Artemon Forum Curious to know...

...who some of you guys'/girls'/shims' influences are. Favorite authors? Poets? Lyricists?

Emily Dickinson
Edna St. VIncent Millay
Robert Frost
Walt Whitman
Octavio Paz
William Carlos Williams
Robert Burns
The Brownings
Shakespeare

Among many, many others. . .

Emily

You know I'm far to befuddled to ask a question like this lol ::biggrin::

Poe
Shakesie
Emily
Blake
Mary Gilmore
Dorothea Mackellar
Banjo Paterson

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Dorothea Mackellar
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The love of field and coppice
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies
I know, but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of rugged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror
The wide brown land for me!

The stark white ring-barked forests,
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon,
Green tangle of the brushes
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops,
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When, sick at heart, around us
We see the cattle die
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the rainbow gold,
For flood and fire and famine
She pays us back threefold.
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze ...

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand
though Earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

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Banjo Paterson
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I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better
Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago,
He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,
Just `on spec', addressed as follows, `Clancy, of The Overflow'.
And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected,
(And I think the same was written with a thumb-nail dipped in tar)
'Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it:
`Clancy's gone to Queensland droving, and we don't know where he are.'
In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy
Gone a-droving `down the Cooper' where the Western drovers go;
As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,
For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.
And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wond'rous glory of the everlasting stars.
I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy
Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall,
And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city
Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all.
And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle
Of the tramways and the 'buses making hurry down the street,
And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting,
Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet.
And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me
As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,
With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,
For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.
And I somehow rather fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy,
Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,
While he faced the round eternal of the cash-book and the journal
But I doubt he'd suit the office, Clancy, of `The Overflow'.
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I have no real preference for authors in the sense of novels.
I tend to read recommended reading.
However I do read Jung like a bed time story if time and brain space allows.

Music, thats a tough one
I love classical, Elgar is one of my favorites, I also love all the other popular classical writers and composers.
I love dead can dance.
I love folk
I love French provincial
I love opera (the Italians hold the upper hand there I believe)
I also enjoy very much Nirvana, Black Sabbath, Love Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin,
Enya, Gregorian chant, trance (anything dreamy), Live, U2, Jet, George (Love George), Ilse De Lange, serious this list could go on infinitely lol.
I am really enjoying many of the alternative new bands and solo artists of late.
Oh I cant choose, I just love music period I don�t really discriminate,

you, shane...you are my inspiration!!!

you bring meaning to my life....
you're my inspiration...

(wait that was a tad gay to quote such a song as that LoL)

::drool::

Shakespear, Dickonson, Stephen Crane, Elizabeth Barret Browning, all the good old fashioned writers. Resently Keeperofhissoul has had some wonderful writes and i am fascinated with them.

It's so awesome to see people in this group share like minds. That rocks! I have to say, some of my favorites:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Walt Whitman
Stephen Crane
Chaucer
Mallory
Lord Byron
Dickinson
Marianne Moore
TS Eliot (even though his ideas on poetry and Shakespeare make him a prick)
Keats
Shelley (both)
Margaret Weis
Jack Kerouac
Ginsberg
William Carlos Williams
William Cullen Bryant
William Ernest Henley
William Wordsworth
William Blake
Ben Jonson
Henry Wadworth Longfellow
Henry David Thoreau
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Poe
Dylan Thomas
Robert Herrick
Robert Frost
Gerard Manley Hopkins
HS Thompson
Tom Stoppard
Sam Shepherd
Shaky Bill (Shakespeare)
Roger Waters
Iron & Wine
Blind Melon
Damien Rice

Oh there's so many more (especially lyracists) but I feel I could just keep going and going, but I think ya'll get the idea. I appreciate all that responded.

Thats quite a list Shane.
::smile:: I think most of us here like the old faves, true true.

I know...sorry. I kinda got carried away. every time I thought of one...two others would pop into mind..and I know I left of a cart-load more. And Ronnie...you've put me under many influences...and if I remember Emerson's essay correctly, he said any great artist must creat with hightened senses...so thank you RP for making me a better artist.

The poets that have influenced me, consciously, are Shakespeare, Donne, Wordsworth, probably Coleridge, Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and T.S. Eliot (and what's wrong with his ideas on poetry?). But there are many that have, unconsiously, influenced me I'm sure. I am an anachronism in today's American culture, so I'm not very well read on modern poets. I do greatly enjoy Bishop for imagism. I am starting to get some ideas of Billy Collins and Ted Kooser. I especially liked the first chapter of Kooser's book on writing, The Poetry Home Repair Manual, in which he writes about the tendency for poets to write obscure poetry, full of literary references and other things that poets might like, but that can get in the way of the populace understanding poetry. That's an issue I think every poet considers. If your experience is like mine, most of the people who read my poetry are not readers of poetry otherwise. Yes, it's encouraging for them to say they like it, but it's not as useful as an experienced perspective. Yet, I can't dispel the layman's pov, simply pleasing my egotism by saying "They just don't get it." Though I haven't read 100 Most Favorite Poems or some such anthology since I was just out of high school, because I realized the canon no longer satisfied my desire, those poems have crossed the barrier between poetry and mainstream writing, they've made it to Billboard's Top 40. And I've got to admit, I would love to be on that list.

To many a surprise I don't read much at all. Virgil, a bit. This one long greek poem as well by lucrecious or something like that, but I forget. What's astonishing is that it was a scientific piece.

I also got influence by a more personal, less known poet called Thomas. I'll have to get back to you guys on his full name.

J.D. Sallenger(Catcher in the rye)
Vonnegutt (cats cradle, breakfast of champions) He is a bit vulgar, I don't read his stuff anymore :(
Joyce Carol Oats (Expensive people) Again she is a bit vulgar at times
Antoine de Saint-Exupery (The little price)
Richard Adams (Watership Down)
Madaline L'egend (A wrinkle in time)
anddddddddd my favorate author (whos litterature makes me want to never pick up a pen) Mervyn Peake (Titus Groan, Ghormenghast, and Titus Alone) If you can read thick descriptive books he is a must!


I'm currently reading Ayn Rand's Atlus shrugged.

Here it is, Tomas Brown-Crooks. Biggest influence in my poetic existence since its debut.

I FORGOT ONE!!!! Shame on me! Rod's recent poem made me think of him. Edgar Lee Masters. For those that haven't read "Spoon River Anthology"...ohhh...it changed my life. I had the opportunity to direct it as a play about a year and a half ago. It's absolutely superb!

How do you write poetry if you've never read any? That would be like playing Blues and never having heard a Blues song.

I dont read a great deal of poetry Em,,, but I tell you I get in big trouble from my professors for writing up my lab reports a little to poetically lololololol� I say they are so damn boring I just cant help it =)

Oh, that's just too funny. I laughed out loud. I wonder what my boss would say if I turned in poetic reports. As it is, he just shakes his head at me and mumbles "I don't want to know," before he wanders off down the hall.
::biggrin::

Two hydrogens wandering and alone
helpless on some chemical sea
One oxygen amid the thralls
Alone...drifting...searching for two souls...

LoL ::tongue::

LOL, yes something like that, but try putting it into the stroop test cause and effect lol,
After you�ve been messed with for three months for 2 hours a week with subliminals in a one sided blind study and you know what they are doing to you cause you happen to be susceptible and can even see the subliminal despite the mask, about once every 5 times lololol�. Yeah it got poetic, my last lab sitting was immediately before an exam, I should thank them. ::biggrin::