Poetry - even poets don’t always like it. Marianne Moore, a major 20th-century American poet, wrote a poem, appropriately called ‘Poetry’, that began, “I, too, dislike it…” But in the same poem she gave us a metaphor for poetry that has become a justification for an entire form: poems, she wrote, are “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”. And that’s the point. Sometimes, there’s nothing more real than a poem.
It’s National Poetry Week this week, and we conducted a straw poll around the office, asking people to nominate their favourite poems. Here are a few nominations:
‘Forgetfulness’, Billy Collins
‘Dover Beach’, Matthew Arnold
‘Musee des Beaux Arts’, WH Auden
‘Bullocky’, Judith Wright
‘This Be the Verse’, Philip Larkin
‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, TS Eliot
‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, WB Yeats
‘Dreamer’, Libby Hart (from the collection, This Floating World)
‘The Seventh’, Attila Jozsef
‘Encyclopedia of Rhythm and Blues’, Anthony Walton (we couldn’t find it online, but it’s a ripper)
‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’, Dylan Thomas
‘Totem’, Luke Davies
‘Thinking the room empty’, Cate Kennedy (from the collection, The Taste of River Water)
Wheeler Centre resident organisation Australian Poetry is celebrating National Poetry Week with a different theme every weekday this week. Today’s theme was ‘write’, tomorrow’s is ‘buy’, then there’s ‘share’, ‘live’ and ‘celebrate’.