The poetry organisation Live Canon has launched an appeal for the public to name their seven favourite 'desert island' poems, for an event they are staging in early December. Why not also log your favourite poems on this discussion thread - let's make our list your 10 best, and there's no deadline!

There's a treasure trove on this subject in Discussions started by Dave Bradley. Couple of years ago. One of my favourites was Fanlight Fanny by George Formby with the incomparable lines
"She's a peach but understand
She's called a peach because she's always canned".

I was always aware that there was a serious poem called " the boy stood on the burning deck" but I don't think I ever knew the proper words?

Gregg,
Of course poems are of different `kinds`.

But my number one - of those get up and go and face the world as it is poems - Is Robert Brownings:

`Childe Roland to the dark Tower came`

Every time I come across one of those ` what`s the point, nothing means very much anyhow` poems we get so many of these days I feel like pointing them to stanza
1V.

For, what with my whole world-wide wandering,
What with my search drawn out thro' years, my hope
Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope
With that obstreperous joy success would bring,
I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring
My heart made, finding failure in its scope.

And that`s just near the start.

Maybe more later.

http://www.writeoutloud.net/public/newsgroupview.php?NewsThreadsID=1345

How could I omit in my earlier post with its homage to George Formby
"People say she's two-faced
Tie-ing up her bootlace
(You can see the face that they mean)
That's Frigidaire Fanny from the Argentine"

ooh this looks fun. ok. ive limited it to one each otherwise we would be fairly 'beat' heavy and i'd like to show diversity.

in no order.

howl - allen ginsberg
annie died the other day - ee cummings
my blue hen - ann gray
tourettes at the movies - owen sheers
the tyger - william blake
a thousand kisses deep - leonard cohen
so you want to be a writer - charles bukowski
the red wheelbarrow - william carlos williams



im in no way well read but these 8 have stuck with me. also, lancashire toreador was the best fornby song for lyrics surely!

'In the dead of night I ramble, Spanish castle walls I scramble.
I saw a shadow above a girl in her boudoir.
I climbed up her balcony, it started to sway.
She shouted, 'Murder! there's a bandit, spare my life, pray'.
But when my castanets I rattled she said, 'Hooray!
It's The Lancashire Toreador'

Oh no, not the red wheelbarrow again

http://writeoutloud.net/public/newsgroupview.php?NewsThreadsID=1408

(But great to see LC in the list)

i have read bits of this thread. personally (and i expect castigating here but wont take it on board im afraid, its just the way i am) i dont see any need for academia in poetry. poetry (for me) is emotion, vision and the painting of an image using words. applying academic constraints onto something can lessen its emotional impact (again, my opinion only!). no poem, ever, has painted an image as vividly as WCW's Red Wheelbarrow. Thats most probably due to outside influences, such as my mindset when I first discovered him or the sheer amount of press it gets, but for me, its up there. And yes, Cohens book 'book of longing' is a masterpiece. some of the stuff he wrote up mt baldy is so resonant it hurts.

The Book of Mercy is one of my desert island books, and, in its way, very much poetic prose. Incomparable, however it's labeled. Must locate the Book of Longing!

my daughter (3) got it for me for fathers day. a fine gift buyer already. its brilliant. i think she got it from waterstones. lyrics wise, cohen, dylan and waits all cross over into poetry in my opinion.