing the wall outside my window,
palm to the stone rosette, toe on the
granite front, like the prowler who'd scaled the first
storey next door, been peeled from the wall
and kicked in the head. And every time
I tried to write of the body's gifts,
the child with her clothes burned off by napalm
ran into the room screaming. I was
a Wasp child of the suburbs, I felt
cheated by Lyndon Johnson, robbed of my
entrance into the erotic, my birthright
of ease and pleasure. I understood almost
nothing of the world, but I knew that I was
connected to the girl running, her arms
out to the sides, like a plucked heron, I was
responsible for her, and helpless to reach her,
like the man on the sidewalk, his arms up
around his head, and all I did
was memorize Latin, and make love, and sometimes
march, my heart aching with righteousness.

"Coming of Age, 1966," from Blood, Tin, Straw, 1999

[EFerrari]

54. I love Sharon Olds. She got me thinking about sonnets and

sestinas and all kinds of trouble.

I still vote for Pound because he did, too, and in many cultures and languages. :)

[RetroLounge]

84. I just bought Blood, Tin, Straw this week...

Wow...

RL

[BlueIris]

96. I hope you'll have a chance to read all of her books.

If you haven't already. They're soooooo excellent.

[ulysses]

100. she's wonderful, yes.

[pitohui]

41. gary snyder EOM

,

[Mutley]

42. Why can we choose Ezra Pound but not T.S. Eliot?

:cry:



:P

[miss_american_pie]

62. Flawed poll

:)

[Mutley]

78. I would say so.

:P

[BlueIris]

46. I also forgot to consider John Ashbery. That was my very bad.

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

"At North Farm," from A Wave, 1984

[tigereye]

90. great picks all around, BlueIris!

I wondered when Ashbery was going to appear.

all these poems indicate that it is too hard to pick one of a surfeit of riches...

[enigmatic]

47. Bukowski

[Heidi]

50. Another vote for Bukowski,

with Leonard Cohen as runner up.

:hug: (Thank you, e.)

[fudge stripe cookays]

56. Um...Leonard Cohen is Canadian.

Sorry. Must disqualify him.

[Heidi]

58. Duh. I missed the "American" part.

I've been a Cohen fan for 20 years. :hi:

[saltpoint]

65. But you got the 'Cohen' part, and that's the part that rings so true

with a lot of us... he is a master of language and sound.

I heard him interviewed last week on Terri Gross' FRESH AIR and enjoyed everything he had to say, regretting only that the hour ended so soon.

What a talented soul he is, and a delight to listen to.

[Heidi]

70. My dad

turned me on to Leonard Cohen when I was in my early 20s, and I completely agree with you, sir. Wish I'd heard that Cohen interview; I'll check to see whether it's archived. (Call Me Wesley and I have a running joke that although I take our marriage vows very seriously, if Leonard Cohen ever comes calling, all bets are off. ;) )

(Always so good to run into you, Old Crusoe. :pals: )

[saltpoint]

94. Oh no. This is a major headline, Heidi. If Cohen's next collection of

poems, or his next CD, is entitled "Home Wreckin' Man," we'll all know what happened.

_____

All good wishes to both of you.:hi:

[fudge stripe cookays]

95. Silly Heidi!

:D

:hi:

[RagingInMiami]

48. Jim Morrison

Or Miguel Pinero.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

73. This is the only suggestion more laughable than the Tupac one.

[ellisonz]

53. Allen Ginsberg.

America

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January
17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck 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
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 your 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. Business-
men 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 an hour
and twenty-five-thousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of
underprivileged 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 Com-
munist 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 sin-
cere 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't 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 Readers'
Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia.
Him big bureaucracy running our fillingsta-
tions.
That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read.
Him need big black niggers. 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.

[wickerwoman]

55. H.D.

Read "Trilogy" about 15 times until you start to understand it. It's what got me through 9/11.

Ginsberg as a close second.

[BlueIris]

59. And how could I have skipped my beloved Donald Justice?

He passed almost two years ago. He created some of the first poems I read that inspired me to probe the near-limitless landscapes of poetry and what it can do as a genre.

Excepting the diner
On the outskirts
The town of Ladora
At 3 a.m.
Was dark but
For my headlights
And up in
One second-story room
A single light
Where someone
Was sick or
Perhaps reading
As I drove past
At seventy
Not thinking.
This poem
Is for whoever
Had the light on

"Poem to be read at 3 a.m.," from Night Light, 1961

[xchrom]

60. i had to go with whitman

though i must say there are more contemporary poets like the former poet laureate, pinsky, that might have been included -- i'm only refering to chronology now ---

[BlueIris]

61. Stephen Dunn

It was as if a pterodactyl had landed, cocky
and fabulous amid the earth-bound,

so it's not difficult to understand why I smiled
when I saw that Rolls Royce

moving slowly on the Black Horse Pike past the spot
where Crazy Eddie's once was.

