(live reading at a local cafe during the local Poetry Festival)
Long overdue. This weekend I recorded famous poems (onto computer files and CDs) that influenced me basically from age 2 to 21 (end of university)/1951-1972. This is a chronological reading of the following poems with commentary.
Great Poems Remembered
Part 1
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star–Jane Taylor
Hey diddle, diddle–Mother Goose
Hickory, dickory, dock–Mother Goose
Alligator Pie–Dennis Lee
Someone Came Knocking–Walter de la Mare
Sea Fever–John Masefield
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud–William Wordsworth
Invictus-William Ernest Henley
The Road Not Taken–Robert Frost
Birches–Robert Frost
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer–John Keats
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802– William Wordsworth
The World Is Too Much with Us–William Wordsworth
Ozymandias–Percy Bysshe Shelley
To Autumn–John Keats
Ulysses–Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Dover Beach–Matthew Arnold Because I Could Not Stop for Death–Emily Dickinson
My Last Duchess–Robert Browning
Snake–D.H. Lawrence
Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds– William Shakespeare
I Am a Rock–Paul Simon
Blowin’ in the Wind –Bob Dylan
A Kite Is a Victim–Leonard Cohen
anyone lived in a pretty how town–E.E. Cummings
Part 2
Preludes–T.S. Eliot
Fern Hill–Dylan Thomas
The Bull Calf–Irving Layton
Annabel Lee–Edgar Allan Poe
Jabberwocky–Lewis Carroll
Otherwise–Jane Kenyon