What is Your All Time Favorite Poem?
The Poetry Salon Facilitators Tell Us Some of Theirs.
It’s Mid-April. We’re just half-way through National Poetry Month. I’ve been sharing a lot of my favorites with writers at The Poetry Salon. Last week I wrote a substack post about my favorite poem, “How to Like it” by Stephen Dobyns, and outlined what it has taught me about both writing and life.
This week I wanted to ask my fellow writers and facilitators at The Poetry Salon what their favorite poems are. Of course it was hard for all of them to pick just one, but all of them narrowed it down to a single poem they wanted to recommend. Not surprisingly, they all chose different poems. Here is the line-up.
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Kim Malinowski
Facilitates Generative Writing on Mondays at 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., PST.
Picks “Love Song” by Rainer Maria Rilke, read by Ron Perlman.
“My favorite poem is “Love Song” by Rainer Maria Rilke. It is translated from the German and I only like the version used in the 1980s Beauty and the Beast TV series.
It is the first poem I remember hearing. I fell in love with the words and Ron Perlman’s voice glided with cadences and images that stacked perplexed together. “Love Song” was tangible. I could taste the poem and hold complex love in my hand. I have given Rilke my life as the young poet in ‘Letters to a Young Poet.’ I would die if I could not write and thus must be bound into the life of whimsy and darkest truth.”
Jon Pearson
Facilitates “Unhinge Your Mind” on Tuesdays at 9 a.m., PST
Picks Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart*
“I love Clarice Lispector. Reading her book Near to the Wild Heart I feel like I’m entering my own mind through a back door I didn’t know was there. And once there, I'm not in a “mind" at all, but in a backyard that stretches forever. Her syntax breaks every rule in the book, and I feel, the whole time I'm reading her, like I'm falling through space, but not normal space, a space you might find after you died, where everything, even the smallest thing, was nakedly original and weirdly familiar. Imagine consciousness has a skin around it. Imagine peeling off the skin. Imagine splashing around inside yourself—and everything is wet, sticky, and brand new.”
*Technically, this is a novel, but give it a read and you’ll see why it counts as poetry too.
Jen Gupta
Facilitates Generative Writing on Thursdays at 9 a.m., PST
Picks “Somewhere Real” by Shira Erlichman
I'm gonna have to go with "Somewhere Real" by Shira Erlichman. This poem feels like it takes the whole world-- every emotion, every person, every good and bad memory, every earthly beauty and ungodly embarrassment-- and wraps it up in one big hug. I love the breathlessness and the way the poem moves from silly to serious, personal to universal, concrete to abstract seamlessly and with such conviction that I can't help but get on board.
Robbi Nester
Facilitates Saturdays at 9 a.m., PST
Picks “Facts About the Moon” by Dorianne Laux
It’s hard to pick favorites, when it comes to poetry. The poems I choose reflect so much about the moments in which I chose them, what I needed or thought I needed, what I wanted to learn or know about poetry and about the world.
I guess that for this moment, I will choose Dorianne Laux’s poem, “Facts about the Moon,” the title poem of one of her collections. I love this poem because it illustrates how a poet, given sufficient skills, can take what in other hands might be an idle comparison and make it grow an entire world around it.
In a trice, with a bit of personification and metaphoric sleight of hand, the moon becomes a personage, with an entire history. Its relationship with the Earth, a drama the poet pulls from her sleeve that began with bare scientific facts and morphed into something else entirely.
What is Your Favorite Poem Right Now?
I know that’s a difficult question. If it helps, you might think about the first poem you remember reading, the most recent poem that you loved, any poem that you want to read and read again, any poem you sent to a friend. Tell us what we should read. We want to hear from you!
My favorite poem is Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese.”
My favorite is Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath when ch chronicles symbolically, her many suicide attempts. The last line sends shivers upy spine.
https://youtu.be/LkK2fwZfVjA?si=qt7E-L0fe9jsubad