I didn't used to be a fan of poetry, but it's now become my favorite thing to read. My favorite poet is Edwin Arlington Robinson, other poets I like are William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Austin Dobson, Ezra Pound, Shelley, Keats, Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Allen Ginsberg and Joseph S. Salemi, as well as some poets I know like Jeanette Powers, Chloe Wagner, Jason Ryberg & Victor Smith(R.I.P). I am a big fan of traditional forms, and as a conversation starter, here's an interview with Joseph S. Salemi, a "new formalist" poet, on why he thinks that the state of poetry today is moribund:

http://www.writingshow.com/podcasts/2008/02242008.html

I have to admit that on poetry I am a greatest hits kind of guy. I own a few collected works, but Yeats and Shakespeare are the only two I have read a majority of. I also own some anthologies and single volumes, and like quite a bit of them. John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins particularly knock me out.

I adore poetry and as a English professor, it's my stock in trade. But that doesn't mean I can wrap my head around all of it. My favorites tend to be older poets, with Shakespeare (The Sonnets above all), Donne, Pope, Browning, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Rossetti, Dickinson, Pushkin, and most of the great Harlem Renaissance poets (Cullen, Hughes, Toomer, etc.). Among more modern poets I enjoy Plath, Heaney, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva, and Yevtushenko (who I was fortunate enough to study with). Very few things make me as happy as a good poem that employs language in a magical, transformative way.

The first straight poetry I've read, in a long time is Walt Whitman. I might get back into reading Edgar Allen Poe eventually. I don't know if there is a preferred form I prefer. I have a thing for non rhyming semi-free form poetry. Lyrical, I guess you could call it.

Cool responses. I've been researching William Carlos Williams, and DL-ed some audiobook versions of some early poems of his, for a monthly poetry discussion at The Writer's Place here in Kansas City. Last week we met to talk about Ezra Pound, and surprisingly I was the most knowledgeable about Pound in the room thanks to an episode of the Entitled Opinions podcast from 2005 with Marjorie Perloff which was all about Pound. I'll need to actually work to prepare for the next one, but I like Williams' work so far, except I didn't warm to Paterson the way I have to his earlier work. Thanks again everyone for favoring this thread.

I've also been increasingly fascinated by prose poems as well. Though at the moment, I'm not sure which author to go to. I mean more in terms of metaphor, simile, alliteration. Things that take a short moment, and make it feel like an eternity.^^

Yep. I've written some poems as well as songs, and wish I was more prolific, but it takes forever to get that stuff just right. Especially poetry, where you have no music to save your bacon if the words are not working out.

Thanks for joining, Kate, and everyone else who's joined. Sorry I haven't been in the group lately, haven't finished too many books, so haven't been on Booklikes much. Don't let that stop you from posting, though.