In the latest episode of my podcast, Cocktail Party Takeaways, I take on T.S. Eliot's poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Unlike my other episodes, this one treads lightly. I don't try to analyze the poem to death, or provide a lot of insider information about the poem's hidden meanings, its many allusions, or even its problematic creator. My main takeaway? Poetry is supposed to be obtuse. If you can get past needing to know what it's "about," shake loose that need to control a thing by knowing everything, you will have unlocked the magic of words in verse. After all, you don't need to understand the sea to appreciate its beauty.
In the podcast, I tell a story about a remarkable high school student I had the pleasure of knowing, and the gift he gave me: A thin little paperback of T.S. Eliot's poems, annotated and illustrated by the student as he sat one evening in a Paris cafe. I said I would publish pictures of the book, and so here they are.
I also promised to provide a list of some of my favorite poems. This is a hasty assemblage that surely leaves out some poet near and dear to me who momentarily slips my mind. Still, treasures abound, even in an incomplete collection of poems.
Most can be found on Poetry Foundation and poets.org
“The Layers,” by Stanley Kunitz
1540, 1129, 249, by Emily Dickinson
“13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” by Wallace Stevens
“Let America be America Again,” by Langston Hughes
“Washing the Elephant,” by Barbara Ras
“The Fish,” by Elizabeth Bishop
“Tattoo,” by Ted Kooser
“When You Are Old,” by William Butler Yeats
“Nothing Gold Can Stay,” by Robert Frost
“A Step Away from Them,” by Frank O’Hara
“I carry your heart with me,” by e.e. cummings
“Wait,” by Galway Kinnell
“The Peace of Wild Things,” by Wendell Berry
“Her Kind,” by Anne Sexton
“The Sacred,” by Stephen Dunn
“Oh Small Sad Ecstasy of Love,” by Anne Carson
"Ode to Man," by Anne Carson
“The Guest House,” by Rumi
“What Lips These Lips Have Kissed,” by Eda St. Vincent Millay
"American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin," by Terrance Hayes
"The Hollow Men," by T.S. Eliot
"The Four Quartets," by T.S. Eliot
"Wild Geese," by Mary Oliver
"Mindful," by Mary Oliver
"Batter My Heart, Three Person'd God," by John Donne
"Paradise Lost," by John Milton
"The Hill We Climb," by Amanda Gorman
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