Poems I Love
Submitted by shan2001 on Sun, 08/21/2005 - 05:52
Tags:
- Ma Rainey by Sterling Brown
- The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes
- If We Must Die by Claude McKay
- For My People by Margaret Walker
- I Stand Here Ironing by Tillie Olsen (Yes, I know that it is technically a short story, but it is easily poetry to me.)
- The Negro Speaks of Rivers by Langston Hughes
- Phenomenal Woman by Maya Angelou
- Still I Rise by Maya Angelou
- Butcher Shop by Charles Simic
- I, Too, Sing America by Langston Hughes
- I Wrote a Good Omelete by Nikki Giovanni
- Karintha by Jean Toomer
- the White House by Claude McKay
Author Comments:
Will add to this list as I remember them, or find new ones. I've never really been a fan of poetry-- even while I was into creative writing, but when a poem jumps out at me-- it really jumps and speaks. When you find a really good poem, you can feel it. Really, really feel it. I don't like them lofty and verbose-- I like them when they speak.
I love Yusef Komunyakaa. I really like Slam, Dunk, & Hook... perhaps because of the Nike reference (lord forgive me.) A lot of his stuff reminds me of what I learned while riding my bike when I was twelve.
I also like Maya Angelou's The Rock Cries Out To Us Today... perhaps because it reminds me about President Clinton. Nobody finishes off a poem like she does. And nobody speaks like Langston Hughes. His Mother To Son speaks out loud. And reminds me that the Terence Blanchard-Donald Harrison Quintet did a great album called "Crystal Stair". (Great but difficult... and their other albums include "Discernment" and "Black Pearl".) Which reminds me of Hughes's Trumpet Player: 52nd Street. Which brings me back to Komunyakaa for the saxophone solo. It reminds me of what I learned once I outgrew my bike.
This one goes out to bertie .
February in Sydney by Yusef Komunyakaa
Dexter Gordon's tenor sax
plays "April in Paris"
inside my head all the way back
on the bus from Double Bay.
Round Midnight, the '50's,
cool cobblestone streets
resound footsteps of Bebop
musicians with whiskey-laced voices
from a boundless dream in French.
Bud, Prez, Webster, & The Hawk,
their names run together riffs.
Painful gods jive talk through
bloodstained reeds & shiny brass
where music is an anesthetic.
Unreadable faces from the human void
float like torn pages across the bus
windows. An old anger drips into my throat,
& I try thinking something good,
letting the precious bad
settle to the salty bottom.
Another scene keeps repeating itself:
I emerge from the dark theatre,
passing a woman who grabs her red purse
& hugs it to her like a heart attack.
Tremolo. Dexter comes back to rest
behind my eyelids. A loneliness
lingers like a silver needle
under my black skin,
as I try to feel how it is
to scream for help through a horn.
All great poems-- I love most of the poems I've read of Maya Angelou and Hughes. I really wasn't familiar with Yusef Komunyakaa, but that poem you posted is great. I'll have to read more by him. :)