If you enjoy fanfiction, I would also recommend And This, Your Living Kiss by opal-bullets! It's technically Supernatural fic, but totally divorced from canon; no prior knowledge necessary. Get some Poetry 101 in the guise of reading about a famous poet secretly auditing a poetry class
what are your suggestions for starter poetry for people who dont have strong reading/analysis backgrounds
I've answered this a few times so I'm going to compile and expand them all into one post here.
I think if you haven't read much poetry before or aren't sure of your own tastes yet, then poetry anthologies are a great place to start: many of them will have a unifying theme so you can hone in based on a subject that interests you, or pick your way through something more general. I haven't read all of the ones below, but I have read most of them; the rest I came across in my own readings and added to my list either because I like the concept or am familiar with the editor(s) / their work:
Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times (ed. Nick Astley) & Being Alive: The Sequel to Staying Alive (there's two more books in this series, but I'm recommending these two just because it's where I started)
The Rattlebag (ed. Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes)
The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (ed. Ilya Kaminsky & Susan Harris)
The Essential Haiku, Versions of Basho, Buson and Issa (ed. Robert Hass)
A Book of Luminous Things (ed. Czesław Miłosz )
Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns by Robert Hass (this may be a good place to start if you're also looking for commentary on the poems themselves)
Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World(ed. Pádraig Ó'Tuama)
African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song (ed. Kevin Young)
The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (ed. Kevin Young)
Lifelines: Letters from Famous People about their Favourite Poems
The following lists are authors I love in one regard or another and is a small mix of different styles / time periods which I think are still fairly accessible regardless of what your reading background is! It's be no means exhaustice but hopefully it gives you even just a small glimpse of the range that's available so you can branch off and explore for yourself if any particular work speaks to you.
But in any case, for individual collections, I would try:
anything by Sara Teasdale
Devotions / Wild Geese / Felicity by Mary Oliver
Selected Poems and Prose by Christina Rossetti
Collected Poems by Langston Hughes
Where the Sidewalk Endsby Shel Silverstein
Morning Haiku by Sonia Sanchez
Revolutionary Letters, Diane di Prima
Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved by Gregory Orr
Rose: Poems by Li-Young Lee
A Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor / Barefoot Souls by Maram al-Masri
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
Tell Me: Poems / What is This Thing Called Love? by Kim Addonizio
The Trouble with Poetry by Billy Collins (Billy Collins is THE go-to for accessible / beginner poetry in my view so I think any of his collections would probably do)
Crush by Richard Siken
Rapture / The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy
The War Works Hard by Dunya Mikhail
Selected Poems by Walt Whitman
View with a Grain of Sand by Wislawa Szymborska
Collected Poems by Vasko Popa
Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas (this is a play, but Thomas is a poet and the language & structure is definitely poetic to me)
Bright Dead Things: Poems by Ada Limón
Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth by Warsan Shire,
Nostalgia, My Enemy: Selected Poems by Saadi Youssef
As for individual poems:
“Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver
[Dear The Vatican] erasure poem by Pádraig Ó'Tuama // "The Pedagogy of Conflict"
"Good Bones" by Maggie Smith
"The Author Writes the First Draft of His Weddings Vows (An erasure of Virginia Woolf's suicide letter to her husband, Leonard)" by Hanif Abdurraqib
"I Can Tell You a Story" by Chuck Carlise
"The Sciences Sing a Lullabye" by Albert Goldbarth
"One Last Poem for Richard" by Sandra Cisneros
"We Lived Happily During the War" by Ilya Kaminsky
“I’m Explaining a Few Things”by Pablo Neruda
"Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" //"Nothing Gold Can Stay"//"Out, Out--" by Robert Frost
"Tablets: I // II // III"by Dunya Mikhail
"What Were They Like?" by Denise Levertov
"Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden,
"The Patience of Ordinary Things" by Pat Schneider
“I, too” // "The Negro Speaks of Rivers” // "Harlem” // “Theme for English B” by Langston Hughes
“The Mower” // "The Trees" // "High Windows" by Philip Larkin
“The Leash” // “Love Poem with Apologies for My Appearance” // "Downhearted" by Ada Limón
“The Flea” by John Donne
