Favorite Poem?

[the_gneech]

Apparently the "Writer's Block" feature for LJ last week was to list your favorite poem. I'm not generally big on modern poetry [1], but I am fond of this little verse by William Hughes Mearns:

Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh how I wish he'd go away!

It was written in 1889, but always seems very contemporary to me.

-The Gneech

[1] a.k.a., the Language of Wangst. Classical verse (a la Beowulf or Shakespeare) isn't included in this. One major exception I will allow is for the Romantics (Blake, Shelley, et al.), who while they tended towards the emo, still managed to not suck.

Comments

Alternatively...

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I think he's from the CIA.

Re: Alternatively...

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

Good ol' Mad magazine. :)

Yes, that sentiment also works, particularly in this town...

-The Gneech

[athelind.livejournal.com]

William Butler Yeats wrote the best Heavy Metal lyrics of the late 19th and early 20th Century.

[theodwulf.livejournal.com]

Chesterton and Belloc, all the way.

Lepanto on the one hand, with the:

St Michael's on his mountain in the sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth)
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea folk labor and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and claps his wings of stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
Don John Calling through the blast and the eclipse
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,
Trumpet that sayeth ha!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Is shouting to the ships.

Han'aker Mill on the other:

Sally is gone that was so kindly.
Sally is gone from Han'acker Hill.
And the briar grows ever since then so blindly
And ever since then the clapper is still,
And the sweeps have fallen from Han'acker Mill.

If I could write like that, I'd have to go up into the mountains and live as a hermit, because it would be a crime to waste time doing anything else.

[punktiger.livejournal.com]

I may/may not have mentioned this before, but I can cite the one poem I read in high school that opened my mind to free-verse poetry and started my love of creative writing.

Vacation by William Stafford

One scene as I bow to pour her coffee: —

..........Three Indians in the scouring drouth
..........huddle at a grave scooped in the gravel,
..........lean to the wind as our train goes by.
..........Someone is gone.
..........There is dust on everything in Nevada.

I pour the cream.

The images, the story it tells, the precise way he paints the picture with a careful choice of words just blew my mind. It just hit me the right way at the right time. I had been exposed to poetry at an early age (I still have the original poetry book my father read from), but this was the one that made the penny drop.

[klepsydra.livejournal.com]

Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who didn't care.
He didn't care again today.
I love 'em when they act that way!

(John-Paul Smit)