A selection of meaningful and enjoyable poems to inspire and be enjoyed by everyone
Here is an anthology of poems, chosen by Garrison Keillor for their wit, their frankness, their passion, their "utter clarity in the face of everything else a person has to deal with at 7 a.m."
Good Poems includes verse organized by theme about lovers, children, failure, everyday life, death, and transcendance. It features the work of classic poets, such as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost, as well as the work of contemporary greats such as Howard Nemerov, Charles Bukowski, Donald Hall, Billy Collins, Robert Bly, and Sharon Olds. It's a book of poems for anybody who loves poetry whether they know it or not.
Garrison Keillor (born Gary Edward Keillor on August 7, 1942 in Anoka, Minnesota) is an American author, storyteller, humorist, columnist, musician, satirist, and radio personality. He is known as host of the Minnesota Public Radio show "A Prairie Home Companion".
Keillor was born in Anoka, Minnesota, the son of Grace Ruth (née Denham) and John Philip Keillor, who was a carpenter and postal worker. His father had English ancestry, partly by way of Canada (Keillor's paternal grandfather was from Kingston, Ontario). His maternal grandparents were Scottish immigrants, from Glasgow. The family belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, a fundamentalist Christian denomination Keillor has since left. He is six feet, three inches (1.9 m) tall. Keillor is a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. In 2006 he told Christianity Today that he was attending the Episcopal church in Saint Paul, after previously attending a Lutheran church in New York.
Keillor graduated from Anoka High School in 1960 and from the University of Minnesota with a bachelor's degree in English in 1966. During college, he began his broadcasting career on the student-operated radio station known today as Radio K.
Keillor has been married three times.
Garrison Keillor started his professional radio career in November 1969 with Minnesota Educational Radio, now Minnesota Public Radio. He hosted The Morning Program on weekdays from 6 to 9 a.m. on KSJR 90.1 FM at St. John's University, which the station called "A Prairie Home Entertainment." The show's eclectic music was a major divergence from the station's usual classical fare. During this time he also began submitting fiction to The New Yorker, where his first story, "Local Family Keeps Son Happy," appeared on September 19, 1970.
Keillor resigned from The Morning Program in February 1971 to protest a perceived attempt to interfere with his musical programming. The show became A Prairie Home Companion when he returned in October.
A Prairie Home Companion debuted as an old-style variety show before a live audience on July 6, 1974, featuring guest musicians and a cadre cast doing musical numbers and comic skits replete with elaborate live sound effects. The show was punctuated by spoof commercial spots from fictitious sponsors such as Powdermilk Biscuits. The show also contains parodic serial melodramas, such as The Adventures of Guy Noir, Private Eye and The Lives of the Cowboys. Keillor voices Noir and other recurring characters, and also provides vocals for some of the show's musical numbers.
A Prairie Home Companion ran until 1987, when Keillor decided to end it to focus on other projects. In 1989, he launched another live radio program from New York City, "The American Radio Company of the Air" — which had almost the same format as A Prairie Home Companion's. In 1992, he moved ARC back to St. Paul, and a year later changed the name back to A Prairie Home Companion; it has remained a Saturday night fixture ever since.
Keillor has been called "[o]ne of the most perceptive and witty commentators about Midwestern life" by Randall Balmer in Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism. He has written numerous magazine and newspaper articles and more than a dozen books for adults as well as children. He has also written for Salon.com and authored an advice column at Salon.com under the name "Mr. Blue."
In 2004 Keillor published a collection of political essays, Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America, and in June 2005 he began a column called "The Old Scout", which ran at Salon.com and in syndicated newspapers. The column went on hiatus in April 2010.
Keillor wrote the screenplay for the 2006 movie A Prairie Home Companion, directed by Robert Altman. (Keillor also appears in the movie.)
If you have any interest in poetry at all, you should give this collection a listen. A really interesting, varied assortment of poems, well-performed by a number of skilled readers.
I haven’t read much poetry lately. I’d “forgotten how big,” how restorative it can be. I’m so glad that I ended my evening with Anne Sexton's “Welcome Morning” rather than finishing the day with “American Idol.” A good poem makes me want to read more and to write. Whether or not I’ll actually pick up the pen is another question, but it feels good to want to do it. A good poem calms me and gives me perspective and makes me feel centered — all things I certainly could use on a daily basis.
(Garrison Keillor's introduction is wonderful; don't skip it.)
Hooked by the intro...funny and opinionated, just the needed thing. A friendly debate over the best poets and poems gets me right here (pointing to chest).