"The Last Rose of Summer" by Thomas Moore
"Beauty" // "Please don't" // "How it Adds Up" by Tony Hoagland
“My Friend Yeshi” by Alice Walker
"De Humanis Corporis Fabrica"byJohn Burnside
“What Do Women Want?” // “For Desire” // "Stolen Moments" // "The Numbers" by Kim Addonizio
“Hummingbird” // "For Tess" by Raymond Carver
"The Two-Headed Calf" by Laura Gilpin
“Bleecker Street, Summer” by Derek Walcott
“Dirge Without Music” // "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed" by Edna St. Vincent Millay
“Digging” // “Mid-Term Break” // “The Rain Stick” // "Blackberry Picking" // "Twice Shy" by Seamus Heaney
“Dulce Et Decorum Est”by Wilfred Owen
“Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition”by Wislawa Szymborska
"Hour" //"Medusa" byCarol Ann Duffy
“The More Loving One” // “Musée des Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden
“Small Kindnesses” // "Feeding the Worms" by Danusha Laméris
"Down by the Salley Gardens” // “The Stolen Child” by W.B. Yeats
"The Thing Is" by Ellen Bass
"The Last Love Letter from an Entymologist" by Jared Singer
"[i like my body when it is with your]" by e.e. cummings
"Try to Praise the Mutilated World" by Adam Zagajewski
"The Cinnamon Peeler" by Michael Ondaatje
"Last Night I Dreamed I Made Myself" by Paige Lewis
"A Dream Within a Dream" // "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe (highly recommend reading the last one out loud or listening to it recited)
"Ars Poetica?" // "Encounter" // "A Song on the End of the World"by Czeslaw Milosz
"Wandering Around an Albequerque Airport Terminal” // "Two Countries” // "Kindness” by Naoimi Shihab Nye
"Slow Dance” by Matthew Dickman
"The Archipelago of Kisses" // "The Quiet World" by Jeffrey McDaniel
"Mimesis" by Fady Joudah
"The Great Fires" // "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" // "Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert
"The Mermaid" // "Virtuosi" by Lisel Mueller
"Macrophobia (Fear of Waiting)" by Jamaal May
"Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong" by Ocean Vuong
"Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou
I would also recommend spending some times with essays, interviews, or other non-fiction, creative or otherwise (especially by other poets) if you want to broaden and improve how you read poetry; they can help give you a wider idea of the landscape behind and beyond the actual poems themselves, or even just let you acquaint yourself with how particular writers see and describe things in the world around them. The following are some of my favourites:
Upstream: Essays by Mary Oliver
"Theory and Play of the Duende" by Federico García Lorca
"The White Bird" and "Some Notes on Song" by John Berger
In That Great River: A Notebook by Anna Kamienska
A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib
The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
"Of Strangeness That Wakes Us" and "Still Dancing: An Interview with Ilya Kaminsky" by Ilya Kaminsky
"The Sentence is a Lonely Place" by Garielle Lutz
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon by Mark Doty
Paris, When It's Naked by Etel Adnan
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My favorite kind of superhero comic. Happy Hanukkah!
Happy Hanukkah, everyone, from these two jerks! I’m posting this a little early this year. Line art by the amazing Ro Stein & Ted Brandt, and colour art by @deecunniffe.
I want to point out what a technical achievement this story is on the art side. There’s a real joy to creating a whole story in eight panels, but this? This is some magic. We introduce four new characters. In panel 5, SIX PEOPLE are talking. SIX. In the world of comics, that’s almost un-doable.
Yet Ro and Ted arranged everything so the conversations flow and are sensibly grouped, all the “acting” is fantastic, and then Dee laid on top these beautiful, almost fairytale colours – look at the subtle work, the blush in Henry’s cheeks, Frank’s five o-clock shadow, the shine of the wine bottle’s glass surface, the light texturing in the backgrounds… and of course the snow! This is some first-class illustration work on an incredibly hard script. (I fear Ro and Ted always get me at my worst – my very formalist script for them in the 24 Panels anthology was no cakewalk either. (The problem is, they’re just so damn good at it… check out their work on the Image comic Crowded!)
As always, if you like what we do in Hells Kitchen Movie Club, consider donating a little to a veteran’s charity.
(I also have a thriller novel I’m crowdfunding, please check it out, we are more than halfway there. The book is all written…)
Previously in Hell: cover image // 01 // 02 // 03 // Xmas // 04 // 05 // 06 // 07 // Hanukkah // That time the Punisher’s creator gave us a thumbs-up // twitter // insta
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