To all comers:

Do you now, or have you ever, read poetry for fun? If so, what did you read, and why?

Shakespeare and Plutarch's sonnets. Tolkein. Epic poetry like Beowulf.

Not a whole lot. But I did go through a phase of reading a lot of Jack Gilbert's "The Great Fires." Amazing stuff. For the most part, though, I've never quite grokked poetry. I was a lit major in college, and loved every minute of that. But poetry, for whatever reason, rarely did much for me. Gilbert is the only poetry author I can think of who has.

Rilke, Yeats, Eliot, Auden. Reading Rilke in particular is like listening to great Romantic classical music; I get the neck prickles, the mild intoxication. The translations of Rilke that work best for me are Stephen Mitchell's; Robert Bly's are the worst (harsh and unmusical--he seems to think everything in German should be barked out like military orders).

Yeats, Eliot, and Auden are a little more cerebral--sometimes a lot more. I enjoy the cogitating I do to keep up with them, but I still treasure the physical and emotional responses more.

Prodigious numbers of Elizabethan and Jacobean minor poets, starting with Donne/Shakespeare and branching way the heck out. Anything epic, starting with Homer, in as close to the original language as possible (for fun, I mostly read Homer in Lattimore). Dickinson, in certain moods. Late Romantics (Browning, Barrett Browning, Tennyson) and their twentieth-century heirs, esp. Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Millay, Stevens, and Thomas. Medieval romances, although those hover on the edge of "professional reading" for me. Borges (yes, the poetry, and in Spanish, although there are reasonably good translation). Anyone who can write a decent sonnet.

(I have a respectable four feet of poetry shelves at home, and considering that a good chunk of my poetry books live in my office, that means I really do read a lot of it for fun. ;)

Christopher Logue's reworkings of Homer. C.F. Cavafy. William Morris. A little Langston Hughes when I'm feeling jazzy...

Philip Larkin. I started to read his poetry because I enjoyed his essay "The Pleasure Principle." Ian Hamilton, for his directness. The poetry in the New Criterion, the Formalist (http://www2.evansville.edu/theformalist/), and the New Formalist (http://www.newformalist.com/) because I enjoy metrical verse.

There are a couple of anthologies I've enjoyed. First, The New Penguin Book of English Verse ed. P.J. Keegan. I found it reviewed in the Economist's books of the year. It has poems ordered by year, which makes for some interesting juxtapositions. It runs from the 12th century to about 1990. Second, The Funny Side: 101 Humorous Poems (Faber Poetry) ed. Wendy Cope. I discovered it in a bookstore in London. I can't remember exactly why I picked it up but I love that its poems are often serious underneath the humor and that they don't sacrifice literary taste in order to be humorous. Besides, humorous poetry is hard to find.

Yes. I can't imagine a context where the expectation of "fun" isn't a factor. Are there people who read poetry for punishment?

I enjoy reading poetry of various kinds, but I have to confess that very few poets give me as much sheer pleasure and fun as Billy Collins.

Fun isn't what I'm after, but if I need a psychic shock and a good case of the spine tingles, I read Wordsworth's "Three Years She Grew." For fun I memorize poems and recite them to myself in idle hours--Byron's "She Walks in Beauty," Keats's "Ode on Melancholy" and "To Autumn," Coleridge's "Kubla Khan." Memorizing them gives me a chance to linger over poetry's musical elements--the way that sound echoes sense. I'll read every poem that comes my way, but there's only a few that have that soul-stirring charge.

I first fell in love with literature as a teenager by discovering Kerouac and the Beats. I read nearly all of Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Laurence Ferlinghetti, Robert Creely, Gary Snyder, and the like. From there I went back to their influences: Blake, Rimbaud, Whitman, Pound, William Carlos Williams. All for fun, and with a great deal of adolscent enthusiasm. My tastes have since changed and matured, and most recently I read Pushkin's novel-in-verse "Eugene Onegin," and the works of Anna Akhmatova, whose poetry is hauntingly beautiful, even in English translation. I also pick up anthologies now and then to dip into, most recently Bloom's.

Oh gosh, yes, but in far too eclectic and unfocused a manner to easily capture. Beowulf, Rilke, Shakespeare, Rumi, Rich are returning favorites.

Most recent "just 'cos I wanted to" poetry choice was Anne Bradstreet.

I keep trying. Sometimes, it actually is fun.

But not usually.

I used to, in high school (1950s) although I'm sure there was an element of thinking that it was good for me. For a speech class I memorized one poem about children who sail to Dunkirk to rescue British soldiers. I still know most of it (and a few months ago I found a copy in an anthology).

But then I went to grad school in math, and after five years of learning to parse everything for its logical content to the exclusion of all else, I found I couldn't read poetry any more. Once you take out the music and the metaphor, there isn't a lot left for enjoyment.