Just one week earlier, I'd seen a man, buttoned-down and wing-tipped,
reading, Sonnets to Orpheus in paperback,

as the mall's Orange Julius stand. My smille was inward,
I craved some small intimacy,

not with him, but with an equal lover of the discordant,
another purchaser adrift among the goods.

Sometimes I'd rather be ankle-deep in mud puddles,
swatting flies with the Holsteins,

I'd rather be related to that punky boy with purple hair
walking toward the antique shop

than to talk with someone who doesn't know he lives
in "Le Siécle de Kafka" as the French

dubbed it in 1984. The State of New Jersey
that same year refused to pay Ai for a poetry reading

because her name needed two more letters, which produced my crazy smile,
though I wanted to howl too, I wanted to meet the man

who made that rule, kiss him hard on his bureacratic lips,
perhaps cook for him a scalding bowl

of alphabet soup. Instead we added two astericks, and the check came!
Four spaces on a form all filled in

and the State was pleased, which is why I'm lonely
for the messiness of the erotic, lonely

for that seminal darkness that lurks at birthday parties, is hidden
among hugs at weddings, out of which

smiles, even if wry or bitter, are born.
In the newspaper today it says that the man who robbed a jewlry store

in Pleasantville, crippling the owner, wasn't happy with his life,
was just trying to be happier.

And in Cardifff, just down the road, someone will die at the traffic circle
because history says so, because history says soon,

and that's the circle I must take in my crushable Toyota
if I wish to stay on Black Horse Pike,

and I do.

from "Smiles," Iowa Review, 1991

[mulsh]

67. Bob Dylan

n/t

[JunkYardAngel]

80. Seconded

I also love Ginsberg , though.

[Magrittes Pipe]

68. Don Van Vliet

[Fenris]

86. No one else ponders the real issues like him.

I believe he was the first to discuss the advantages of two-dollar rooms and two-dollar brooms.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

71. Uhm, POE?

Good friggin lord, how'd you miss that?!

[XemaSab]

74. Robinson Jeffers

:bounce:

[BlueIris]

76. Yusef Komunyakaa.

I don't wish you were
one of the Jackson Five
tonight, only that you

were still inside yourself,
unchanged by the vampire
moonlight. So eager

to play the Other,
did you forget Dracula
was singled out

because of his dark hair
& olive skin? After you
became your cover,

tabloid headlines
grafted your name
to a blond boy's.

The personals bled
through newsprint,
across your face. Victor

Frankenstein knew we must love
our inventions. Now, maybe
skin will start to grow

over the lies & subtract
everything that undermines
nose and cheekbone.

You could tell us if
loneliness is what
makes the sparrow sing.

Michael, don't care
what the makeup artist
says, you know

your sperm will never
reproduce that face
in the oval mirror.

from "Neverland," Pleasure Dome, 1993

***

Thanks for the tree
between me & the sniper's bullet.
I don't know what made the grass
sway seconds before the Viet Cong
raised his soundless rifle.
Some voice always followed,
telling me which foot to put down first.
Thanks for deflecting the richocet
against that anarchy of dusk.
I was back in San Francisco,
wrapped up in a woman's wild colors,
causing some dark bird's love call
to be shattered by daylight
when my hands reached up
& pulled a branch away
from my face. Thanks
for the vauge white flower
that pointed to the gleaming metal
reflecting how it is to be broken
like mist over the grass,
as we played some deadly
game for blind gods.
What made me spot the monarch
writhing on a single thread
tied to a farmer's gate,
holding the day together
like an unfingered guitar string,
is beyond me. Maybe the hills
grew weary & leaned a little in the heat.
Again, thanks for the dud
hand grenade tossed at my feet
outside Chu Lai. I'm still
falling through it's silence.
I don't know why the intrepid
sun touched my bayonet,
but I know that something
stood among those lost trees
& moved only when I moved.

from "Thanks," Dien Cai Dau, 1988

[vikegirl]

77. Dorothy Parker

Résumé

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
:-)

[LiberalEsto]

79. Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg nt

[otherlander]

101. THANK YOU! (See post 19) nt

[RedStateShame]

93. Chuck D

[SteppingRazor]

97. What about Ginsberg? William C. William? Hart Crane?

or that fascist-loving Ezra Pound?

On edit: or e.e. cummings, for that matter?


Although, for the record, my vote goes easily to Walt Whitman

[ulysses]

98. Carolyn Forché

imho

http://mason.gmu.edu/~cforchem/

[GumboYaYa]

99. It's so hard to pick a favorite, one of my most loved who has not been

named is Edna St. Vincent Millay. I love Renascence. It is a chillingly beautiful poem.

