Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

I wish I had a better answer than "I make one up as needed", but I have more of a filking ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filk_music ) background than any actual musical training.

I only discovered Rumi relatively recently, but it was quite a revelation. This one really struck a chord with me:

https://gist.github.com/benshimmin/8da42a687eae6e47f30d

(Yes, putting poetry in a GitHub Gist seems weird, but at least I know it won't disappear in a hurry.)

Nice! I grew up near him and my dad used to act in his plays. He was such a great artist and interesting person. I like this line "A hissing swarm of hair bugs has got the baby and its rugs" from the evil garden.

Poetry often goes way beyond just the naked words. Understanding the context around the writer, including background on his or her place and time matters a lot.

In this sense, this amazing iOS app completely changed my understanding of T.S. Eliot and his classic "The Waste of the Land": https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-waste-land/id427434046?m...

Highly recommended. It makes it pretty obvious that there is still so much opportunity to do more things with augmented content.

Clouds Gathering by Charles Simic

    It seemed the kind of life we wanted.
    Wild strawberries and cream in the morning.
    Sunlight in every room.
    The two of us walking by the sea naked.

    Some evenings, however, we found ourselves
    Unsure of what comes next.
    Like tragic actors in a theater on fire,
    With birds circling over our heads,
    The dark pines strangely still,
    Each rock we stepped on bloodied by the sunset.

    We were back on our terrace sipping wine.
    Why always this hint of an unhappy ending?
    Clouds of almost human appearance
    Gathering on the horizon, but the rest lovely
    With the air so mild and the sea untroubled.

    The night suddenly upon us, a starless night.
    You lighting a candle, carrying it naked
    Into our bedroom and blowing it out quickly.
    The dark pines and grasses strangely still.

Japan by Billy Collins

    Today I pass the time reading
    a favorite haiku,
    saying the few words over and over.

    It feels like eating
    the same small, perfect grape
    again and again.

    I walk through the house reciting it
    and leave its letters falling
    through the air of every room.

    I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it.
    I say it in front of a painting of the sea.
    I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf.

    I listen to myself saying it,
    then I say it without listening,
    then I hear it without saying it.

    And when the dog looks up at me,
    I kneel down on the floor
    and whisper it into each of his long white ears.

    It's the one about the one-ton temple bell
    with the moth sleeping on its surface,

    and every time I say it, I feel the excruciating
    pressure of the moth
    on the surface of the iron bell.

    When I say it at the window,
    the bell is the world
    and I am the moth resting there.

    When I say it at the mirror,
    I am the heavy bell
    and the moth is life with its papery wings.

    And later, when I say it to you in the dark,
    you are the bell,
    and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,

    and the moth has flown
    from its line
    and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed.