I haven't heard this one in such a long time, Rob. Thanks for refreshing me on it. Here's my favorite Sylvia Plath poem (well, one of them anyway). Very different.
Thanks for sharing this one Karen. You're right. This is hilarious! Here's a video of him reading it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXp2eyC2oaQ I am going to have to use this as a writing promt in workshop.
Wow, this is a hard question to answer! It’s like trying to choose a favorite piece of music. Recently, the poem that most resonated with me is by Ross Gay, and its title is the same as the book it's in: Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. Isn’t that a great title? The poem is 12 pages long, and I usually avoid reading long poems. But this is filled with humor and heart, and is the type of “chatty” poem I love because it speaks right to the reader. In fact it starts "Friends, will you bear with me today,”.
Oh my goodness, Karen, I totally know and love this poem too. I once used it as the basis for an ENTIRE workshop because it is so long and it took us a full workshop to digest it and write in response to it. There's a great recording of Ross Gay reading it, which makes it a little easier to share and enjoy.
I can see doing an entire workshop on it. Great idea! I have used pieces of it for workshops, especially his metaphors and similes, which are so fabulous. I've written my own poem inspired by it too. I even gave him a copy of my poem at a reading where I got to hug him and get a picture with him. His energy is joyous and loving. (But he didn’t send me a response to my poem, and I get that. I don’t often like it when random people hand me a poem unsolicited, so I don’t expect any response to one I’ve given someone on the rare occasions that I've done it)
I really love this one too, Kay. One of my teachers, Jack Grapes talks about this poem often in class. It's a great example of a poem that sounds like normal talk, and then suddenly goes deep and poetic in the last two lines.
The Day Lady Died
BY FRANK O'HARA
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
Although I can’t narrow my love of poetry down to just one I will say that My Father Reads Wang Wei by Jenny Liou from her book Muscle Memory has undoubtedly impressed me.
In addition to being a poet Jenny Liou has been a prizefighter. This background is essential to understanding the poem.
I’m crashing in my parents’ basement tonight
because it’s closer to my gym, and in the final days
before my final fight, even driving home takes too much energy.
My father, who at seventy is still
fighting off old age with sweat and suffering
has waited up for me. He’s convinced
I face death in the cage to an extent that I unlikely do.
Sit down, he says. He’s always hated poetry, yet
he wants to read his father’s favorite poem to me.
The wind is blowing hard against an archer’s bow.
It must be fall because the grass is dried out
and the eagles have sharp eyes.
Snow begins to drift and the horses
travel quickly. He pauses and looks back.
A poem within a poem and story within a story each can be viewed separately but more importantly, as a cohesive diptych.
The daughter is nearing her final fight, marking a transition in her life. She’s not sure what awaits her on the other side. .Similarly her father is also a fighter, battling against old age, unsure what the future brings. Yet his father’s words speak to both him and his daughter, even though he means its recitation purely for her benefit.
The directive to sit down, too, while it’s a request to her to not only listen and pay attention, is also a plea to rest, to stop fighting for at least a while, to allow both body and spirit to find an equilibrium. Again, without realizing it, he’s prescribed the same healing advice to himself.
The words of his father “the wind is blowing hard against an archers bow” reflect the winds of time, unabating, against the aim, the purpose, the fight of the individual against it in order to achieve a goal, to reach a desired destiny.
“It must be fall because the grass is dried out and the eagles have sharp eyes” is a clear indication that this period of life is not only near its end but that the “sharp eyes” of death are closing in on what remains. The dry grass becomes a reference to papery wrinkled skin and silvery hair, no longer lush and vibrant. This pertains directly to her father who also sees this as a message to her that the once fit and healthy body of hers is not as equipped to fight as it was when she was younger. He even fears for her life as she fights her last bout. Her reaction is to dismiss it much as his is to do the same in his aging body.
“Snow begins to drift and the horses travel quickly.” becomes not only the sudden realization of the end of time for each of them but their ever increasing pace to attain what they set out to do in their lives so as to know that their existences served a purpose.
But the last line - “He pauses and looks back” - is, for me, at 75, the line that delivers the hardest punch. The human tendency to measure how far we’ve come is also, in a way, a determination of how far we still have to go. It’s the realization that no matter the distance, the sense of accomplishment in what and how we’ve lived is the true measure of life.
Gosh, I don't have one favorite poem, but several I always return to, and a few new favorites as well. I love Jane Hirshfield's "For What Binds Us" and Joe Stroud's prose poem "Black Friday." Two new favorites are "Wld Iris by Gluck and a short prose poem by Gary Young at the end of his book Days about asters.
My favorite poem is Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese.”
Hey Chelle, this is one of my favorites. I can kind of recite it by heart... I usually flub over a few lines. I've read this one many times.
The Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
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
I haven't heard this one in such a long time, Rob. Thanks for refreshing me on it. Here's my favorite Sylvia Plath poem (well, one of them anyway). Very different.
https://allpoetry.com/Two-Campers-In-Cloud-Country
That Dobyns poem is so great. The ending is just teeth-gritting acceptance with so many other layers.
"teeth-gritting" is a good way to put it, Barbara : ) I agree.
It’s hard to pick a favorite but Marriage by Gregory Corso is fun and real and raw and still poetic
Thanks for sharing this one Karen. You're right. This is hilarious! Here's a video of him reading it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXp2eyC2oaQ I am going to have to use this as a writing promt in workshop.
Wow, this is a hard question to answer! It’s like trying to choose a favorite piece of music. Recently, the poem that most resonated with me is by Ross Gay, and its title is the same as the book it's in: Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. Isn’t that a great title? The poem is 12 pages long, and I usually avoid reading long poems. But this is filled with humor and heart, and is the type of “chatty” poem I love because it speaks right to the reader. In fact it starts "Friends, will you bear with me today,”.
Oh my goodness, Karen, I totally know and love this poem too. I once used it as the basis for an ENTIRE workshop because it is so long and it took us a full workshop to digest it and write in response to it. There's a great recording of Ross Gay reading it, which makes it a little easier to share and enjoy.
I can see doing an entire workshop on it. Great idea! I have used pieces of it for workshops, especially his metaphors and similes, which are so fabulous. I've written my own poem inspired by it too. I even gave him a copy of my poem at a reading where I got to hug him and get a picture with him. His energy is joyous and loving. (But he didn’t send me a response to my poem, and I get that. I don’t often like it when random people hand me a poem unsolicited, so I don’t expect any response to one I’ve given someone on the rare occasions that I've done it)
Here's the YouTube video of Ross Gay reading it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uURnrX_-v6o
The Day Lady Died. Frank O' Hara
I really love this one too, Kay. One of my teachers, Jack Grapes talks about this poem often in class. It's a great example of a poem that sounds like normal talk, and then suddenly goes deep and poetic in the last two lines.
The Day Lady Died
BY FRANK O'HARA
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
Although I can’t narrow my love of poetry down to just one I will say that My Father Reads Wang Wei by Jenny Liou from her book Muscle Memory has undoubtedly impressed me.
In addition to being a poet Jenny Liou has been a prizefighter. This background is essential to understanding the poem.
I’m crashing in my parents’ basement tonight
because it’s closer to my gym, and in the final days
before my final fight, even driving home takes too much energy.
My father, who at seventy is still
fighting off old age with sweat and suffering
has waited up for me. He’s convinced
I face death in the cage to an extent that I unlikely do.
Sit down, he says. He’s always hated poetry, yet
he wants to read his father’s favorite poem to me.
The wind is blowing hard against an archer’s bow.
It must be fall because the grass is dried out
and the eagles have sharp eyes.
Snow begins to drift and the horses
travel quickly. He pauses and looks back.
A poem within a poem and story within a story each can be viewed separately but more importantly, as a cohesive diptych.
The daughter is nearing her final fight, marking a transition in her life. She’s not sure what awaits her on the other side. .Similarly her father is also a fighter, battling against old age, unsure what the future brings. Yet his father’s words speak to both him and his daughter, even though he means its recitation purely for her benefit.
The directive to sit down, too, while it’s a request to her to not only listen and pay attention, is also a plea to rest, to stop fighting for at least a while, to allow both body and spirit to find an equilibrium. Again, without realizing it, he’s prescribed the same healing advice to himself.
The words of his father “the wind is blowing hard against an archers bow” reflect the winds of time, unabating, against the aim, the purpose, the fight of the individual against it in order to achieve a goal, to reach a desired destiny.
“It must be fall because the grass is dried out and the eagles have sharp eyes” is a clear indication that this period of life is not only near its end but that the “sharp eyes” of death are closing in on what remains. The dry grass becomes a reference to papery wrinkled skin and silvery hair, no longer lush and vibrant. This pertains directly to her father who also sees this as a message to her that the once fit and healthy body of hers is not as equipped to fight as it was when she was younger. He even fears for her life as she fights her last bout. Her reaction is to dismiss it much as his is to do the same in his aging body.
“Snow begins to drift and the horses travel quickly.” becomes not only the sudden realization of the end of time for each of them but their ever increasing pace to attain what they set out to do in their lives so as to know that their existences served a purpose.
But the last line - “He pauses and looks back” - is, for me, at 75, the line that delivers the hardest punch. The human tendency to measure how far we’ve come is also, in a way, a determination of how far we still have to go. It’s the realization that no matter the distance, the sense of accomplishment in what and how we’ve lived is the true measure of life.
Gosh, I don't have one favorite poem, but several I always return to, and a few new favorites as well. I love Jane Hirshfield's "For What Binds Us" and Joe Stroud's prose poem "Black Friday." Two new favorites are "Wld Iris by Gluck and a short prose poem by Gary Young at the end of his book Days about asters.