Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincas_Mykolaitis-Putinas

Goethe is fine too, and some Russian poets.

I'm from England but I gladly concede that the best poetry tends to come from countries east of my own.

Angus O'Reilly O'Patrick McGinney.

The Snow Man is quite good:

  One must have a mind of winter
  To regard the frost and the boughs
  Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

  And have been cold a long time
  To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
  The spruces rough in the distant glitter

  Of the January sun; and not to think
  Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
  In the sound of a few leaves,

  Which is the sound of the land
  Full of the same wind
  That is blowing in the same bare place

  For the listener, who listens in the snow,
  And, nothing himself, beholds
  Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

I studied this poem back in high school (in France).

I have mixed feeling about it. I said "studied", but I really meant "had to study". There's something about school's treatment of the subject that just robs the poem of any power. Maybe it's because as teenagers we likely didn't have the life experience for it to resonate with us. Even now, I can vaguely sense it but am numb to it. On the other hand, I'm glad I have been introduced to such poetry, as I think it helps me later in life to appreciate the finer things.

Also, did you know Baudelaire's translation of Poe's work brought it french recognition? (I earlier got it the wrong way around, thinking Poe had translated Baudelaire)

Belfast man checking in, poetry is one of the main traditions here and has a thriving local community, so I thought I would recommend some of my favourites from this part of the world.

Paul Muldoon,

Maybe something of a "poet's poet" but certainly worth checking out. His style is a casual one, but bursts with sidelong allusions to history, literature, art and etymological punnery. Perhaps of particular interest to people here, might be his novel-length poem Madoc, an hallucinogenic journey through time and place, in which "[he] supposes that Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey took up their (actual) fancy of founding a Pantisocratic community in North America."

Ciaran Carson,

Took a break from writing through most of the 70s to travel with his wife playing traditional music and steep himself in the Irish storytelling tradition. His books since then have been an, at time excitingly precarious, marriage of traditional storytelling and a modernist mock pedanticism. Worth checking out is his Belfast Confetti, a mix of essays and poems which explore the psychological relationship one has to one's city.

Leontia Flynn, A much younger poet, of the generation of artists who have had to deal with adapting to life and working in the 21st Century. Her last book, from 2011, Profit & Loss is a striking meditation on the changing role of memory in pre- and post- Internet society.

And for something different that I would particularly recommend to the HN crowd,

Sam Riviere,

An English poet of the current generation who deals with the cognitive fallout of the ever varied linguistic and cultural deluge one experiences day to day in 2015. I don't want to say too much about his writing as he is still so young, but certainly seek out his latest book, Kim Kardashian's Marriage.