E. E. Cummings certainly, then many of the "classics" from a poetry anthology (intended to be a textbook) I picked up somewhere. I also have an affinity for childrens' rhymes.

Charles Bukowski is the only writer whose poems ever said anything to me, but in general I have a hard time "feeling" poetry.

Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Frost, Dante's Divine Comedy. Maybe a few others. Most poetry bores me to tears.

I'm surprised to see how many people read epic poetry for fun -- I thought I was the only one. Of course, these days it takes several years for me to get through one. Right now I'm about halfway through Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. In translation, of course. I'm not that cultured.

I prefer poetry to novels. No novel will ever turn my mind inside-out the way Dante, Shakespeare, Keats, Dickinson, Yeats, Stevens and Bishop, among other favorites, can do.

Rose- for Rilke translations try Edward Snow. I can't judge his faithfulness to the German, but he produces more convincing English verse than Mitchell for my taste. His translations are published in dual-language format, something I find useful even for an original language that I can't read provided I have some idea how to pronounce it- I can get some faint whiff of the word-music that way.

Read Regularly (i.e. over and over) for Fun:

Yeats, Eliot, Swinburne, Thomas Hood, Kipling, Shelly

Read Occasionally for fun:

Tennyson, Rilke, Kocan, Keats, e.e. cummings, Blake, Robert Browning . . hmm. And others which slip my mind now. There are individual poems all over that I particularly enjoy, even though the poets who wrote them aren't particularly memorable. The Great War poets, for example. I've also liked "Shadows" by Lord Houghton. And others.

Read once for fun:

Milton (Paradise Lost). And the Iliad. And the Inferno. Reread Paradise Lost at least once, but not the others--they're more like regular books to me, than most poetry.

Most recently it was Paul Muldoon's newest collection. And it was great fun!

Lately I've been reading a great deal of Louise Gluck and Barry Dempster, as well as a little Rilke -- though he often gets a bit too grand for my taste.

Not often, but three do spring to mind: Wendy Cope (there's a great poem about... socks. Honest); R S Thomas (not 'fun' precisely); Dafydd ap Gwilym (14th-century Welsh poet, in English translation).

Yeats goes without saying. A few years ago I reread "Paradise Lost" and realized it was wasted on me as an undergraduate. I still reread Louis MacNeice's "Autumn Journal" and Auden's "Achille's Shield" and never tire of them.

I read (and reread) Stephen Crane, Emily Dickinson, and Raymond Carver, among others. I prefer concision. I most admire the ability to create a profound connection between poem (not poet) and reader in the fewest words. One epic I can always pick up and be completely enthralled by is John G. Neihardt's A Cycle of the West. Lovely, and deeply disturbing...

In English I like Shakespeare, Houseman and Blake's Tiger. Normally the little poetry I read is in Hebrew: Zach, Amichay, Avidan, Wallach, Rabikovich. Then there's "Another place, a foreign city", the verse novel by Maya Arad, a Stanford linguist. It is modeled on Pushkin, and that led me to Yevgeni Onegin for which there is a beautiful translation to Hebrew.

Australian folk poet Henry Lawson, who I discovered through folksingers who put some of his finest stuff to music.

T.S.Eliot's original poems which became the foundation for "Cats"

Shel Silverstein and Ogden Nash for real fun.

And, a few years ago the English department at my former institution staged a group marathon reading of Paradise Lost which was probably the most fun I'd had at a poetry reading in my life.

The Bard, Whitman, Longfellow, Baldwin, Simon and Garfunkel, Lennon, Homer, Sun Tzu, Cummings, Frost, just to name a few.......read them in grade school, high school, college, and during my military career.....still reading. And with the influence of my wife, the Confucian Scholar and Chinese Philosohy, I am exploring other philosophy and poetry...and me the military engineer!!!!!

The Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam as translated by Fitzgerald. What I consider the great passages in Shakespeare's plays (Richard II on the deaths of kings, Shylock on revenge, Henry V on his band of brothers, Prospero on the stuff that dreams are made on, etc.) Apart from that, random selections from the Norton anthology of poetry: the shorter poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Byron, and the cavalier poets.

Yes.

Every time I read Poe's "The Raven" I become the 11 year-old kid I once was reading it for the first time. It is spooky music!

I read a little Rimbaud for pleasure, and I love Virgil. Emily Dickinson is great English poetry.

Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass".

"Epitaphs" by Ezra Pound:story of my life.

My tastes in poetry are low-brow all the way: Kipling, Chesterton, Robert Service. The kind of stuff that sounds great around a campfire.

Paul Goodman. Wallace Stevens. Marge Piercy. Walt Whitman.
Lots of anthologies of modern American poetry.

"The translations of Rilke that work best for me are Stephen Mitchell's; Robert Bly's are the worst (harsh and unmusical--he seems to think everything in German should be barked out like military orders)."

