Favorite Poet or Songwriter

[Orsino2]

List your top three.

Walt Whitman, Bob Dylan, or Neil Young. (in no order)

[fulmah]

John Berryman, Robert Pollard, and Captain Beefheart (when he does his spoken word)

[gdhmomchild]

R. Hunter
R. Frost
R. Braughtigan
(W. Shakespeare too. Maybe not technically a poet but can read like poetry.)

Sorry...I would have to draw a straw to lose one today.

[lumina]

rumi, alexander pushkin, and maynerd james keenan. hard question there is so many talented writers.

[TrippinBTM]

Hmm... there's so many


Frost probably tops my list at the moment. Hes grand.
Blake is pretty sweet, though I'm not as familiar with his work as I am with Frost

I don't know for my third. I'm not really well read in poetry. I could list some bands I like, but I won't. Thing is, I'm just getting into reading poetry. ANyone got any good suggestions? I'm especially into nature poetry, or sorta mystical stuff. Whatever though.

[Hippievixen]

Sylvia Plath... Joni Mitchell... and Allen Ginsburg.

[fulmah]

ANyone got any good suggestions? I'm especially into nature poetry, or sorta mystical stuff. Whatever though.
I recommend Charles Wright for contemporary nature/reflective stuff. You can read some of his stuff here:

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/c_wright/online_poems.htm

here's a quick excerpt, though the hipforum's formatting's going to mess it all up, probably:

"How soon we come to road's end--
Failure, our two-dimensional side-kick, flat dream-light,
Won't jump-start or burn us in,

Dogwood insidious in its constellations of part-charred cross
points,
Spring's via Dolorosa
flashed out in a dread profusion,
Nowhere to go but up, nowhere to turn, dead world-weight"

[nationofmillions]

I think Blackie writes kick ass poetry. in the poetry forum here, fyi.

[prism]

Billy Corgan, Stephen Stills, Sylvia Plath, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Richard Lovelace, & William Shakespeare.

[johnnybang]

I'm partial to John Lennon, Captain Beefheart, Robert Pollard, and Charles Bukowski.

[Hippievixen]

damn... see, i forgot about john lennon :)

[johnnybang]

I dont think anybody that I've read handles nature like Captain Beefheart (writer of song lyrics, not poetry per se). There is also a Chinese poet named Li Po who wrote some incredible stuff a few centuries ago. Very minimal--he was a Zen Buddhist poet.

[johnnybang]

Oh, and Kerouac's stuff had moments--"the quivering meat conception turns in the void..."

[Hippievixen]

hehe, how *could* i forget about john lennon?

he's in my fucking sig!!

*lol*

what a blonde :)

[johnnybang]

Lennon was a singular artist!

[johnnybang]

Sadly, I think he got caught up in Marxist political theory and lost touch with his earlier brilliance. He made the classic artist's mistake of thinking that his music could save the world...then he got shot.

[measa420]

robert frost

neil young
kurt cobain
there are so many but those are the ones that popped in my head first

[Syntax]

Sigh... Shame that nobody would know these Russian poets, and yet I shall have to be honest and say:

Vladimir Vysotsky
Bulat Okudjhava
Yuriy Vizbor

(but if you wanted English poets only, Bob Marley and John Lennon would be on my list)

[ThrftShopSweater]

TS eliot without any doubt...

[Cornflakes]

Robert Frost

[kidder]

Poets with huge ability: Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Keats, Donald Justice, Archibald Lampman. All worth a shot. That's why I didn't include John Lennon :-)

[EternalHunter]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allen Poe, E.E. Cummings

[Jaan]

Kurt Cobain, heh, well, for me he is the only songwriter who hasnt got a singel song that I dont like.