The main purpose of the book is to show how well poetry handles its well-familiar themes: childhood, death and the heartfelt appreciation towards being outside. While this can be annoying in other poetry titles, here those themes get their fair, glorious due. The poets here don't sit by a window and write about robins. They stroll outside through woods to a still pond to share the night with herons and "deep trees" (from a Mary Oliver poem in the book).
Why good poems? Why not great? These are short conversational pieces, most without endings that benefit the start and middle of a piece. Poems where the last stanza usually summarizes the whole thing - or just ends it - rather than adding a twist or memorable last line.
Here's an excellent contribution from Louis Simpson called
Ed
Ed was in love with a cocktail waitress, but Ed's family, and his friends, didn't approve. So he broke it off.
He married a respectable woman who played the piano. She played well enough to have been a professional.
Ed's wife left him... Years later, at a family gathering Ed got drunk and made a fool of himself.
He said, "I should have married Doreen." "Well," they said, "why didn't you?"
Not that the book isn't without its great poems... after all, it includes "This Is Just To Say" by William Carlos Williams and "Let Evening Come" by Jane Kenyon.
It's just on the side of really good. Comforting without being smug. Real without giving you nightmares. Full of the variety - and therefore the glory - that are the poems around us everyday.
There are 19 themed chapters, each with 5-30 poems, so the book seems to read with a little better pace, like a novel. There's a full biography of each poet in the back, with Garrison's comments, important dates and achievements, and well-chosen quotes.
Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hass, William Stafford and Donald Justice are some of the poets that come out of this book looking particularly good. Inevitably there are strong poets that get left out, like Jack Gilbert, Dorianne Laux and Larry Levis.
But I'll forgive Keillor the omissions that would have added even more variety, creativity and depth to this volume. I will pull it out often and read a new favorite poem. I will cherish a genre that continually leaves it's deep, telling, life-giving marks.
Great anthology. Some really good poems. The only thing I didn’t like is fragmented poems. Perhaps because I love Whitman. Seeing just a part of Song of Myself in it, isn’t that pleasing. Either include it complete or not at all, but that’s my preference. Great choices though.
Below is one of many I had not read before.
Sometimes
Sometimes things don't go, after all, from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail, sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war; elect an honest man, decide they care enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor. Some men become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best efforts do not go amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to. The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.
Emily Dickenson wrote, "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?"
Very few of the poems in this collection would meet these criteria for me. Ok, so I didn't read every poem; I got about 3/4 of the way through. And I guess I didn't pay enough attention to the title: these are good poems, but I wouldn't call most of them great poetry.
Granted, Keillor states in the intro that he wants to make poetry more accessible to people who think they don't like poetry because they were frustrated and confused by e. e. cummings and T. S. Eliot in high school. But I like cummings and Prufrock (though I could do without The Wasteland). So there.
I've been reading this one off and on for four or five months; it's not to be digested all at once! The poems Keillor chooses are, on average, sentimental and accessible, and I mean that in the best way. They are poems that bridge the gap between your heart and the poet's, rather than separating you. They are also, very largely, twentieth-century poems written by people I've never heard of; these are mostly not the endlessly anthologized poems found in most volumes like this one. A really excellent read.
This morning when I was looking through our bookshelves, I saw I book that I had never seen before. I don't know where we got it, I don't know how long we've had it, but I do know that I am going to try to read the short poems out of this book every day until I'm done. Can I do it?
Finally finished this, some 3? 4? years after Dan, a regular at my old restaurant gave it to me to encourage my interest in poetry. Clearly, his efforts did not succeed too well, as it has taken me all this time to finish the collection which, by happy coincidence, I began reading again before a friend wrote a sonnet for me, but it isn't due to a lack of interest in poetry per se. I own and love several collections of poetry by Ted Hughes, Stephen Dunn and Margaret Atwood (and have a collection of Philip Larkin's waiting,) but so much poetry, even the "good" stuff is awful and unreadable. While this book that I'm reviewing has, on the whole, poetry I enjoy, it still has the odd verse or two that makes me go into skim mode, which is not the way to be when you're trying to enjoy poetry.
Overall, it's a good selection, but I think it's more of a starting point for the novice to find poets they'll enjoy as opposed to a collection that stands out as something truly good on its own. It did really, really make me want to re-read Dunn's Pulitzer-Prize-winning "Different Hours" though, which is an OUTSTANDING collection of poetry. It also makes me regret somewhat that I don't own any Billy Collins, though I've found the two selections of his in this book to be my favorites of his works by far.