Yes, Rilke too. I'll take your comments about Bly under consideration, he's the translation I have.

Rudyard Kipling, Siegfried Sassoon, Alfred Tennyson. Pretty much anyone who could sling a decent verse and observed the world around them, rather than writing their dope dreams.

e.e. cummings, Wallace Stevens, Shakespeare's sonnets, Hopkins, J.A. Lind, and random excursions into the Oxford Book of English Verse.

Many good suggestions. I'd add just one not represented: Charles Wright.

I don't know about "fun" but I do read poetry when I am in a certain mood, or when I want its moving power.

I'm deeply fond of Yeats. I've also been known to pull volumes of Frost and Dickenson off the shelves (I know, the "real" poetry fans are sniffing and saying something like "poseur" right now). I also have one-off poems that I like - I may not have read all of the poet's work, but there are poems in collections - some of Stevie Smith's stuff, a few poems that I remember and go back to even though I may not remember the author.

I love (and frequently reread) the one about the speaker's father getting up in the blue-black cold and shining everyone's church shoes (it ends with a line containing the phrase "Love's austere and lonely offices", which I just love). There's also the one called "Naming of Parts," which always gives me a chill.

I also have a little book put out after 9/11 called something like "Poems for Difficult Times" that has a lot of not-well-known poets in it, but lots of interesting (not all good, in my estimation) poetry.

I'm not sure "fun" is the right word. There's something, and I don't have a good name for it, that one does not because one is forced to nor because it makes one miserable, but for which "fun" seems like kind of a banal word. Read poetry to be moved? Perhaps. Read it for fulfillment? That may be the closest explanation I can give. There are many things I do that I consider fulfilling but that I wouldn't necessarily describe as "fun" in the sense that most people today would describe "fun" - certainly, it's not the same as a trip to a water park (although I will admit I'd rather sit at home and read poetry than go to a loud crowded water park) - but it's still something I enjoy and treasure.

The National Endowment for the Arts recent survey, "Reading at Risk," reported that less than 1 in 8 adults read a single line of verse in a year's time. What happened to "fun" verse entertainment ("Casey at the Bat," "Paul Revere's Ride," "The Raven," . . .)?

John Shade.

We can visualize John Shade in his early boyhood, a physically unattractive but otherwise beautifully developed lad, experiencing his first eschatological shock, as with indredulous fingers he picks up from the turf that compact ovoid body and gazes at the wax-red streaks ornamenting those gray-brown wings and at the graceful tail feathers tipped with yellow as bright as fresh paint.
;)

Contemporary (more or less) British & Irish poets: from the established and well-known - Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill - to the younger and/or lesser known - Tobias Hill, Thomas Kinsella, Sue Hubbard.

And I agree with A.S. Byatt that the three greatest love poets in the language are Donne, Browning, and Graves.

I was a poetry writing major in college, but got away from it. I minored in Russian, and had one great prof who required us to memorize poems. Oddly, almost the only poetry I go back to is Russian. I don't do it very often. Sometimes it's relief from the rest of the world, sometimes it's just because I miss the language, but I love to go back and look at Pushkin, Akmatova, Svetaeva, Lermentov, Mayakovsky... Pushkin is my favorite. He has such a distinctive lyrical quality in Russian that even a non-native speaker like me can identify his poems without knowing who wrote them.

I also loved Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, a novel in verse written in the style of Pushkin.

Steve: thanks for the Snow suggestion. I've got his translation of The Book of Images but haven't looked in it yet; this is a good nudge.

I loved what John Cunningham said about Service, Chesterton, Kipling and campfires. A.E. Houseman's not exactly in the campfire category, but I feel like he's kin to them--perhaps he's in the suburban gas heater category? Well, whatever slot he's in, I enjoy him a lot.

e.e. cummings, Plath, Eliott, Shelley, Coleridge, William Carlos Williams, Spenser

I don't read poetry systematically. Here are a few I've read within the last year or so, or who spring to mind: Kipling: Phillip Levine; Housman; Wilfred Owen; Yehuda Amichai (most in translation, I'm sorry to say); Dorothy Parker; Stevie Smith, and I spent an evening a month or so ago with Vachel Lindsay.

I recently got my daughter Pinksy's translation of the Inferno, which is rather decent as such things go, and that's stimulated me to start rereading the whole Commedia. I use the Oxford paperbacks with Sinclair's literal prose translation facing the Italian. I read French well and have a smattering of opera-libretto Italian so with the help of the trot when needed, I can do a pretty fair job of making out the Italian text. That makes me feel very lucky, because it's the only way one can fully appreciate what a mind-bogglingly great poet Dante is.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, Walt Whitman, e e cummings, and Dorothy Parker - I'm a dilettante, what can I say?

