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.
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.
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"
Billy Corgan, Stephen Stills, Sylvia Plath, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Richard Lovelace, & William Shakespeare.
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.
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.
robert frost neil young kurt cobain there are so many but those are the ones that popped in my head first
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)