All month long we’ve been polling staff here to find out everyone’s favorite poems, and now we want to hear from YOU – what’s your all-time favorite poem? Which piece of verse do you find yourself returning to again and again? If you were trapped on a desert island with only one poem in your pocket…..you get it.
Let us know in the comments below. We’ll pick three and post them on the blog at the end of the week. As a thank you for sharing, we’re giving away three different poetry broadsides (pictured above), including one signed by Billy Collins and one of a poem called X-ray that actually looks like an X-ray (and is really cool.) All three are perfect for framing and demonstrating to the world at large that you are indeed a lover of poetry.
So tell us – what poem can you not live without?
BookPeople 
The current poem I simply cannot live without would have to be ‘Reasons to Survive November” by Tony Hoagland, from his book What Narcissism Means To Me.
Years ago I memorized this Naomi Shihab Nye poem to tell myself in moments of sadness, ennui, road rage, etc. It never fails to be the perfect straight-backed chair, the raft to sweep me up.
You Know Who You Are
By Naomi Shihab Nye
Why do your poems comfort me, I ask myself.
Because they are upright, like straight-backed chairs.
I can sit in them and study the world as if it too
were simple and upright.
Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words
and not one of them can save me.
Your poems come in like a raft, logs tied together,
they float.
I want to tell you about the afternoon
I floated on your poems
all the way from Durango Street to Broadway.
Fathers were paddling on the river with their small sons.
Three Mexican boys chased each other outside the library.
Everyone seemed to have some task, some occupation,
while I wandered uselessly in the streets I claim to love.
Suddenly I felt the precise body of your poems beneath me,
like a raft, I felt words as something portable again,
a cup, a newspaper, a pin.
everything happening had a light around it,
not the light of Catholic miracles,
the blunt light of a Saturday afternoon.
light in a world that rushes forward with us or without us.
I wanted to stop and gather up the blocks behind me
in this light, but it doesn’t work.
You keep walking, lifting one foot, then the other,
saying “This is what I need to remember”
and then hoping you can.
When Death Comes by Mary Oliver
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
In case you just wanted the title …
“When Death Comes” by Mary Oliver
My favorite poem is, in fact, “Litany” by Billy Collins. I even have it framed over my Favorites bookcase.
“Youth” — WS Merwin
Through all of youth I was looking for you
without knowing what I was looking for
or what to call you I think I did not
even know I was looking how would I
have known you when I saw you as I did
time after time when you appeared to me
as you did naked offering yourself
entirely at that moment and you let
me breathe you touch you taste you knowing
no more than I did and only when I
began to think of losing you did I
recognize you when you were already
part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you
from what we cannot hold the stars are made
The Layers
Stanley Kunitz
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens.
Mark, you’re our winner for April 28th! Send an email to online@bookpeople.com to claim your prize.
I’m really in love with Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke With You”. It’s so real and I could listen to him say it over and over (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDLwivcpFe8 if you’ve never seen/heard it).
Another favorite of mine is “Recuerdo” by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
“The Quiet World”
By Jeffrey McDaniel
(from his book The Forgiveness Parade)
In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.
When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.
Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.
When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.
I also like Litany by Billy Collins, and I like the way it is recited here:
Oh, yes! I’d forgotten about this! Thank you for posting it, this is so good.
The bee is such a busy soul,
he has no time for birth control.
That is why, in times like these,
there are so many sons of bees.
Hard to pick just one, really hard…”Tonight I Can Write The Saddest Lines” by Pablo Neruda.
Absolute favorite is “Mindful” by Mary Oliver. I always find new bits of inspiration when I read it.
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
— James Wright