weidli

got held up on the way to work today because there was a big snake trying to sun herself on the highway right on the way out of town & the lady in the grey subaru in front of me put her warning lights on & got out to try & shoo her into the grassy sunny verge on the other roadside. & it was afternoon and busy but the logging trucks stopped & waited & the family cars stopped & waited & the long haul truckers stopped & waited for that snake to cross the road. nobody so much as honked. & when the snake was safe the road was backed up in both directions but a fellow in a pickup truck waved at me to go ahead (i was waiting to turn right onto the highway) even though he could have made me wait until the whole long line of cars passed. what i am trying to say is: there is still love in this world. what i am trying to say is: happy pride to me & to that big old bull snake who will live to see another sunrise & to every person on that highway who decided that saving her was worth five minutes of delay

Jun3015,552 notes
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#positivity
pettysweet

my favorite spockism has got to be jim mentioning he's got any sort of human trait being met with "there's no need to insult me"

Jun301,753 notes
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#star trek
catmask

one thing about tumblr users isthat they love to disagree with posts. another thing is that they love to do is disagree with things that were not even in the post as if they were

supergameboytwo

this is just absolutely not true. people do not normally drink printer ink.

Jun3033,242 notes
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#miscellaneous
Anonymous
wrote

what are your suggestions for starter poetry for people who dont have strong reading/analysis backgrounds

soracities
answered

I’ve answered this a few times so I’m going to compile and expand them all into one post here.

I think if you haven’t read much poetry before or aren’t sure of your own tastes yet, then poetry anthologies are a great place to start: many of them will have a unifying theme so you can hone in based on a subject that interests you, or pick your way through something more general. I haven’t read all of the ones below, but I have read most of them; the rest I came across in my own readings and added to my list either because I like the concept or am familiar with the editor(s) / their work:

  • Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times (ed. Nick Astley) & Being Alive: The Sequel to Staying Alive (there’s two more books in this series, but I’m recommending these two just because it’s where I started)
  • The Rattlebag (ed. Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes)
  • The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (ed. Ilya Kaminsky & Susan Harris)
  • The Essential Haiku, Versions of Basho, Buson and Issa (ed. Robert Hass)
  • A Book of Luminous Things (ed. Czesław Miłosz )
  • Now and Then: The Poet’s Choice Columns by Robert Hass (this may be a good place to start if you’re also looking for commentary on the poems themselves)
  • Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World(ed. Pádraig Ó'Tuama)
  • African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song (ed. Kevin Young)
  • The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (ed. Kevin Young)
  • Lifelines: Letters from Famous People about their Favourite Poems

The following lists are authors I love in one regard or another and is a small mix of different styles / time periods which I think are still fairly accessible regardless of what your reading background is! It’s be no means exhaustice but hopefully it gives you even just a small glimpse of the range that’s available so you can branch off and explore for yourself if any particular work speaks to you.

But in any case, for individual collections, I would try:

  • anything by Sara Teasdale
  • Devotions / Wild Geese / Felicity by Mary Oliver
  • Selected Poems and Prose by Christina Rossetti
  • Collected Poems by Langston Hughes
  • Where the Sidewalk Endsby Shel Silverstein
  • Morning Haiku by Sonia Sanchez
  • Revolutionary Letters, Diane di Prima
  • Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved by Gregory Orr
  • Rose: Poems by Li-Young Lee
  • A Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor / Barefoot Souls by Maram al-Masri
  • Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
  • Tell Me: Poems / What is This Thing Called Love? by Kim Addonizio
  • The Trouble with Poetry by Billy Collins (Billy Collins is THE go-to for accessible / beginner poetry in my view so I think any of his collections would probably do)
  • Crush by Richard Siken
  • Rapture / The World’s Wife by Carol Ann Duffy
  • The War Works Hard by Dunya Mikhail
  • Selected Poems by Walt Whitman
  • View with a Grain of Sand by Wislawa Szymborska
  • Collected Poems by Vasko Popa
  • Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas (this is a play, but Thomas is a poet and the language & structure is definitely poetic to me)
  • Bright Dead Things: Poems by Ada Limón
  • Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth by Warsan Shire,
  • Nostalgia, My Enemy: Selected Poems by Saadi Youssef

As for individual poems:

I would also recommend spending some times with essays, interviews, or other non-fiction, creative or otherwise (especially by other poets) if you want to broaden and improve how you read poetry; they can help give you a wider idea of the landscape behind and beyond the actual poems themselves, or even just let you acquaint yourself with how particular writers see and describe things in the world around them. The following are some of my favourites:

Jun291,474 notes
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#resources