I enjoy reading poetry out loud to myself and others who can bear my delivery. Almost anything well crafted will do.

If you like Dante--even if you don't know Italian--you must attempt to read the Italian out loud to get the musicality. Then, if you're inclined, do as I did, and begin to study Italian grammar to get it all. A good Italian grammar (out of print, alas) is K. Speight's "Italian" (The English Universities Press Ltd: 1962). Alibris can get it for you.

some favorites: philip larkin, donald justice, elizabeth bishop, and karl schapiro. i'm a science writer so i read these masters to keep my senses sharp and my tank of metaphorical imagery topped up.

Yes, especially this past year for some reason.

English/American: Hardy, Housman, Larkin (my all-time favorite), Dickinson, Frost, John Berryman, Richard Wilbur.

Russian: Pushkin, Annenskii, Blok, Osip Mandel'shtam, Joseph Brodsky.

Past enthusiasms: Yeats, Robert Lowell ("Lord Weary's Castle," not the later stuff), Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke.

Right now I'm reading and enjoying Dana Gioia's "Interrogations at Noon". And I've been meaning to get Edgar Bowers' collected poems, largely on the strength of his "Mary".

I read more poetry than I realized. A year ago on St. Patrick's Day I allowed myself the pleasure of purchasing a Yeats book. The Second Coming had been thrashing away in my psyche in not quite fully remembered form. Most appropriate for these times. Fun, perhaps not.

Leonard Cohen I have read for pure pleasure, also Auden, the many contributors to When I am an Old Woman I shall wear Purple collection.

In my mind I think I have only read poetry when assigned: personal myth that doesn't hold up to the record.

There is a book of Vietnam war poems by a Kentucky author, R.L. Barth. Book is titled Forced Marching to the Styx. Being a Boomer I appreciate that he included a gloss for his poem Puff, explaining Puff the magic dragon. Puff in the war was a helicopter gunship. He came to the high school where I student taught in mid-eighties and held a poetry workshop with a class of seniors.

I do now, and have in the past, read poetry for fun. I used to have my alarm set for 6:23, when the local NPR station would air Garrison Keillor reading short poems for "The Writer's Almanac", which I loved. He would read poets that are not recognized one day, and a famous person the next. While poetry is not my first choice, if I run across it I read it, though I do go through periods where I actively seek it out.

Also, just thought about the start of the school year and your new home (a position I was in last year at this time). Good luck, and best wishes! They're a lucky group of people.

Richard Wilbur

I'm a big fan of Wallace Stevens. Will read local artists stuff. Prefer readings and slams for the more contemporary works.

In High School, I was "forced" to read poetry. I found it quite boring. But then I had a great drama teacher who taught me HOW to read poetry (Shakespeare, specifically). Since then, I read poetry for enlightenment. I guess some might call that "fun." Oh yeah, the poetry I enjoy most: Shakespeare, Poe, Tolkien, Keats.

Christina Rossetti, William Morris, Tennyson, Keats.

Illustrated "Goblin Market" for BFA show.

e e cummings

I remember writing music back in college to "what if a much of a which of a wind".... Heh! Funny. Now, when I play it in my head, it sounds an awful lot like Neil Diamond. I think I listened a bit too much to his Jonathan Livingston Seagull album.

Other than that, poetry still saddens me. Mom was a poet herself, and a voracious reader of many kinds of books. She died two years back of cancer, and I haven't been able to find any fun in it since. I still haven't taken out all her poetry and history books and placed them in my own library.

I wonder if I should begin approaching poetry as a kind of salve and a means of understanding more of Mom instead of forever associating it with sadness.

Maybe I could begin to discover just a hint of the joy she found in it.

Thanks for the question. Oh, great site.

Phil

I too read poetry for pleasure. The fun part for me is the sound and rhythm and music of it. My ears respond to a poem before the analytical part of my brain does, and if my ears don't like it, my brain is not going to get involved, period!

I have been reading Philip Larkin's collected works over the past month, and I'm really enjoying it (even if he does come across as a death-obsessed grouchy librarian!) Last year I worked my way through Elizabeth Bishop's poems (on the beach) and savoured them too. Seamus Heaney is probably my current favourite. I am rereading Finders Keepers, his collected essays on poetry. I love them. Actually, that's how I got interested in reading Larkin and Bishop.

I took a poetry workshop in college and my teacher, a Benedictine monk, had us read Billy Collins. That was my favorite book in that class because it wasn't dark, it wasn't 'nothing,' and it wasn't total nonsense like another book we had to read (one poem in the bad book was made up of nonsensical alphabetized phrases). Billy Collins is fun to read.
God bless you all.

Psalms, Song of Solomon and the Book of Proverbs and the semi-poetic Ecclesiastes work for me. My hymn book contains some really great lines, as well.