Poems

One of the things I’ve been asked to do before I start at the university in September is read a poem every day for 2 weeks or so then find poems I like and find out why I like them.

I do not have much experience with English speaking poets except for those I encountered when I did my first 60 credits in English at the university.

I remember really falling for 2 poems by William Carlos Williams:

The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glaced with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

This Is Just to Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

It’s hard saying why you like one poem and not another one. For me I think the poems that work best are those that are like sentences or sometimes just sighs taken out of someone’s every day life, they just seem so real, so touchable.

I am pretty sure about what I don’t like in poems: when they’re just too long! If you have that much to tell, write a short story! I always skip long poems, they just look so boring, to me poems are something that short, well formulated, often with a play of words, sometimes funny, sometimes very beautiful, but never something that goes on and on page after page!

I do of course sometimes write poems myself, but I’m not very good at it. What I want to do with my poems is paint a picture with words so that others by reading this picture will experience some of the same feelings I had when I wrote it. My poems are usually very emotional, they are usually written when I feel something very strong: love, hate, sorrow, emptiness, loneliness….
They are like outburst of emotions on paper. And when the urge to write a poem comes over me it’s hard to hold back, it just feels so fulfilling to put my strong emotions in words on paper.

One of the most beautiful and saddest poems I know is by W.H.Auden: “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone” (“Funeral blues”).
I think perhaps one of the reasons why it touches me so much is that the first time I heard it was in a movie: “Four weddings and a funeral” and it was read at the funeral and it was just so fitting. Somehow, even though it is so extremely sad, it’s also such an outburst of love, every time I read it it makes the hair stand on my arms; it’s like the ultimate love poem. A friend of mine who read it she said that reading a poem like this really makes you wish that someone would some day love you just as much, I totally agree.

“Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone”
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public
doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West
My working week and my Sunday rest
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood
For nothing now can ever come to any good.