what poems got you interested in writing?

[NeonSubtlety]

I haven't been doing much writing, lately. But, I took a copy of one of my favorite collections of poetry with me to a conference recently, and read when I should've been knee-deep in Machiavelli types, with their beautiful shoes. And in my creatively-parched recovery period, I've been picking up all of the old favorites which, for a while, never let me forget that I wanted to be a writer.

It made me curious about what inspired other people. Feel free to copy/paste or just speak about it. I'd like to hear your stories. And I'm a sucker for setting if you're a sucker for backstory.

A few that I remember being particularly moving were:




"The Attic" by Marie Howe --


Praise to my older brother, the seventeen-year-old boy, who lived
in the attic with me an exiled prince grown hard in his confinement,

bitter, bent to his evening task building the imaginary building
on the drawing board they'd given him in school. His tools gleam

under the desk lamp. He is as hard as the pencil he holds,
drawing the line straight along the ruler.

Tower prince, young king, praise to the boy
who has willed his blood to cool and his heart to slow. He's building

a structure with so many doors its finally quiet,
so that when our father climbs heavily up the attic stairs, he doesn't

at first hear him pass down the narrow hall. My brother is rebuilding
the foundation. He lifts the clear plastic of one page

to look more closely at the plumbing,
-he barely hears the springs of my bed when my father sits down--

he's imagining where the boiler might go, because
where it is now isn't working. Not until I've slammed the door behind

the man stumbling down the stairs again
does my brother look up from where he's working. I know it hurts him

to rise, to knock on my door and come in. And when he draws his skinny arm
around my shaking shoulders,

I don't know if he knows he's building a world where I can one day
love a man--he sits there without saying anything.

Praise him.
I know he can hardly bear to touch me.



"Howl" by Allen Ginsberg


"Ulysses" by Tennyson --

Specifically, I remember hearing it in Dead Poets Society. It was butchered for the purpose of the movie. But, in my adolescence, all I knew was that it made me want live differently.

 

[butters]

fantastic idea for a thread! back later on to add my response. very cool thread. *nods*

 

[greenmountaineer]

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden

*************

While Hayden was an African American born in Detroit during the Depression and I was born shortly after WWII, I always identified closely with this poem. I think fatherhood was a frightening responsibility for many men during the first half of the 20th century with all of the world wars and world poverty. I think it spawned many self-made barricades. That a father would express love for his son in perhaps the only way he knew how and the son would only come to know that as an older, wiser man is very poignant and personal for me.

P.S. I had never read "The Attic" until your post of it. It is incredibly powerful in its images, disturbing in its inference, and another example in poetry of how families, for the good or the bad, shape our view of the world. I think my family experience as a child put me in a place where poetry I discovered as a child resonated.

 

[NeonSubtlety]

I loved "those winter sundays" the second time I read it. I must've done some real growing between my senior year of highschool and my freshman year of college. Because, while many of my classes had me reading the exact same poems (like "those winter sundays"), I saw them as a monotonous task at 17 and a revelation at 18.

 

[butters]

what superb writing. i missed out on so much right through till i was about 40, when i began to write... not to say i'd not read many many writers, but missed so many i wish i'd have met earlier or, indeed, am still to meet.

when it comes to poetry, i think the culprits were the likely lads of Shakespeare, definitely Wordsworth, and those bad-boy romantics even though i only wrote a few pieces back then, their words resonated in me... their imagery above all, even above the lyricism of Shakey.

two poems (real schoolkid stuff) stand out above all the others as to what inspired my own writing to take shape:

Wordsworth's Ice Skating, with that image of the boy skating so fast on the frozen waters, stopping short, and the world appearing to still turn... it's absolutely stamped upon my makeup, even if the others in it are more subtle, and appreciated more with age.

And in the frosty season, when the sun
Was set, and visible for many a mile
The cottage windows through the twilight blazed,
I heeded not their summons. Clear and loud
The village clock tolled six; I wheeled about
Proud and exulting, like an untired horse
That cares not for his home. All shod with steel
We hissed along the polished ice in games
Confederate, imitative of the chase
And woodland pleasures, the resounding horn,
The pack loud bellowing, and the hunted hare.
So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle. With the din,
Meanwhile, the precipices rang aloud;
The leafless trees and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron; while the distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars,
Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.

Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideways, leaving the tumultuous throng,
To cut across the shadow of a star
That gleamed upon the ice. And oftentimes
When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks on either side
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion, then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels,
Stopped short --- yet still the solitary cliffs
Wheeled by me, even as if the earth had rolled
With visible motion her diurnal round.
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched
Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.


The Prelude, 1799; Book I, ls 452-489

and this one - Coleridge's Kubla Khan. I refuse to apologise, i love the imagery, the richness of the sounds as i whisper them, the rhythmic quality... again, above all else, there's one image that, for me, makes its indelible mark..

Where Alph, the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

it speaks to me. i think it might have also spoken to Pink Floyd, somewhere along the line. annnnyyyway, here's it in its entirety, though i suppose most of you are quite familiar with it:

Kubla Khan
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In Xanadu did Kublai Khan
A stately Pleasure-Dome decree,
Where Alph, the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers was girdled ’round,
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But, oh! That deep, romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill, athwart a cedarn cover:
A savage place! As holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath the waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her Demon Lover!
And from this chasm with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this Earth in fast, thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced,
Amid whose swift, half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail;
And ‘midst these dancing rocks at once and ever,
It flung up momently the sacred river!
Five miles meandering with ever a mazy motion,
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean.
And ‘mid this tumult, Kublai heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the Dome of Pleasure
Floated midway on the waves,
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device:
A sunny Pleasure-Dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such deep delight ‘twould win me
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome within the air!
That sunny dome, those caves of ice,
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry: “Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle ’round him thrice,
And close your eyes in holy dread:
For he on honeydew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise!”

that last image is pretty incredible, too, but yet it's the opening one that sings me dreams.

 

[greenmountaineer]

The Romantics rule!

 

[Algonquin Twit]

Randall Jarrell

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
by Randall Jarrell


From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.



I remember reading this in sixth grade, the incredible impact of the words there inspired me to read more and to write.

 

[butters]

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
by Randall Jarrell


From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.



I remember reading this in sixth grade, the incredible impact of the words there inspired me to read more and to write.

amazing poem that i met in school, too. i'm not sure it inspired me to write, but left me reeling with its harshness. i had to absorb many many more poems of such calibre before really feeling ready to put down anything worthwhile.

 

[vrosej10]

I'd had so bad poetry experiences which put me off it, but then I met good english haiku and it was love at first sight. Finding poetry could be intense whilst not being epic was a motivator. I particularly enjoy the work of Masajo Suzuki. My favourite poem of all time is hers:

the one who divorced me
the one who died
distant fireworks​

(I might have the first two lines backward but u get the idea).

 

[Remec]

I don't have many influences in my poetry (or writing in general, for that matter) that I can recall to be able to point at/to and say...this...this was an inspiration. The earliest attempts at writing came out of school assignments. The earliest poems I can remember reading were Mother Goose rhymes, limericks from Lear, and the various verse from Lewis Carroll.

Through the years you could add this and that from various sources...Shakespeare, Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shel Silverstein, and a host of people from different classes, survey courses, literary magazines, and poetry collections that I picked up for one reason or another.

I know I prolly should read more actual poets (or writers who poeticize, if you know what I mean by the difference), but I'm always afraid I'll pick up someone else's voice or turn of a phrase or something.

 

[bflagsst]

E b browning sonnetts from the Portuguese and ...
Flaubert

 

[twelveoone]

one of the poets that always bothered me, in the sense of there is something behind this was Robert Frost. Years later, I found out the book that influenced him was- The Principles of Psychology.

 

[UnderYourSpell]

I read somewhere that Coleridge said that even he wasn't sure what the poem really meant and that he dreamt the lines during a nap, my best lines come just as I'm dropping off but I never remember them!

 

[vrosej10]

I read somewhere that Coleridge said that even he wasn't sure what the poem really meant and that he dreamt the lines during a nap, my best lines come just as I'm dropping off but I never remember them!

At uni we are taught about the myth of authorial intent, basically that there no author has an intended meaning and all meaning is derived from the interaction between the reader and the text. In my case I think that's through. I think that Field of Dreams quote kind of applies to mine: If you build it, they will come.

