I'm a poetry nerd

[ptaylor1989]

Is there a section of this site dedicated to a person's undying love for poetry? Which are your favorites? Which authors do you admire?

[Jasonconfused]

I can't say I know much (or anything) about poetry but I've really been interested in getting into it lately. Do you know any good books that compile some great poems or anything? I know I can just look them up online but I think it would be nicer to just have them in a book form.

[ptaylor1989]

So many good ones. I'll reccommend Some Ether by Nick Flynn just to begin. "Cartoon Physics" is a good start

[ptaylor1989]

I'll create an easily searchable list of good poems but let me know how you like the first recommendation. Like all recommendations, it's much easier to recommend after I get acquainted with your taste

[Jasonconfused]

I read a short excerpt and I must say you hit my taste on the first try! I tend to be attracted to the darker side of things and there is a lot of pain in those few words I read. I'll definitely get the book sometime soon and I'll let you know what I think!

[ptaylor1989]

Fuck yea! That book is an ok start. Darker topics are my specialty. Next, read "Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock" . It'll make even the most pious horny for more

[Jasonconfused]

Looking forward to it!

[CellarDoor]

The Hollow Men (1925)
T. S. Eliot

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
_________________
I'll be your plastic toy.

[Guest]

I fuck with Seamus Heaney. That's my shit.

[Guest]

If you're posting poetry then:

The Onset by Robert Frost

Always the same, when on a fated night
At last the gathered snow lets down as white
As may be in dark woods, and with a song
It shall not make again all winter long
Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground,
I almost stumble looking up and round,
As one who overtaken by the end
Gives up his errand, and lets death descend
Upon him where he is, with nothing done
To evil, no important triumph won,
More than if life had never been begun.

Yet all the precedent is on my side:
I know that winter death has never tried
The earth but it has failed: the snow may heap
In long storms an undrifted four feet deep
As measured again maple, birch, and oak,
It cannot check the peeper's silver croak;
And I shall see the snow all go down hill
In water of a slender April rill
That flashes tail through last year's withered brake
And dead weeds, like a disappearing snake.
Nothing will be left white but here a birch,
And there a clump of houses with a church.