So, I started this book by reading the introduction. And as Keillor talked about poems that tell stories, I had trouble remembering why I disliked him. And then I read: "And then there is T. S. Eliot, the great stuffed owl whose glassy eyes mesmerized the English profs of my day. Eliot was once a cultural icon, the American guy so smooth he passed for British . . . but you look at his work today and it seems rather bloodless . . . Eliot didn't get out of the house much . . ." and I remembered, Oh yeah, that's why I dislike him. Talk about reverse snobbery! Eliot sucks because he's not earthy enough. Heaven forbid poetry talks about, well, heaven. Yes, there are some amazing poems in here. Keillor's intro isn't the fault of any of the poets he collected here. But, sigh. What an intro. And yet - it's not all bad. Keillor has a lot of really good points, too, of course he does! The man is brilliant. And frustrating in his prejudices. And brilliant . . . I could go back and forth forever. But enough of that. The volume as a whole is more worth reading than not, so pick it up if you're in the mood for poetry, and feeling patient enough to sift out the chaff.
From Song of Myself Walt Whitman “..All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own, Else it were time lost listening to me... .... In all people I see myself, none more, and not one a barley-corn less, And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.
I know I am solid and sound, To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means. I know I am deathless, I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass,
I know I shall not pass like a child's carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.
I know I am august, I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood, I see that the elementary laws never apologize, ...... ”
I am so not a Garrison Keillor fan--While his radio show contains some good nuggets, more often than not the stories ramble for an eternity before reaching a mediocre punchline. However, I love this anthology of poems selected by Keillor. I recommend it to anyone who thinks that poetry doesn't resonate with them--these poems are accessible, easy to read and many of them, in Keillor tradition, tell stories.
This version is an audiobook. I read the actual book the first time and listened to it the second. I am going to buy an audio copy as it’s perfect for listening to 20 minutes before bed to put you in a calm state. I wish it wasn’t abridged as that makes me crazy. I also wish each poem was identified before hand. But I can go back to my book and look up what I heard. It’s truly wonderful listening to Keillor’s voice read these poems. Better than Xanax.
What a great anthology! There are poems in here for just about every mood and situation which you could encounter.
As a Keillor fan, I can imagine him reading these. The public radio station to which I listen does not carry The Writer's Almanac, so I have never heard him read any of this poetry, but when I read them, it is Garrison's voice I hear in my head.
Divided into 19 sections, Good Poems touches on all manner of topics. From iceberg lettuce to the nature of the divine, from poetry readings to bodily excretions, from the delights of making love in a pile of leaves to old age and youth and so much more, it's all here. The range of poets Keillor selected is equally wide ranging. From Kenneth Rexroth to Emily Dickinson, from Shakespeare to Anne Sexton the list goes on.
I keep my copy in one of my motorcycle saddlebags as emergency reading in case I find my self waiting at an appointment. I know I can open it anywhere at random and immediately be transported away into another world, and I enjoy the unpredictabilikty of not knowing where it will be. --Mark Pendleton
Note: It's a lamentable shame that Keillor's name now brings to mind allegations of sexual misconduct. I'm here to review the book and not the editor.
Collections like this can help keep poetry alive. These are bright, occasionally powerful poems that are accessible to even the most novice of poetry readers.
The hardline artist types who want poetry to be constantly challenging probably won't care for this collection. These are friendly poems of a largely homespun nature; there's nothing alienating going on here.
Yet these poems do have much to say. The sorrowful richness of life, all of its gifts and violations, is on full display here. Some of the poems collected here are likely to stay with you long after you've put the book on the shelf and gone on with your life. If that's not the mark of a good poem then I don't know what is.
I think it's time that I admit defeat. I like (some) poetry, but not enough to read a book of it. This might be the kind of thing where I would read a poem or two as a palate cleanser between books. But I just cannot sit down and read it like I would a novel.
I'd like to say that I will eventually finish Good Poems, but I need to return it to its owner, who has been patient while I dawdled over this.
I’ve been reading poems all summer. In grade school there was a poem reading contest called the Cherry Blossom Festival, I think? It has probably gone to the wayside in today’s school curriculum. If you haven’t read poems for awhile this is a great book. At our last book club meeting before everything went to shit I had everyone pick a favorite poem to read. Some of them hated the idea but got into it and it was one of our best book club meetings.
Not as clean or classic as the other anthology I read. Half of the poems are crude or cursing, but the other half have become some of my new favorites. Also, half to say a word for the way it's arranged. Yellow, music, a good life, trips - those are good themes for poems and pleasant to read together.
This collection contains a nice variety of old and new (but mostly new) poems. As with any collection, some of the selections were just my style, others were not. It helped me figure out what I like and dislike in modern poetry.
rip to garrison keillor but i would have picked a better selection (look i loved reading this. lots of poems were old & new favourites. however at least third of them did nothing to me - too much white american maleness for me.)
