Welcome to the Poets’ Corner.
This is the section of our ELT e-Reading Group devoted to poetry.
We would like to invite all our members to use this space to post here your favourite poems, poems that are special for you and/or that you particularly enjoy and which you would like to share with all of us.
The only thing you have to do is to choose a poem and post the text here with the bibliographical reference. If you copy it from a website, please do provide the website address.
Unfortunately, for legal reasons our choices are limited to poems that are no longer under copyright protection. If you would like to post a poem from a contemporary writer, please make sure you have a written permission to do so.
We are all invited to read the poems and comment on them or simply enjoy reading them.
We would very much encourage your personal response to the poems posted here. How does the poem touch you? What echoes, messages, feeling and reactions has it brought to you? How do you connect it with other poems, stories or texts you have already read
Another possible approach to poetry is to look at the writing technique employed by the poet. It can be a very illuminating and enriching experience as well, as you can try to ‘see how the writing has been put together and the pitch it makes for a reader's attention. How successfully does the writer invent, sustain, and make the reader inhabit an imaginative space? How successfully are other technical aspects of writing deployed: imagery, metaphor, formal styles, point of view, narrative voice, consciousness, characterisation, scene setting, use of dialogue, the rhythm of dialogue and narrative, narrative pace and tension, structural devices?’
Please, also feel free to post your poems - teachers can also be poets :)
Looking forward to a new time full of poetry here in the reading group.
Cheers - Chris
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Comments
Thank you very much indeed for this nice welcome at a new, privileged space, the new "Home"of some very friendly people we have met before, and inspired us to further poem writing.
We all should thank you so much for such attentive, hard work you have been developing so to "give voice" to teachers who, as you say, "can also be poets". Thanks for your encouragement!
We look forward to reading new poems, remembering others, meeting new colleagues who will certainly be sharing their favourite poems and/or their own ... which will be ours likewise...
Cheers,
Maria
Reading Poems
When you believe
and suddenly they tell you
and you ask
and they tell you again
but why not believe then
you ask, right!
Imagine a book with its cover
then the book lost the cover
how can you read it?
If it’s a poetry book,
poems don’t come on covers
look inside the poem
find on the pages inside
and believe you found them
and their meaning.
Tanguene
I wrote this to thank you for offering us this space for sharing creative writing again We have had positive experience with the Poet´s Corner at encompassculture site where we shared poems of acomplished writers and those of members as well, which was encouraging us to try creative writing and have had feedback from colleagues. It was useful and marks an important period in my experience of reading, sharing and writing in English. The poem just gives my personal feeling about the meaning of poetry.Thank you.
Tanguene
This is wonderful Chris. I'd like to share a poem with my friends here:
A Poem without any name
Breaking the bleak beaks of barrenness
life unleashes itself.
Sun still shined
Earth spinned
Water flowed
Birds chirped.
But moon marooned
And stars stopped shivering from afar.
I waited for a glimpse of the known world
of the imagined world
of the world to be.
Existence passes away
Words remain.
The ownership of my words
I bestow upon you.
If they remain
They'll tell you
Once upon a time there was a woman
Who day-dreamt ...
Nice thought Tanguene - your poems are so poignant. Here's another I share
Reaping SolitudeSolitude like swarms of locusts
Invades days
Invades nights.
Lady Robinson’ the Island of Despair
Populated with strange faces
Faces like trees, like unknown vegetations
But without a Friday – either to rule or to share.
Silence formidable – truth.
Companionship benevolent – a hallucination.
No action – inertia inherent.
Smiles make nice sheathe for pains
Tears soak well in comic puns
Engaging my self in a discourse of amusement –
Reaping imagined crops
From dead branches, in a vast lonely forest.
Hi Chris, Tanguene & All poetry lovers
I am so pleased to join you all again in this new space where we are invited to read and comment on poems, as well as sharing ours...
The Light
During the day and at night
I keep treasuring the Light
Which floods my soul
Encouraging me above all
To face hard moments
And forget torments...
I look at things around
Bringing a special musical sound
Which echoes in my heart and mind
As a sweet melody so kind
Inspiring my days
In such manifold ways...
Maria
Hi Tanguene & All Readers
Thanks for your inaugural poem... I found it particularly interesting when you incentivate to "look inside the poem/find on the pages inside/and believe you found them/and their meaning." I agree on how important it is our journey "inside the poem". Though it can be a little difficult sometimes, don't you think so?
While reading your first poem here, I had an idea I would like to share with you and all. Simple lines after all...
Cheers,
Maria
???
Every book has its face...
Which greets us (sometimes) with grace.
The book's cover has something to reveal
And probably something to conceal...
So, let's get inside
To find out the secret
And share it world wide!
Maria
Dear Maria, Sanghita and Tanguene
Thanks a lot for sharing your poetic lines here. I hope you will inspire more teachers to share their creative writing as well.
I wish I had the gift of writing, but as this is not the case, let me just post one of my favourite 'autumn' poems as a thank you note :)
Gerald M. Hopkins
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Cheers - Chris
Hi Tanguene and all!
This is a nice poem! Sometimes there are things that we can see and we cannot believe in, and other things that we have to believe in even when we do not exist at the moment, I mean, even when we cannot touch them!
Sometimes is a bad thing, something that we never expected and we can even see, but we cannot believe in our eyes. That is when you ask, Who am I, where is this place?
Sometimes there is nothing to believe in, as in Bon Jovi's song: "Somethign to believe in"
Well, readers, we just need to believe there is a content inside and we make up a new cover, a new roof, a new vision, a new world... and then, as one reader has already pointed out, tell the world what is inside the book!...
Tanguene, remember I know what motivated you to write this poem, but its hard to say it exactly! But, do not worry, you will cover it... Just believe!
Mon Ami
the light is like a poem without any name - Sanghita
Sanghita, when I read your poem I find these poem's name is The Light... or New Day...
Its in this light that we day-dream, its in this light that we have to work for our future and forget torments...
I really liked these poems and when I was reading one, I could see another inside it.
Its so nice to wake up in the morning and find these poems, you read and believe a new day has come...
SO, lets stay awake!...
MON AMI
Hi Sanghita & All
Thanks for sharing your poems that add much to the readers' companionship instead of solitude.
It seems to me that the poetess uses strong imagery to tell us how solitude can be a plague, something causing trouble, annoyance, despair... Solitude pervades with pain, but this could be softened by "smiles" that influence other "imaginary crops" in such a "vast lonely forest".
Best regards,
Maria