I have been looking for good poets to read recently also. I started with Bukowski as well and then kind of fumbled around on the internet for other stuff to like. I like a lot of the stuff I read by Sylvia Plath. Here's (an early) one of hers:
To Eva Descending the Stair
A Villanelle
Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear;
The wheels revolve, the universe keeps running.
(Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.)
The asteroids turn traitor in the air,
And planets plot with old elliptic cunning;
Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear.
Red the unraveled rose sings in your hair:
Blood springs eternal if the heart be burning.
(Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.)
Cryptic stars wind up the atmosphere,
In solar schemes the tilted suns go turning;
Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear.
Loud the immortal nightingales declare:
Love flames forever if the flesh be yearning.
(Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.)
Circling zodiac compels the year.
Intolerant beauty never will be learning.
Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear.
(Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.)
I like villanelles, and I think Plath wrote at least a couple. Eventually she killed herself in an oven. :[
There's also a couple of New Zealand poets I read at high school and still rather enjoy. James K Baxter is a satirical kind of hippie guy.
He has this one poem which is essentially him tearing the shit out of the city I live in ("an elephant's asshole surrounded by blue-black haemorrhoids" iirc) , and another in which he criticises otago university's banning of mixed flatting.
Glenn Colquhoun is a GP, whose highly accessible collection of poems "Playing God" was the first book of poetry I ever read in its entirety, and is probably the reason I'm still interested in looking for more poems to read. Here's a poem from that:
To the girl who stood beside me
at the check-out counter of Whitcoulls
bookstore in Hamilton on Tuesday
For ten seconds I fell
in love with you.
The first second we met.
You were buying recipes.
The second second we turned,
Taking pieces of each other out of our eyes.
The third second we held each other gently.
Your skin was a small kitten playing with a curtain.
The fourth second we kissed.
Front gates clicked against our fence.
In the fifth second we married.
Your dress was made of Nikau palm.
The sixth second we built a house beside a lake
It was never tidy and the grass was up to our knees.
The seventh second we argued:
About toothpaste and poetry
and who would put out the rubbish.
The eighth second we grew fat and happy
and laid on the ground after eating.
Your stomach wriggled with a round child.
In the ninth second we were old in the same garden
of the same house by the same lake in the same love.
The tenth second we said goodbye.
Your hand slipped away from mine but
seemed to me like something I could feel.
We passed again beside each other without turning
as though we had somehow only met at the checkout
counter of Whitcoull's bookstore in Hamilton
on a faintly blue September Tuesday.
Is poetry just for language perv-os though? it seems this way To Me. I don't get the attraction of taking a story and putting it in a form, without context, that minimises detail and all of that for the sake of form and and aethetics. Maybe poetry is for wordsmiths and I just am not one.
Maybe they are novels for people with short attention spans. I have a very short attention span and hardly ever finish novels I start reading, so I like reading poems because you can sort of have the whole thing at once. Although I like books about facts and science and things more than both. That makes me think maybe there's something wrong with me.
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[req] good poets