A Way to Rest

[garretfw]

“Hitler and Stalin were my travel agents.”
   -- Charles Simic

There’s poetry and then there’s magic. That throwaway comment stopped my heart. Among the other things they do, poets give regular writers a way to rest their brains. It was Brad Kessler who said that reading poetry was safe while writing prose. I recently read John Ash’s "

Comments

[girasole]

John Keats, his poetry and his letters, which are among the most fascinating letters ever written.

Mary Oliver, Yeats, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marge Piercy, all have moments of heart-stopping wonder, but Keats does it to me every time, every line.

[garretfw]

There are letter? I ask with dread and glee. Have you noticed that the more wonderful things you find out about, the less time there is? I hope you are surviving this wretched heat!

The Letters of John Keats

[girasole]

I have my slipcased 2vol. edition of Keats' letters from 1972 http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/KEALET.html, but there are numerous editions or you could get them from the library. The truth is though, you want to own them, because they are the best letters ever written.

Here's an example, where Keats writes about negative capability
http://www.mrbauld.com/negcap.html

and one of my favorite throwaway lines from his letters, about food:

"Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine -- how good how fine. It went down all pulpy, slushy, oozy, all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large, beatified Strawberry."

Re: The Letters of John Keats

[garretfw]

Oh, my. Now that is something to cherish. Thank you.

[britlitfantwin]

I love reading poetry by Robert Graves, especially 'When I'm Killed', and Wilfrid Owen ('The Show' strikes me as a devastatingly true picture of war). Maya Angelou's 'Caged Bird' is a favourite of mine as well. There are others, like Robert Frost, but these are the ones that pop to mind.

Oh, I nearly forgot to mention Robert Bly: he wrote a poem called 'Gratitude to Old Teachers' that really gets me.

[maribou]

Yeats, always Yeats, even when I think it's a poem I don't particularly care for something sneaks up on me and bam.
I've been falling back in love with Don Marquis lately (the archy & mehitabel guy)...

[jeannineatkins]

I'd have to go with Yeats, too, mostly for the music, and Hopkins. People complain about studying poetry to death in high school, but some of those poems come back to me in new and better ways.

And thanks for the Charlie Simic quote. I got to take a modern poetry course with him in grad school. His knowledge of and love for a wide range of poetry was so contagious, and always brought up with the wry humor and humilty you find in his poems. I have got to find the notes I took which won't bring back the whole experience, but even an edge would be wonderful. We spent a lot of time on Dickinson, who he saw as, along with Whitman, as beginning modern poetry, and while I love her work, I can't say it stops my heart. More, it makes me think.

[garretfw]

Oh my god!!!!! How lucky you were. I'm with you on Dickinson. Nice, but. . . . . I hope you are having a good day.

[handworn]

Yeats is up there for me. Dorothy Parker, too. Edgar Allen Poe.