hey /lit/ I wanna get into poetry rec me your favorite poems

>>9026638

Just find poets whom you like and whose poetry you can relate to and appreciate.

>>9026638
i like the wasteland. avoid bukowski

The Crab Feast, by David Malouf

>>9026638
The Iliad, by the greeks

>>9026724
Thanks inspector fucking obvious.

>>9026638
This Compost by Whitman

1.
SOMETHING startles me where I thought I was safest;
I withdraw from the still woods I loved;
I will not go now on the pastures to walk;
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea;
I will not touch my flesh to the earth, as to other flesh, to renew me.

O how can it be that the ground does not sicken?
How can you be alive, you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health, you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?

here have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations;
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day—or perhaps I am deceiv’d;
I will run a furrow with my plough—I will press my spade through the sod, and turn it up underneath;
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.

2.
Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—Yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noislessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
The he-birds carol mornings and evenings, while the she-birds sit on their nests,
The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs,
The new-born of animals appear—the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare,
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk—the lilacs bloom in the door-yards;
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.

What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea, which is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,
That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it,
That all is clean forever and forever.
That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
That the fruits of the apple-orchard, and of the orange-orchard—that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me,
That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.

>>9027408
3.
Now I am terrified at the Earth! it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,
It distils such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks, its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

Epitaphium Citharistriae, by Victor Plarr.

Albion

Philip Levine
https://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/levine_w13.html

On narrow roads twisting
between the farms, if farms
these were and not fallow
fields set off by stone walls
too low to keep anything
in or out. I’d been told
that when the west wind raged
local spirits—all the ghosts
of the unmourned—gathered
on the hilltops where no one
dared to go. We parked
in a little meadow shaded
by ancient birch and sycamore
going silver and gray under
the noon sun. Hand in hand
we climbed until the under-
growth separated us and she—
more nimble than I—took
the lead, and I followed until
the trees thinned out. The only
sound besides our breathing
was the silence. Beyond the first
clearing a stone wall stumbled
up and over a steeper rise.
Once there we saw the land
itself became confused as to
where to go. What, I thought,
could possibly be waiting
beyond still another grove
of birch and sycamore?
That was forty years ago
or more. We were still
young or young enough,
and new to the adventure,
so of course we kept going,
not in the hope of finding
Celtic arrowheads or human
skulls purified by time
and weather, or bronze relics
of lives we knew nothing of,
or what was actually there:
the exhausted chalky soil
of this depleted island
my father fought for. High
above, the clouds moved
against a pure blue sky
or perhaps it was the sky
that moved and everything
else stopped, like the two
of us, listening. Listening
for what? I ask myself now.
Call and response from bird
to bird or the sough of wind
stuttering through the trees,
the voices of a forgotten past?
I can’t recall how long we
stood there nailed to the spot,
hand in hand, expectant,
as though anything
could tell us where we were.

Bad Sheep

By Hailey Leithauser

Midnight’s merely blue,
but me, me, me, I’m
through
and through
sloe, cracked soot-
on-a-boot,
nicotine spat, licorice whip.
You can scratch, scratch, scratch
but I stay underskin true
to ebony, ink, crowberry, pitch;
hoist me up by my hooves
and shake till I’m shook, I’m still
chock full of coke, fuliginous
murk.
O there’s swart in my soul,
coal by the bag,
cinders and slag,
scoriac grit, so please
come, comb
through my fleece with hands pallid
as snow and watch
how they grow tarry, raven,
stygian, ashed—
or, if you wish, clean me with bleach
I won’t
flinch, just char
down to a core of caliginous
marrow,
pure carbon, atramentous,
utterly piceous,
shadowed, and starless,
each clumpity clump
and eclipse of my heart raptly
re-burnishing
a woolgather dark.

As silent as a mirror is believed
Realities plunge in silence by . . .

I am not ready for repentance;
Nor to match regrets. For the moth
Bends no more than the still
Imploring flame. And tremorous
In the white falling flakes
Kisses are,--
The only worth all granting.

It is to be learned--
This cleaving and this burning,
But only by the one who
Spends out himself again.

Twice and twice
(Again the smoking souvenir,
Bleeding eidolon!) and yet again.
Until the bright logic is won
Unwhispering as a mirror
Is believed.

Then, drop by caustic drop, a perfect cry
Shall string some constant harmony,--
Relentless caper for all those who step
The legend of their youth into the noon.
-Hart Crane

>>9026638
Read a book that will tell you how to read modern poetry like "Beautiful and Pointless" then read a major anthology like "Best of the Best American Poetry" or "American Poetry Now." Once you've done that you'll have found a few poets that you like and can pick up one of their books to read alongside critical essays about said material.
My favorite poet right now is Monica Youn
Ersatz Ignatz

The clockwork saguaros sprout extra faces like planaria stroked by
a razor. Chug

say the sparrows, emitting fluffs of steam. Chug chug say the piston-powered
ground squirrels.

The tumbleweeds circle on retrofitted tracks, but the blue pasteboard welkin
is much dented by little winds.

The yuccas pulse softly under the grow-light sconces.

Here is the door he will paint on the rock.

Here is the glass floor of the cliff.

He’ll enter from the west, backlit in orange isinglass, pyrite
pendants glinting from the fringes of his voice.