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Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

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131–140 of 369 posts

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#131
Anne Michaels, Skin Divers. I don't think I can publish this poem here (or the collection of poems it refers to), but I love her imagery.

She's also written prose, but she writes it in a way that sounds almost like poetry, full of metaphor and imagery.

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#132
"Passion not spent"

    What's my great fear?
    I'll tell you; come near...
    To lay down in death
    with so much left.

    Passion not spent -
    Oh cowardly regret!
    For fear of others?
    The thousand deaths.

    I'm afraid to die
    With no twinkle in my eye -
    To pass meagerly by
    Yet hidden inside.     

    To walk through life
    Not truly alive,
    And to pass in the night
    With an unfelt "goodbye".

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#135
Eminem:

No more games, I'ma change what you call rage

Tear this motherfucking roof off like two dogs caged

I was playing in the beginning, the mood all changed

I've been chewed up and spit out and booed off stage

But I kept rhyming and stepped right into the next cypher

Best believe somebody's paying the pied piper

All the pain inside amplified by the fact

That I can't get by with my 9 to 5

And I can't provide the right type of life for my family

Cause man, these goddamn food stamps don't buy diapers

And it's no movie, there's no Mekhi Phifer, this is my life

And these times are so hard, and it's getting even harder

Trying to feed and water my seed, plus

Teeter totter caught up between being a father and a prima donna

Baby mama drama's screaming on and

Too much for me to wanna

Stay in one spot, another day of monotony

Has gotten me to the point, I'm like a snail

I've got to formulate a plot or I end up in jail or shot

Success is my only motherfucking option, failure's not

Mom, I love you, but this trailer's got to go

I cannot grow old in Salem's lot

So here I go it's my shot.

Feet, fail me not, this may be the only opportunity that I got

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#137
I always come back to Frost's "The Road Not Taken"

  TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,	
  And sorry I could not travel both	
  And be one traveler, long I stood	
  And looked down one as far as I could	
  To where it bent in the undergrowth;	        5
   
  Then took the other, as just as fair,	
  And having perhaps the better claim,	
  Because it was grassy and wanted wear;	
  Though as for that the passing there	
  Had worn them really about the same,	        10
   
  And both that morning equally lay	
  In leaves no step had trodden black.	
  Oh, I kept the first for another day!	
  Yet knowing how way leads on to way,	
  I doubted if I should ever come back.	        15
   
  I shall be telling this with a sigh	
  Somewhere ages and ages hence:	
  Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—	
  I took the one less traveled by,	
  And that has made all the difference.

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#140

I'm a fan of Invictus, by William Ernest Henley: Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the Shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds a…

I always loved Invictus. it was also my Father's favorite, and I remember how I felt "offended" when I learned Timothy McVeigh had chosen it for his last words.
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