Which poet should read at the inauguration?

[XemaSab]

:shrug:

[Haole Girl]

1. I just can't "count the chickens before they hatch"

As much as I'd love to, I've learned not to. Sigh.

[XemaSab]

2. Hey, it could be the McCain inauguration I'm talking about

:P

[Haole Girl]

3. Oh yeah

I guess it could be. ;-)

[cwydro]

13. I don't dare either.

But I would go with Maya Angelou.

[fudge stripe cookays]

4. Maya Angelou, of course.

But I don't wanna count chickens either, the way things in WV are going already.

[RetroLounge]

6. Maya Angelou? She said "Poet"

:hide:

RL

[fudge stripe cookays]

11. Them's fightin words, sparky. n/t

[mitchum]

27. A man after my own heart...

her memoirs are great (and I love her voice), but she is a wretched poet

[XemaSab]

34. .

;)

[wain]

5. RL n/t

[RetroLounge]

7. RL?

Radio Lady is a Poet too?

Who knew?

:shrug:

:hi:

RL

[EFerrari]

8. Leslie Marmon Silko

Ceremony

I will tell you something about stories,

They aren't just for entertainment.
Don't be fooled
They are all we have, you see,
all we have to fight off illness and death.
You don't have anything
if you don't have the stories.
Their evil is mighty
but it can't stand up to our stories.
So they try to destroy the stories
let the stories be confused or forgotten
They would like that
They would be happy
Because we would be defenseless then.

[EFerrari]

9. dupe

[skooooo]

10. Bob Dylan!

[machI]

36. Bob Dylan would be an electrifying choice

There would be shivers running up my spine during his oration

[taterguy]

12. Bukowski

Obviously

[RetroLounge]

14. Oooh, dead drunk poets are the best!

Maybe Dylan Thomas too...

:hi:

RL

[Chan790]

25. There's always Ferlinghetti.

I think he might live forever. He's 89 now.


Populist Manifesto No. 1

Poets, come out of your closets,
Open your windows, open your doors,
You have been holed-up too long
in your closed worlds.
Come down, come down
from your Russian Hills and Telegraph Hills,
your Beacon Hills and your Chapel Hills,
your Mount Analogues and Montparnasses,
down from your foothills and mountains,
out of your teepees and domes.
The trees are still falling
and we’ll to the woods no more.
No time now for sitting in them
As man burns down his own house
to roast his pig
No more chanting Hare Krishna
while Rome burns.
San Francisco’s burning,
Mayakovsky’s Moscow’s burning
the fossil-fuels of life.
Night & the Horse approaches
eating light, heat & power,
and the clouds have trousers.
No time now for the artist to hide
above, beyond, behind the scenes,
indifferent, paring his fingernails,
refining himself out of existence.
No time now for our little literary games,
no time now for our paranoias & hypochondrias,
no time now for fear & loathing,
time now only for light & love.
We have seen the best minds of our generation
destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.
Poetry isn’t a secret society,
It isn’t a temple either.
Secret words & chants won’t do any longer.
The hour of oming is over,
the time of keening come,
a time for keening & rejoicing
over the coming end
of industrial civilization
which is bad for earth & Man.
Time now to face outward
in the full lotus position
with eyes wide open,
Time now to open your mouths
with a new open speech,
time now to communicate with all sentient beings,
All you ‘Poets of the Cities’
hung in museums including myself,
All you poet’s poets writing poetry
about poetry,
All you poetry workshop poets
in the boondock heart of America,
All you housebroken Ezra Pounds,
All you far-out freaked-out cut-up poets,
All you pre-stressed Concrete poets,
All you cunnilingual poets,
All you pay-toilet poets groaning with graffiti,
All you A-train swingers who never swing on birches,
All you masters of the sawmill haiku in the Siberias of America,
All you eyeless unrealists,
All you self-occulting supersurrealists,
All you bedroom visionaries and closet agitpropagators,
All you Groucho Marxist poets
and leisure-class Comrades
who lie around all day and talk about the workingclass proletariat,
All you Catholic anarchists of poetry,
All you Black Mountaineers of poetry,
All you Boston Brahims and Bolinas bucolics,
All you den mothers of poetry,
All you zen brothers of poetry,
All you suicide lovers of poetry,
All you hairy professors of poesie,
All you poetry reviewers
drinking the blood of the poet,
All you Poetry Police -
Where are Whitman’s wild children,
where the great voices speaking out
with a sense of sweetness and sublimity,
where the great’new vision,
the great world-view,
the high prophetic song
of the immense earth
and all that sings in it
And our relations to it -
Poets, descend
to the street of the world once more
And open your minds & eyes
with the old visual delight,
Clear your throat and speak up,
Poetry is dead, long live poetry
with terrible eyes and buffalo strength.
Don’t wait for the Revolution
or it’ll happen without you,
Stop mumbling and speak out
with a new wide-open poetry
with a new commonsensual ‘public surface’
with other subjective levels
or other subversive levels,
a tuning fork in the inner ear
to strike below the surface.
Of your own sweet Self still sing
yet utter ‘the word en-masse -
Poetry the common carrier
for the transportation of the public
to higher places
than other wheels can carry it.
Poetry still falls from the skies
into our streets still open.
They haven’t put up the barricades, yet,
the streets still alive with faces,
lovely men & women still walking there,
still lovely creatures everywhere,
in the eyes of all the secret of all
still buried there,
Whitman’s wild children still sleeping there,
Awake and walk in the open air.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

