Dubious wrote: ↑Sun May 06, 2018 9:04 am
Most modern poetry is fit for the landfill. There's no talent left to write it only clumsily expressed heaped-up cliches! Same with music.
Old times did not have a better fare of poets and musicians.
The classics we read in school and at college were the distilled products of hundreds and thousands of years. In the English language, there were maximum 100 great writers / poets in the last three hundred years. That's three per decade. And that's out of billions of people.
So if you find no good poets in today's world, it's little wonder. Poets are born ten a century.
My second favourite of the moderns is Andrew Szemeredy. Here's a poem by him:
Hot August Night
You sit on the porch if you’re over twelve
Or in a tree if you’re under sixteen.
You listen to the hum of the night.
The hazy heat embraces you.
It gives you the warmth
Your mother once breathed into you.
The night breathes... it breathes and lives.
It gives your skin the pleasure of a full stomach,
Your senses the pleasure of relaxed nothingness.
You talk to the darkness, without saying a word
And the trees and shrubs answer.
There’s a fizz in the grass, a scurrying nocturnal.
Your mind is lulled in the August night.
You think of molten memories: cherry-sweet lips, youth.
You play with your thoughts and let the night play along.
You trust the night. You release your feelings into it,
You let them enter the dark to be touched and felt by it
Before you’d retrieve them. You teach the night how to have feelings.
You breathe the warm air in,
And it breathes you into itself.
The unassuming disciple, confidante, soul mate.
You and the August night.
And another poem by Andrew Szemeredy, to quench your thirst for rhyming poetry:
Army Barracks Blues Syndrome
Monsoon rains beat on the tin roof of the shed
Where many a tear and uniform was shed
There stands a native girl, naked
Totally naked, beautiful, unabashed.
Moonsong, shine up from the depths
Hit the chords with despair and meth
There is no life in these army barracks
No caring, no bliss, no life, barring the rats.
I stand in disbelief. It is not true
That guys like me, like my sort, use
Your fear of our strength, our muscles ripped,
To tear your heart out then escape, unfettered.
We men remember that embrace too
Of the young native girl with the deep tattoo
In sickness, in health, in prosperity
We weep for you, girl, for all eternity.
The third and fourth favorite poets OF MODERN TIMES are tied for third and fourth place. They are Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger.