Had a lively conversation on FB last night, in which we all offered up some of our favorite poets. I volunteered to post our list, so others might add to it.

Mary Oliver: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems

Rainer Marie Rilke: “Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

Antonio Machado: “In order to write poetry, you must first invent a poet who will write it.”
― Antonio Machado

Francis Ponge: “My mother was an admirer of a little-known French writer whose name was Francis Ponge, a sort of parody name. Ponge was a man after my mother’s own heart. Ponge wrote in minute detail about the appearance of such things as sand and mimosa and soap. Soap particularly fascinated him. Ponge wrote long essays on the appearance of soap, page after page of descriptions of soap. He wrote a novel titled Soap. My mother translated some of his poetry. This also concerned soap.” – Jonathan Miller, in ‘Among Chickens’, Granta (159)

Rumi: “I want to see you.

Know your voice.

Recognize you when you
first come ’round the corner.

Sense your scent when I come
into a room you’ve just left.

Know the lift of your heel,
the glide of your foot.

Become familiar with the way
you purse your lips
then let them part,
just the slightest bit,
when I lean in to your space
and kiss you.

I want to know the joy
of how you whisper
“more”
― Rumi

William Stafford: “I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.”
― William Edgar Stafford

Emerson: “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Naomi Shihab Nye:  Elaine Mansfield and her late husband, Vic, opened (E) and closed (V) their books with the exceptional poem, “Kindness.”

Here is another special Nye poem that I love:

“I’m like the weather, never really can predict when this rain cloud’s gonna burst; when it’s the high or it’s the low, when you might need a light jacket.

Sometimes I’m the slush that sticks to the bottom of your work pants, but I can easily be the melting snowflakes clinging to your long lashes.

I know that some people like:

sunny and seventy-five,
sunny and seventy-five,
sunny and seventy-five,

but you take me as I am and never
forget to pack an umbrella.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets under 25

Neruda: “I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

Sharon Olds: 

”… to a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one another, love of language itself, love of sound, love of singing itself, and love of the other birds.”

Sharon Olds (b. 1942), U.S. poet. As quoted in Listen to Their Voices, ch. 18 (1993). On why writing poetry, though “always difficult,” is easier than not writing it.

John O’Donohue:  “If you send out goodness from yourself, or if you share that which is happy or good within you, it will all come back to you multiplied ten thousand times. In the kingdom of love there is no competition; there is no possessiveness or control. The more love you give away, the more love you will have.”
Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

David Whyte: “The poet lives and writes at the frontier between deep internal experience and the revelations of the outer world. There is no going back for the poet once this frontier has been reached; a new territory is visible and what has been said cannot be unsaid. The discipline of poetry is in overhearing yourself say difficult truths from which it is impossible to retreat. Poetry is a break for freedom. In a sense all poems are good; all poems are an emblem of courage and the attempt to say the unsayable; but only a few are able to speak to something universal yet personal and distinct at the same time; to create a door through which others can walk into what previously seemed unobtainable realms, in the passage of a few short lines.”
― David Whyte

Contributors to our list: Elaine Mansfield, Joseph Anthony, KåyMä-rie Liå, & Mary Friedel-Hunt.

We would love to add your poets to our growing list. Oh, and add a note about why you love your poet/s.