Are we starting this up again? How about Rilke or Robert Lowell?
LET THERE BE LIGHT
"Love follows knowledge." St. Catherine of Siena
My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/
Virgil's suggestion of Robert Lowell makes me think that I'd like to read more from Amy Lowell. However, there have been a significant amount of good suggestions so far that any more hardly seems necessary.
"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."
- Margaret Atwood
When should we take this to votes - I think we aught, for the first vote, to cut down all nominations by three, so for instance, 10 people nominated 3 each, then just list your top ten, and the bottom 20 will be cut or something, but we'll have it so we cannot vote for our own nominations, to make things more interesting.
Well here are the suggestions up to now, do we want to start the picking process from this?
Michael Drayton- Nimphidia, the Court of Faery
Thomas Lovell Beddoes- Selected Poems
Mahmoud Darwish The Butterfly's Burden, trans. Fady Joudah
The Book of Songs Translated by Arthur Waley
Pablo Neruda - Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Charles Baudelaire - Les Fleurs du mal
Petrarch Canzoniere (unspecified translation)
Lorca
Robert Graves
Charles Simic - Jackstraws: Poems
William Matthews - Search Party: Collected Poems
Adrienne Rich - Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems
Shakespeare - Timon of Athens
Dante - Purgatory
Goethe - Faust (part 1)
Marina Sveteeva Selected works
Giacomo Leopardi
Theophile Gautier
Robert Browning
Percy Shelley
Robert Lowell
Rainer Maria Rilke
Amy Lowell
"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."
- Margaret Atwood
Can we knock Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe off of there - those aren't the right genre...
Besides the list seems to defy the purpose of such a discussion to an extent - I mean, it seems like most people just nominated poets they have already read, or who they could easily make a thread for on their respective subforum.
Ok, so we remove Shakespeare, Dante, and Goethe since we're looking for short poems.
Shelley and Browning because they have subforms. However, Stlukes seems interested in reading Browning, and I don't think I'm adverse to reading him either.
I would be up for removing Baudelaire from the list because I've read Les Fleurs du Mal several times before, and from the French symbolism thread, so have many other people in this thread.
I'm personally leaning towards the non-English poets, despite my nomination of Amy Lowell. It just bothered me slightly that the only poem I've read from her is "Patterns" and she is in the public domain, so her poems should be easy to obtain.
Edit: Neruda may be a bit too popular for the purpose of the reading group as well.
Last edited by OrphanPip; 02-18-2010 at 01:40 AM.
"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."
- Margaret Atwood
I must disagree with your assessments here, along with your reasoning. It seems rather irrelevant as to whether you have over-read Baudelaire or not, as these are nominations, and your personal history means nothing to my nomination. If you do not want to read Baudelaire, do not vote for Baudelaire. To suggest that we completely remove him from the list because you have read him before is absurd.
As for Neruda's popularity - we might remove any number of the poets on the list for being popular - and if you mean popular as in a pejorative sense, then I simply must disagree.
No, I have nothing against Neruda. If you look to the thread where we discussed establishing this reading group. The purpose was to look at less commonly read poets in more detail, in an attempt to avoid discussing poets that most people already have long established opinions of. Thus, from the mere existence of several threads in the poetry subform discussing Baudelaire and French Symbolism in general, he doesn't seem to match that bill.
Also, I wasn't implying that my opinion should be the be all end all of what gets included for a vote. I won't be voting for Baudelaire if he's included, but limiting the list to 10 will make voting much easier than a list of 20 some.
"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."
- Margaret Atwood
"So-Crates: The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing." "That's us, dude!"- Bill and Ted
"This ain't over."- Charles Bronson
Feed the Hungry!
I'd be interested in participating in this group as well. I'll leave the suggestions to you all, however.
Oh crap
-- Hellboy
I didn't mean to be catty. I was just a little annoyed that the two poets you recommended removing from the nomination list were the very two I nominated.
That's the nature of nominations. If more people feel like you do about Neruda or Baudelaire being overread, then those same people won't vote for reading Neruda or Baudelaire, thereby fixing the problem. If no one voted for my nominations that would be fine, but completely removing them from even the nominations is not cool.
I mean, I've done multiple close readings of Rilke in the last couple months, but I wouldn't suggest removing him from a nomination list - I just wouldn't vote for him.
I don't have a problem with leaving them up for vote, but it's a big list to choose from, especially if we leave it open to more nominations.
"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."
- Margaret Atwood