[Lance_Boyle]

102. Leaping Lanny Poffo

no doubt about it.

[hyphenate]

103. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

without a doubt.

But there are considerations to make. There are so many sib-categories within poetry that it's impossible to make a blanket statement about the greatest.

You could consider something like the avant garde poets like Arlo Guthrie, Richard Brautigan, Alan Ginsberg, and others in the Kerouac era;

You could consider those who wrote emotionally charged poems, such as those written by Oliver Wendell Holmes or A.E. Houseman;

You could consider the epic poets, such as my referral to Longfellow;

You could consider poets like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson or Langston Hughes;

You could talk about the comedic poets like Ogden Nash, e.e. cummings and even Dorothy Parker;

or you could talk about such national treasure poets such as Robert Frost.

Even again, you could discuss a contemporary poet, or someone who has served as poet laureate.

Too many different categories, and too many possibilities. It all depends on what you want to hear, feel and "see" in a poem, why you enjoy poetry in the first place, and whether you wish to understand and interpret a poem, and not just take it at its word.

[querelle]

104. Sylvia Plath

That woman did so much to shape me into the person I am today. No.....I am not going to stick my head into the oven. She was just so intense. Her suffering really came through in her writing. I can never forget it.

Q

[Neoma]

105. Me.

No kidding :P

[rosesaylavee]

106. Wordsworth

Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey

...And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.--I cannot paint
What then I was....
http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww138.html

Read that in highschool and it haunts me still.

[Writer]

107. Walt Whitman makes me randy...

"From Pent Up, Aching Rivers."

From Pent-Up Aching Rivers

FROM pent-up aching rivers,
From that of myself without which I were nothing,
From what I am determin'd to make illustrious, even if I stand sole
among men,
From my own voice resonant, singing the phallus,
Singing the song of procreation,
Singing the need of superb children and therein superb grown people,
Singing the muscular urge and the blending,
Singing the bedfellow's song, (O resistless yearning!
O for any and each the body correlative attracting!
O for you whoever you are your correlative body! O it, more than all
else, you delighting!)
From the hungry gnaw that eats me night and day,
From native moments, from bashful pains, singing them,
Seeking something yet unfound though I have diligently sought it
many a long year,
Singing the true song of the soul fitful at random,
Renascent with grossest Nature or among animals,
Of that, of them and what goes with them my poems informing,
Of the smell of apples and lemons, of the pairing of birds,
Of the wet of woods, of the lapping of waves,
Of the mad pushes of waves upon the land, I them chanting,
The overture lightly sounding, the strain anticipating,
The welcome nearness, the sight of the perfect body,
The swimmer swimming naked in the bath, or motionless on his back
lying and floating,
The female form approaching, I pensive, love-flesh tremulous aching,
The divine list for myself or you or for any one making,
The face, the limbs, the index from head to foot, and what it
arouses,
The mystic deliria, the madness amorous, the utter abandonment,
(Hark close and still what I now whisper to you,
I love you, O you entirely possess me,
O that you and I escape from the rest and go utterly off, free and
lawless,
Two hawks in the air, two fishes swimming in the sea not more
lawless than we;)
The furious storm through me careering, I passionately trembling.
The oath of the inseparableness of two together, of the woman that
loves me and whom I love more than my life, that oath swearing,
(O I willingly stake all for you,
O let me be lost if it must be so!
O you and I! what is it to us what the rest do or think?
What is all else to us? only that we enjoy each other and exhaust
each other if it must be so;)
From the master, the pilot I yield the vessel to,
The general commanding me, commanding all, from him permission
taking,
From time the programme hastening, (I have loiter'd too long as it
is,)
From sex, from the warp and from the woof,
From privacy, from frequent repinings alone,
From plenty of persons near and yet the right person not near,
From the soft sliding of hands over me and thrusting of fingers
through my hair and beard,
From the long sustain'd kiss upon the mouth or bosom,
From the close pressure that makes me or any man drunk, fainting
with excess,
From what the divine husband knows, from the work of fatherhood,
From exultation, victory and relief, from the bedfellow's embrace in
the night,
From the act-poems of eyes, hands, hips and bosoms,
From the cling of the trembling arm,
From the bending curve and the clinch,
From side by side the pliant coverlet off-throwing,
From the one so unwilling to have me leave, and me just as unwilling
to leave,
(Yet a moment O tender waiter, and I return,)
From the hour of shining stars and dropping dews,
From the night a moment I emerging flitting out,
Celebrate you act divine and you children prepared for,
And you stalwart loins.

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

108. Can I get some love for Nipsy Russell?

Help a man when he is in trouble;
Help him and never complain
For surely that man will remember you!
...When he is in trouble again.