Omo revived this thread after more than a year. One whole year! That does not give the impression that very many WLFers read much poetry. But I hope that people will read more poetry.
I myself read it sporadically. I'm more attuned to prose, but sometimes I read poetry for a while.
Omo asks:
Quote:
Do you read poetry? Who are your favourite poets? And which poems do you like most?
Do you read poetry in translation? Which poems to do have memorised by heart? And what was the last poetry collection you read?
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Good questions.
1) I read poetry, but sporadically.
2) My favourite poets are a ragbag of quite disparate ones. Edward Thomas, Boleslaw Lesmian, W.B. Yeats, Walter de la Mare, Karel van de Woestijne are but a few of them. You will find no pattern.
3) It's hard to say which poems I like most. I tend to like a
body of work by my favourite poets, not only odd poems.
4) I most certainly read poetry in translation when I can't read the original language. You may lose things, but it's better than being shut out from their work altogether.
5) I very, very rarely memorise poems by heart. We have libraries. But, for some reason I, an Englishman, think first of Yeats' "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death", and Lesmian's "Garbus". The former for some intangible reason involving inevitability, the latter helped by the Ewa Demarczyk song which used the words as lyrics.
6) The last poetry collection I read was Arvid Mörne's collected poems called ""Vandringsdagen" (Day of Wandering) in the original Swedish. I was in the mood for his rather bleak and sorrowful nature poems.
7) The last poems I
translated (a question not asked by Omo) were a few by Brecht from the German to be included in a novel I was translating. Translating poetry is the most hands-on way of reading poems that I know of.