DA Poets

Honestly, any poetry is DA poetry if you can recite it from memory or sound intelligent while speaking of it.

• T. S. Elliot 

          Didn’t write much poetry, but what he did write is dense with meaning

• Wisława Szymborska

          Any of her poems are instant winners, for a great collection I would recommend Map: Collected and Last Poems

• William Shakespeare

          Classic, cannot go wrong with any of his works

• Anne Sexton

          For bonus points, listen to the song “Mercy Street” by Peter Gabriel based on the poem “45 Mercy Street”

• John Milton

          Paradise Lost is always recognizable by name

• Homer

          Both The IliadandThe Odyssey are the best known works, bonus points if you are able to read them in their original Greek for the full effect

• Edgar Allen Poe

          Although The Raven is his most notable work of poetry, his short stories are also enjoyable

• Robert Frost

          An acquired taste compared to my other favourite poets, but my top four are definitely “The Road Not Taken”, “Mending Wall”, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, and “Acquainted With the Night”

• Mark Twain

          Recognizable in name and work

• Lord Byron

          An older poet, much of his language is obsolete in the modern era yet conveys meanings we could not hope to comprehend without it

• Sappho

          An excellent romantic, “Slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl” Bonus points if you read it in the original Greek for the full effect

• Walt Whitman

          The modern-day version of a classical poet: free verse is his specialty!  

• Edgar Allan Poe

          The O.G. dark academic, the literature teacher’s favourite Halloween lesson.  Nothing can beat the simple and unsettling Poetry of Poe!

• Oscar Wilde

          Nothing will ever be as iconic as The Picture of Dorian Gray has become in the DA aesthetic! a definite must-read.

spellokay:

every time i ask for poetry recs no one gives me any so i am BEGGING pls respond with poetry recs. nothing rupi kaur/insta poet-esque, but anything else i’m down for!!! classic poets, modern poets, short poems, long poems, prose, and any poetry sub-genre are welcome!! PLEASEEE!!!

Has anyone got any recommendations for @spellokay? We’ll go first. How about Ocean Vuong,H.D.,Rebecca Tamás?

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

Now that I’m free to be myself, who am I? / Can’t fly, can’t run, and see how slowly I walk. / Well, I think, I can read books.

”What’s that you’re doing?”
the green-headed fly shouts as it buzzes past.

I close the book.

Blue Iris by Mary Oliver

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately.

The Orange by Wendy Cope

I want to write something
so simply / about love / or about pain / that even / as you are reading / you feel it
and as you read / you keep feeling it / and though it be my story
it will be common, / though it be singular
it will be known to you / so that by the end
you will think—
no, you will realize— / that it was all the while / yourself arranging the words, / that it was all the time / words that you yourself, / out of your own heart / had been saying.

I Want to Write Something So Simply by Mary Oliver

But darkness holds it all:
the shape and the flame,
the animal and myself,
how it holds them,
all powers, all sight —

and it is possible: its great strength
is breaking into my body.
I have faith in the night.

You Darkness by Rainer Maria Rilke

He stood alone in my backyard, so dark
the night purpled around him.
I had no choice. I opened the door
& stepped out. Wind
in the branches. He watched me —
his eyes kerosene blue.
What do you want, I asked, forgetting I had
no language. He kept breathing,
to stay alive. But I was a boy
then. Which meant I was a murderer
of my childhood. & like all murderers, my god
was stillness.

The Bull by Ocean Vuong

What’s Not to Love
about a broken bowl,
now two half-bowls,

still ready to hold
what they can, even

if that’s nothing

What’s Not to Love by Brendan Constantine

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it / and everything you’ve held dear / crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, / your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat / thickening the air, heavy as water / more fit for gills than lungs; / when grief weights you down like your own flesh / only more of it, an obesity of grief, 

you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face / between your palms, a plain face, / no charming smile, no violet eyes, / and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

The Thing Is by Ellen Bass

I want to unfold.

Nowhere I wish to stay crooked, bent; / for there I would be dishonest, untrue.

I want my conscience to be / true before you; / want to describe myself like a / picture I observed / for a long time, one close up, / like a new word I learned and embraced, / like the everyday jug, / like my mother’s face, / like a ship that carried me along / through the deadliest storm.

I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone by Rainer Maria Rilke

How much can you change
and get away with it, before you turn into something
else, before it’s some kind of murder? Difficult
to be confronted with the fact of yourself. Opaque
in the sense of finally solid, in the sense of
see me, not through me. The selves, glaze on glaze,
accumulating their moods and minutes. We tremble
and I paint the trembling. I enlarged his mouth
and everything went blurry, a forgery. It might
as well be. And all my fingers turned to twigs. Inside
himself he jumped a little. Why build a room you
can live in? Why build a shed for your fears?
The life of a body is a nightmare.

Portrait of Fryderyk in Shifting Light by Richard Siken

Turn yourself inside out / and paint your organs the color of what you see / in your dreams.

This is the art of / living with a ticking heart, a grenade you / throw through windows to make a / point that language / has no room for.

This is how I destroyed you.

And this,
is how I kept you alive.

Advice From Dionysus by Shinji Moon

What would a better me paint? There is no
new me, there is no old me, there’s just me, the same
me, the whole time. Vanity, vanity, forcing your
will on the world. Don’t try to make a stronger wind,
you’ll wear yourself out. Build a better sail. You
want to solve something? Get out of your own way.
What’s the difference between me and the world?
Compartmentalization. The world doesn’t know
what to do with my love. Because it isn’t used to
being loved. It’s a framework problem. Disheartening?
Obviously. I hope it’s love. I’m trying really hard
to make it love.

Self-Portrait Against Red Wallpaper by Richard Siken

It feels cruel. Something in me isn’t ready
to let go of summer so easily. To destroy
what I’ve carefully cultivated all these months.
Those pale flowers might still have time to fruit.

September Tomatoes by Karina Borowicz

The holes in this picture are not flowers, they are not wheels, and the phone is ringing ringing, a headache word, it’s ringing for you. This is in the second person. This is happening to you because I don’t want to be here. Is there anything I won’t put words around? Yes, there is.

And so there are gaps. And so naturally things try to get into the gaps. I imagine things because I like them or sometimes I dislike them and I am afraid of them and I live in an imaginary world. The phone is ringing and I don’t want to hear this. The T.V. is on and I don’t want to see this, I don’t want to rise to this occasion.

I stood the yard in my everyday clothes singing Wings little monster, listen to my soup bones. Does it help? What does this have to do with the airplanes and the buildings falling down?

Black Telephone by Richard Siken

poemhatertoo:

poemhatertoo:

some responses from my “favorite poem” google form<3

“The Rival” by Sylvia Plath

“On This the 100th Anniversary of the Sinking of the Titanic, We Reconsider the Buoyancy of the Human Heart” by Laura Lamb Brown-Lavolie

“61 Trees” by Ada Limón

Interactive :: House Saints by Hala Alyan

“Driving, Not Washing” by Richard Siken

“Endymion” by John Keats

“The End of Poetry” by Ada Limón

“Perhaps the World Ends Here” by Joy Harjo

“Rain” by Kazim Ali

“My House” by Nikki Giovanni

“The Edge of the World” by Shel Silverstein