Poetry Month: Recommended Poems

In another venue, I have suggested we spend Poetry Month (April) listing some of our favorite poems.

The first poem I listed was T.S. Elliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which I memorized for a high school talent show:

Let us go then, you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.

The next poem that comes to mind is Diane Wakoski's "I Have Not Learned to Live With My Face." It was originally in The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems and is now in the collection, Emerald Ice. A girl introduced our high school English class to Ms. Wakoski's work, and I've been a fan ever since.

Ms. Waksoski is grouped with the "deep image" poets. As you might imagine, the emphasis is on the image rather than sound, narrative, or lyrical quality. At the same time, her poems have a confessional quality, with an admixture of personal and universal myth. Examples include her George Washington and Beethoven poems. Her most recent series, The Archaeology of Movies and Books (I've read the first two collections in this four-part series), takes this to the next level - mixing her personal history with the myth of Jason and Medea in the first two books.

Also worthy of study is her epic work, Greed, which appears to be a work still in progress. Future generations may well consider it an epic for the 20th/21st Centuries.