This site contains poems that I like. Generally they’re public domain or stuff that I had a hand in writing; if you catch me posting something up here that you feel is a violation of copyright, please email me.
- “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”—John Keats. Just as I had “Ozymandias” on my mind when thinking about Shelley when I visited the Fondazione Keats-Shelley Memorial in Rome (at the foot of the Scalinata di Spagna), this captures how I felt seeing a lock of Keats’ hair in the extremely dusty display case in the back of that jungle-like second floor library-museum to the two great writers.
- cummings – when god lets my body be. From his first book, “Tulips and Chimneys” (1923), published when he was 28, but written by the time he was 25; frightening to think of achieving so much at such a young age…
- From Ulysses An excerpt from the “Wandering Rocks” chapter in honor of Bloomsday.
- I will Take an Egg Out of the Robin’s Nest. Walt Whitman, from the 1900 edition of Leaves of Grass.
- Pork Products Transcend. A haiku from “‘That Sweet Ineffable Reason’: The Poetry of George Welsh.”
- Relics. This one’s by me. © Tim Jarrett 1994.