 

[UnderYourSpell]

At uni we are taught about the myth of authorial intent, basically that there no author has an intended meaning and all meaning is derived from the interaction between the reader and the text. In my case I think that's through. I think that Field of Dreams quote kind of applies to mine: If you build it, they will come.

None too keen on that idea of readers sticking their own connotations where none was intended, could cause all sorts of hoo ha ........ no no readers I insist you sit up straight and be told lol good grief I could write any old shit (shut up in the back I heard that!) if it doesn't have to be written with some meaning!

 

[mikesaysno]

i guess i'm not really a poet but the stuff that stuck in my memory was all from the romantic period: Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, keats and Coleridge etc



Farewell! if ever fondest prayer
For other's weal availed on high,
Mine will not all be lost in air,
But waft thy name beyond the sky.
'Twere vain to speak, to weep, to sigh:
Oh! more than tears of blood can tell,
When wrung from guilt's expiring eye,
Are in that word - Farewell! - Farewell!

These lips are mute, these eyes are dry;
But in my breast and in my brain,
Awake the pangs that pass not by,
The thought that ne'er shall sleep again.
My soul nor deigns nor dares complain,
Though grief and passion there rebel;
I only know we loved in vain -
I only feel - Farewell! - Farewell!

 

[KillerMuffin]

I got dragged, kicking in screaming, into poetry by dint of a required poetry writing course. I kept up doing it because I discovered that poetry taught me things about creating language for my fiction that were beyond valuable. I'm still in it because I can write decent enough poetry on demand and writing short stories on demand is painful and the results are very, very ugly. So, I'm a poet that prefers to write novels. I'd woe-is-me all over the place, but my use of language is ever so much richer for it.

I have poetic influences, but I'm told that T.S. Eliot (whom I abhor) is entrenched enough in canon to use allusions that no one understands without a reference library on hand, but I'm a nobody and therefore must have poetry that's pretty much self-contained, or at least, extravangtly clear to someone who is not Buddhist and hasn't ever had the desire to read Go West. I think they're all full of bollocks. If Eliot, who is the greatest waste of space in the literary canon, can do it, so can I. So there.

My largest poetic influence is a guy who wrote the following:

Apart from theoretical conceptualization there would appear to be no method of selecting among the indefinite number of varying kinds of factual observation which can be made about a concrete phenomenon or field so that the various descriptive statements about it articulate into a coherent whole, which constitutes an “adequate,” a “determinate” description. Adequacy in description is secured in so far as determinate and verifiable answers can be given to all the scientifically important questions involved. What questions are important is largely determined by the logical structure of the generalized conceptual scheme which, implicitly or explicitly, is employed.

Yes, my poetic inspiration is a social theorist of some repute, and a rather pooh-poohed theory. *sigh*

My favorite poem is a lovely little sonnet about atomic warfare.

Jane Cooper
After the Bomb Tests

The atom bellies like a cauliflower,
expands, expands, shoots up again, expands,
into ecclesiastical curves and towers
we pray to with our cupped and empty hands.
This is the old Hebraic-featured fear
we nursed before humility began,
our crown-on-crown or phallic parody
begat by man on the original sea.

The sea's delivered. Galvanized and smooth
she kills a tired ship left in her lap
---transfiguration---with a half-breath
settling like an animal in sleep.
So godhead takes the difficult form of love.
Where is the little myth we used to have?

 

[Tzara]

This is an interesting question because it asks about what poems interested me in writing. At least in my case, the answer is quite different from the answer I would give to the more typical question: What are your favorite poems?

The first poet who inspired me to write "poems" (quote marks very much intentional) was E. E. Cummings, whom I first read in high school. Cummings was the first poet I actually wanted to read, as opposed to being required to read for some class or another. The odd typography and phrasing captured my fancy, probably because even then (this was the early 70s) it seemed avant-garde, and at that age I so wanted to be sophisticated and adult.

He also could be very sappy, and boy howdy there are few creatures more sappy than lovelorn 17 year-olds. I ate up poems like this one:

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
................................................i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)​

Ah, the pleasures of wallowing in sentimental claptrap.

So anyway, once I finally managed to con some young thing into letting me carry her books and hold her hand in the halls of my school, I began to write imitation Cummings love poems, the less said about the better.

