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Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

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Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#351

Post by wishinghand »

schoen wrote: post #202
wishinghand wrote: post #198

I've always been fond of Albert Goldbarths' "Budget Travel Through Time and Space". He's an old timer with modern sensibilities, narratives that criss-cross eras with ease and a cosmological perspective. Science is inflected in a lot of his work. "The Sciences Sing a Lullabye" Physics says: go to sleep. Of course you’re tired. Every atom in you has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes nonstop from mitosis to now.…

It's a lot more metaphorical and more fanciful but there's "Evolution" by Langdon Smith: https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/int/evolution.html When you were a tadpole and I was a fish In the Paleozoic time, And side by side on the ebbing tide We sprawled through the ooze and slime, Or skittered with many a caudal flip Through the depths of the Cambrian fen, My heart was rife with the joy of life, For I loved you eve…

How do I format text like that on HN? Use 
 tags?

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#354

Post by pariya »

I love Bukowski's "Pulled Down Shade"

"what I like about you she told me is that you're crude -- look at you sitting there a beercan in your hand and a cigar in your mouth and look at your dirty hairy belly sticking out from under your shirt. you've got your shoes off and you've got a hole in your right stocking with the big toe sticking out. you haven't shaved in 4 or 5 days. your teeth are yellow and your eyebrows hang down all twisted and you've got enough scars to scare the shit out of anybody. there's always a ring in your bathtub your telephone is covered with grease and half the crap in your refrigerator is rotten. you never wash your car. you've got newspapers a week old on the floor. you read dirty magazines and you don't have a tv but you order deliveries from the liquor store and you tip good. and best of all you don't push a woman to go to bed with you. you seem hardly interested and when I talk to you you don't say anything you just look around the room or scratch your neck like you don't hear me. you've got an old wet towel in the sink and a photo of Mussolini on the wall and you never complain about anything and you never ask questions and I've known you for 6 months but I have no idea who you are. you're like some pulled down shade but that's what I like about you: your crudeness: a woman can drop out of your life and forget you real fast. a woman can't go anywhere but UP after leaving you, honey. you've got to be the best thing that ever happened to a girl who's between one guy and the next and has nothing to do at the moment. this fucking Scotch is great. let's play Scrabble."

Favourite poets: Rumi, Neruda, Herrick, Byron, Keats, Frost...

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#355

Post by pariya »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #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 ri…

Major points for dropping rap lines. I like you.

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#357

Post by AceJohnny2 »

r0naa wrote: post #181
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

I had to study a corpus of 30 texts for the bac as well a couple months ago. I certainly understand how you feel... (I am glad to be done with high-school) I don't blame the teachers because it is true that most literary masterpieces are hard to tackle the "right way" especially when there is a standard final examination that students have to be prepared for. I was lucky enough to have a very passionate teacher durin…

> I had to study a corpus of 30 texts for the bac as well a couple months ago. I certainly understand how you feel... (I am glad to be done with high-school)

Bravo! I'm curious though: 15 years ago the french part was done a year earlier than the rest. Is it common to do everything together nowadays, or was your curriculum a bit different?

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#358

Post by sal9000 »

brunorsini wrote: post #278

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 s…

Aehm, it's "The Waste Land".

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#359

Post by brunorsini »

sal9000 wrote: post #358
brunorsini wrote: post #278

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 s…

Aehm, it's "The Waste Land".

You're right, sorry for the typo
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