[RetroLounge]

29. Oh, that is nice!

I may have to post that in a Daily Poem Thread...

:hi:

RL

[otherlander]

30. "No more chanting Hare Krishna while Rome burns."

:thumbsup:

[crispini]

40. Dayum! He's still alive?

Wow. Nice piece.

[Lyric]

15. Louise Gluck, Sharon Olds, or the current Poet Laureate of the U.S.

Kay Ryan. :hi:

[MissMillie]

16. California Peggy!!!!!

I mean, could there be a better choice?

[jonnyblitz]

24. yeah, she could read some of her porn poetry.

:rofl:

[Pierre.Suave]

26. I was going to suggest that same thing

I see someone beat me to it.

[mainegreen]

17. As a gesture to our Canadian brethren, I suggest Chuggo.

[BlueIris]

18. I keep hoping Obama snags Yusef Komunyakaa as the next inaugural poet/Poet Laureate.

He would be our first male African-American Poet Laureate.

[Enrique]

19. Ruth Stone

93 years old, winner of the 2002 National Book Award.

[Fire Walk With Me]

20. Nipsey Russell.

[DS1]

21. There's no time for poets

Swear the man in and let him get to business!

[Rabrrrrrr]

22. H.P. Lovecraft

There is snow on the ground,
And the valleys are cold,
And a midnight profound
Blackly squats o'er the wold;
But a light on the hilltops half-seen hints of feastings un- hallowed and old.

There is death in the clouds,
There is fear in the night,
For the dead in their shrouds
Hail the sin's turning flight.
And chant wild in the woods as they dance round a Yule- altar fungous and white.

To no gale of Earth's kind
Sways the forest of oak,
Where the sick boughs entwined
By mad mistletoes choke,
For these pow'rs are the pow'rs of the dark, from the graves of the lost Druid-folk.

[Orrex]

35. Good call. Druid-folk get too little mention at most inaugurations.

IA! Cthulhu!

[SmokingJacket]

23. The Poet Laureate, of course.

That would be Kay Ryan. I hope she does, though technically she doesn't have to.

[old mark]

28. Delmore Schwartz....

....but he's dead.


mark

[otherlander]

31. Di Prima.

Because what is revolution but lover spelled backwards?

[Orsino]

32. David Alan Grier, of course.

http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=187055

[billyskank]

33. Chuggo.

Obviously.

[JVS]

37. Yeah!

[greendog]

38. amiri baraka

who blew up america?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnz5YQ0F1vY

[jeff30997]

39. Robert Frost.

At least it should be.:)

[kentauros]

41. Rumi

That's the only poet that comes to mind that I've ever cared to read ;)

[FloridaJudy]

42. Billy Collins

Love his stuff, and Maya Angelou's already done it at Clinton's inauguration.

[LanternWaste]

43. Sigfried Sassoon - Suicide in the Trenches

Sigfried Sassoon - Suicide in the Trenches. To remind us that John Wayne movies are just movies...



I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.


You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.