the_rck | (no subject)

Hm. If I don’t like the first four or five pages of a poet’s collected works, is that enough to say I don’t like the poet’s work? This collection is a little odd because it has a play first, so I’m kind of thinking I need to skip to the end of that and see if I like anything beyond that, but I also don’t really want to bother because I very much am not enjoying the play. My main problem is that, as I read it, I keep going, "WTH? Who talks like that?" The words are pretty but not actually coherent in terms of conveying meaning or even image/emotion.

There’s something that I keep thinking I want to post about, but when I open my document to write, I can’t for the life of me remember what it is.

I’m still draggingly tired. The hard part is that I know that sleeping right now won’t help and that my instinct to eat all the food will lead to bad places without giving me any actual energy. But part of my mind remains convinced that, if I eat the right thing, I will magically feel better. It’s days like this when I really, really wish that Provigil had actually worked for me.

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If you're looking only at the first few pages of the poet's collected works, you may be looking only at the poet's earliest poems, which may be very different from her later ones. That said, life's too short, so if you need permission from someone to put the book down for keeps, granted.

What

alexseanchai said. Normally if I get a collected works, I try to see how it's organized (often by the books it was taken from, but not always). If it's by book, I usually pick an arbitrary poem from each book; otherwise I tend to start with something near, but not absolutely at, the back of the collection.

And some things just don't work for me. Marvin Bell is one of my favoritest poets. I think he's amazing. And I loathe his various Dead Man poems completely. I think they are tedious and pretentious and overly-constructed and just boring...but they're not all he wrote, and I love some of his other work.

Who is the poet?

I think it depends very much on the poet in question - some take their time getting into their stride, some are better in youth or age. I'd suggest you ask people who like that poet's work which are their favourite poems, and read some of those. If you dislike half a dozen of "the best", perhaps that work is not for you.

Well, it's W.H. Auden. I'm just finding the play at the beginning of the book horribly hard going. If you know Auden and have any recommendations, I'd appreciate hearing them.

W.H. Auden. I'm kind of getting poetry from the library at random to see if I find anything that I love. So far, Langston Hughes and Sara Teasdale have been the only hits for me.

Oh dear, his plays are dreadful. Try "Lay your sleeping head, my love", "Musee des Beaux Arts" (Google the picture it references) ,"The Unknown Citizen", "Funeral Blues" and "Refugee Blues" to start with. Have a look at the poems here, for example: http://allpoetry.com/W-H-Auden

His best poems are really good.

I was a teacher of English, including poetry, for over three decades. If you give some examples of poems you really like, I may be able to give you some suggestions.

I like both Spoon River Anthologies. I like what I've read of Langston Hughes (those poems actually reminded me of the Spoon River Anthologies a bit). I like Rudyard Kipling and Robert Frost. I like some Emily Dickinson but don't always get the point. I like most Edna St Vincent Millay. I have fond memories of Robert Louis Stevenson, but I'm not sure if he'd appeal to me without the nostalgia. I have similar memories of some bits of Edward Lear.

Let's see... Some Edgar Allen Poe and some Lewis Carroll but not all of either. I've read and liked some Ogden Nash and William Blake (just the stuff that everyone knows. I seem to recall reading that his stuff gets... odd. Is that correct?) but not enough to generalize to liking all of their work.

I bounced hard off of Christina Rossetti and couldn't get into Hilda Doolittle's poetry.

I haven't read a lot of Amy Lowell's poetry, but I've liked what I've read -- especially "Patterns." That might be worth a try.

Auden's a bit dry isn't he? I was going to suggest Frost, but I see you've had a look at him. I remember liking Robert Lowell many years ago ...

Blake wrote two sets of shortish poems, collected as Songs of Innocence and Experience. Most of the famous poems come from there. You would probably dislike his long, rambling blank verse poems.

It's interesting that I'm not particularly familiar with some of the poets you list - I didn't do an American Lit option at university, though I did a lot of British poetry.

I suspect you might enjoy some of Robert Browning's character-based poems, My Last Duchess,Porphyria's Lover, The Laboratory, which is very dark, and The Pied Piper of Hamelin which you may well have read as a child, but is well worth returning to.

I'm very partial to Byron, some of whose work is very satirical and some very dark: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the bit about the eve of Waterloo, We'll Go No More A-Roving and Darkness

I could go on...