Introduction
These are poems that I love, or love parts of.
* * *
In my first-year English class, my tutor asked:
Who here actually reads poetry
for pleasure? Not just one or two poems that you’ve known since
you were a child, but new poems?
I was surprised when I was the only person in the room to raise my
hand. Even the tutor, whom I knew to be a highly literate person, with a
taste for works that I considered ‘difficult’, kept her hands down. I
was the only person, in a group that had already self-selected to study
literature, who actually sought out new poems to read.
I’d always thought I read very little new poetry (even felt rather
guilty at my own lack of adventurousness in this) so finding that the
rest of the room thought seeking out any new
poems was unusual seriously changed my self-image. I was someone who
read poetry, even if I didn’t do it all that much.
I still don’t read that much new poetry (a couple of books a year and occasional poems on poetry sites)
and I generally prefer anthologies to whole books by single poets, but
I’ve always enjoyed being introduced to new poems. I often find new poems
in short quotations in prose works, then seek them out later to take
in the whole work. This is how I found Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market: as four lines in a children’s book that was given me by that very tutor (Brian Froud’s Faeries):
We must not look at goblin men
We must not buy their fruits
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their thirsty, hungry roots?
I came upon Philip Sidney’s My True-love Hath My Heart in Dorothy Sayers’ beautiful examination of marriage, Busman’s Honeymoon.
The line that caught me was the title, and to be honest, I don’t really
remember much of the rest of the poem now, although I’ve read it many
times, especially while typesetting it for the bound copy of my
wedding ceremony.
The other main way I tend to find new poems is by having them read or
recited to me by someone else. My mother sold me on Katherine
Mansfield’s The Town between the Hills,
and I believe she was taught to love it by her mother. My father
gives an inspiringly good reading of Gregory Corso’s Marriage. It’s easy to believe he’s actually retelling his own thoughts of
twenty-five or thirty years ago. He also introduced me to ee
cummings’ anyone lived in a prettyhow town,
but now, after over a decade’s occasional recitations for friends, I
find I prefer my own reading of this poem to my Dad’s. In the
Nursery’s lovely CD Anatomy of a Poet
also gave me new works in the discovered-through-recitation category:
it reminded me of James Elroy Flecker and introduced me to Ernest Dowson.
The anthologies that have influenced me most strongly are those by
Louis Untermeyer (either not a good judge of his own poetry or not a
very good poet, but certainly a man with great taste in poetry)
and The Colour of Saying (an anthology of the verse that Dylan Thomas chose to recite). Both
were in my parent’s library, and I now have my own copies of both.
Untermeyer introduced me to the classics: La Belle Dame sans Merci, Blake’s Tiger,
and Byron, as well as Ogden Nash’s children’s poems.
Thomas’s selections included pieces by W.H. Auden (a huge
discovery for me) and a wonderful bit of social commentary
called Psalm of Montreal, which I’ve never yet managed to memorise, much as I’d like to.
I love memorising poetry. The close reading that develops as I focus
on each individual line and try to work out the best way to say it
increases the depth of my appreciation of the work, both of its meaning
and its sounds, and it’s wonderful to have it on tap whenever I feel
like repeating the experience, without having to find a book or
internet access to remind myself of how it goes. Works that I recite are marked with an asterix.
I’ve put these pages here largely to give myself ready access to my
favourite poems, but I thought I’d make them public so that people who
have similar taste in poetry to me would be able to use the pages to
find new poems that they’d have a high chance of enjoying. If an author
is listed, but has no poems up, this is because they’re a poet I really
like, even though I haven’t posted a particular piece yet. This page is
definitely a work in progress.
Some of the works are accompanied by my thoughts about them, or
descriptions of why I like them. Others, sometimes because I’m honestly
not sure and sometimes because I haven’t written anything yet, are
given without comment. Either way, I hope you enjoy them, and I’d be
interested to read your comments on any poem here that you feel like
writing to me about.
Poems that are still in copyright according to New Zealand law are
not provided (the links are currently simply broken, but I do hope to
come up with a better solution in the long term).
Maire K. C. Smith
Wellington
July 2006