One interesting thing about this now is that, until recently, I would not have recognized this poem as a pretty damn straightforward Shakespearian sonnet. The typography gets you thinking that Cummings is, as I said above, "avant-garde," when in fact this is, other than typography and some odd phrasing, no more radical than Elizabeth Barrett Browning. (Perhaps not even as much, as I think hers are all Italian sonnets.)

But that love ended, I went off to college, and found other poets (notably Yeats and the Coleridge of "Kubla Khan") that I liked to read. I pretty much stopped trying to write poetry at all somewhere in college and wasted a few years trying to write fiction, which I do even more badly than writing poems.

Then I found the PF&D and became interested in trying to write poetry again. So I'd have to say that the poems that got me most interested in writing poetry were those I found here by various authors, many (most?) of whom are no longer here.

 

[champagne1982]

Song lyrics inspire me, even though i could never point to any one particular lyricist or poet, really. But hot damn... Carol King writes some strong stuff.

 

[vrosej10]

I got dragged, kicking in screaming, into poetry by dint of a required poetry writing course. I kept up doing it because I discovered that poetry taught me things about creating language for my fiction that were beyond valuable. I'm still in it because I can write decent enough poetry on demand and writing short stories on demand is painful and the results are very, very ugly. So, I'm a poet that prefers to write novels. I'd woe-is-me all over the place, but my use of language is ever so much richer for it.

I have poetic influences, but I'm told that T.S. Eliot (whom I abhor) is entrenched enough in canon to use allusions that no one understands without a reference library on hand, but I'm a nobody and therefore must have poetry that's pretty much self-contained, or at least, extravangtly clear to someone who is not Buddhist and hasn't ever had the desire to read Go West. I think they're all full of bollocks. If Eliot, who is the greatest waste of space in the literary canon, can do it, so can I. So there.

My largest poetic influence is a guy who wrote the following:

Yes, my poetic inspiration is a social theorist of some repute, and a rather pooh-poohed theory. *sigh*

My favorite poem is a lovely little sonnet about atomic warfare.

Jane Cooper
After the Bomb Tests

The atom bellies like a cauliflower,
expands, expands, shoots up again, expands,
into ecclesiastical curves and towers
we pray to with our cupped and empty hands.
This is the old Hebraic-featured fear
we nursed before humility began,
our crown-on-crown or phallic parody
begat by man on the original sea.

The sea's delivered. Galvanized and smooth
she kills a tired ship left in her lap
---transfiguration---with a half-breath
settling like an animal in sleep.
So godhead takes the difficult form of love.
Where is the little myth we used to have?

That's kind of like me; I went into my uni writing program intending to come out as a nonfiction writer and am probably going to leave a poet. Poetry wooed me and won me. I love wordplay. I rewrite pop song to amuse myself and my son. This is applied wordplay!

 

[sweepthefloor]

I have not been able to write much lately--
I went to see For Colored Girls yesterday and then went and read the book.
It is hard to read with the incorrect spelling but the spoken word aspect--hearing it has given me a shove to write.

 

[bronzeage]

It strains the memory to answer this question, but I knew there had to be an answer. After a while, I remembered "Song to Celia" by Ben Jonson. I was probably 12, maybe 13 years old. I found it in an old college literature reader. It was a huge book, over 3 inches thick. I think it was intended to cover every English lit class from freshmen to seniors.

The first line, "Drink to me only with thine eyes" was familiar. I think it was used in a perfume or jewelry commercial. I read it over and over, thinking to myself, "This is the way to do it." Any 12 year old boy could write a love letter. It happens all the time, but a poem would be different. It had to be more effective than riding past her with the bike's front tire off the ground.

Fortunately for the world, none of the poems inspired by Song to Celia have survived, but I remember most had the desired effect.

If anyone thinks asking a girl to dance is tough, they have never given her a poem while she is standing with her friends.

 

[Commendatore]

Buffalo Bill -ee cummings


Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeons justlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what I want to know is
how do you like your blue-eyed boy
Mister Death

 

[Commendatore]

dammit, it won't preserve the formatting.

 

[Sunndance07]

I like the sweet and simple poetry, both for reading and writing