walkingshadow | (no subject)

In lieu of a poetry writing assignment, for the last week of class we're supposed to type up and hand in our favorite poem. That doesn't strike me as fair. I asked Charles how I was supposed to pick. He said he understood, the way some poems stick with you forever, and how you can read a poem every day for a month or a year and then let it fall away, and poems that you rediscover and knock the wind out of you all over again. He said I could date it, tell him when it was my favorite. Like The Second Coming, for a month last summer. Or The Hollow Men, all of junior year. I hate making decisions. Here's an abbreviated list, in no particular order.

The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot
Poem in October, Dylan Thomas
Musée des Beaux Arts, W.H. Auden
Acquainted With the Night, Robert Frost
Ars Poetica, Archibald MacLeish
The Dance, William Carlos Williams
The Death of a Soldier, Wallace Stevens
Dulce et Decorum Est, Wilfred Owen
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Robert Frost
Spinster, Sylvia Plath
I Knew a Woman, Theodore Roethke
Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Second Coming, W.B. Yeats
You, Andrew Marvell, Archibald MacLeish
Fern Hill, Dylan Thomas
When I Have Fears, John Keats
Annabel Lee, Edgar Allan Poe
Channel Firing, Thomas Hardy
Sailing to Byzantium, W.B. Yeats
The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost
Once by the Pacific, Robert Frost
The Snow Man, Wallace Stevens
The People Yes, #10, 16, 23, 34, 49, 56, 57, 67, 78, 80, 81, Carl Sandburg
The Garden, Ezra Pound
Pantoum, John Ashbery
Goods, Carl Phillips
Richard Cory, Edward Arlington Robinson
Riposte, William Carlos Williams
The Spider's Web, E.B. White

And I didn't even mention E.E. Cummings or Ferlinghetti or Pablo Neruda, and I have to choose, and all I can do is stare and read over and over again.