I'm generally too obtuse to appreciate poetry but thought I'd give this book a try, given my affection for Garrison Keillor. Good poems, as advertised.
I especially liked Wendell Berry's The Peace of Wild Things "I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds./I come into the peace of wild things/that do not tax their lives with forethought/of grief." And laughed out loud at Charles Bukowski's Poetry Readings: "they read on and on/before their mothers, their sisters, their husbands,/their wives, their friends, the other poets/and the handful of idiots who have wandered/in/from nowhere."
Garrison Keillor is one of the funniest men on the planet, and as a connoisseur of funniness, I always suspect the wisest of us are the funniest, and this lovely anthology proves it. So the dour and cynical can stand in line on the scale of wisdom, if they even make it to the line, having lost their sense of humor which as everyone knows is a directional sense also. I rarely like poems from poets when they are in academia mode, trying to impress all the critics with their academic, heartless poetry, and so I love what he writes about poetry, kind of redeeming it from the emotionally challenged academics: “Poetry is the last preserve of honest speech and the outspoken heart.” “A poem is not a puzzle that you the dutiful reader is obliged to solve. It is meant to poke you, get you to buck up, pay attention, rise and shine, look alive, get a grip, get the picture, pull up your socks, wake up and die right.”
I loved the chapter headings, loosely grouping the poems in uncertain categories, but who would not want to read poems that may or may not be about ‘kindness to snails,’ ‘such as it is more or less,’ ‘the lust of tenderness,’ and ‘simpler than I could find words for.’
Some favorites:
the little horse is newlY Born)he knows nothing,and feels everything;all around whom is
perfectly a strange ness(Of sun light and of fragrance and of
Singing)is ev erywhere(a welcom ing dream:is amazing) a worlD.and in
this world lies:smoothbeautifuL ly folded;a(brea thing a gro
Wing)silence,who; is:somE
oNe.
--e. e. cummings
“A Poem for Emily,” by Miller Williams
Small fact and fingers and farthest one from me, a hand’s width and two generations away, in this still present I am fifty-three. You are not yet a full day.
When I am sixty-three, when you are ten, and you are neither closer nor as far, your arms will fill with what you know by then, the arithmetic and love we do and are.
When I by blood and luck am eighty-six and you are someplace else and thirty-three believing in sex and God and politics with children who look not at all like me,
sometime I know you will have read them this so they will know I love them and say so and love their mother. Child, whatever is is always or never was. Long ago
a day I watched awhile beside your bed, I wrote this down, a thing that might be kept awhile, to tell you what I would have said when you were who knows what and I was dead which is I stood and loved you while you slept.
Sharon Olds, “The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb.”
Whatever he needs, he has or doesn’t have by now. Whatever the world is going to do to him it has started to do. With a pencil and two Hardy Boys and a peanut butter sandwich and grapes he is on his way, there is nothing more we can do for him. Whatever is stored in his heart, he can use, now. Whatever he has laid up in his mind he can call on. What he does not have he can lack. The bus gets smaller and smaller, as one folds a flag at the end of a ceremony, onto itself, and onto itself, until only a heavy wedge remains. Whatever his exuberant soul can do for him, it is doing right now. Whatever his arrogance can do it is doing to him. Everything that’s been done to him, he will now do. Everything that’s been placed in him will come out, now, the contents of a trunk unpacked and lined up on a bunk in the underpine light.
Invitation by Carl Dennis
This is your invitation to the Ninth-Grade Play At Jackson Park Middle School 8:00 P.M., November 17, 1947. Macbeth, authored by Shakespeare And directed by Mr. Grossman and Mrs. Silvio With scenery from Miss Ferguson's art class.
A lot of effort has gone into it. Dozens of students have chosen to stay after school Week after week with their teachers Just to prepare for this one evening, A gift to lift you a moment beyond the usual. Even if you've moved away, you'll want to return. Jackson Park, in case you've forgotten, stands At the end of Jackson Street at the top of the hill. Doubtless you recall that Macbeth is about ambition. This is the play for you if you've been tempted To claw your way to the top. If you haven't been, It should make you feel grateful. Just allow time to get lost before arriving. So many roads are ready to take you forward Into the empty world to come, misty with promises. So few will lead you back to what you've missed.
Just get an early start. Call in sick to the office this once. Postpone your vacation a day or two. Prepare to find the road neglected, The street signs rusted, the school dark, The doors locked, the windows broken. This is where the challenge comes in.
Do you suppose our country would have been settled If the pioneers had worried about being lonely?
Somewhere the students are speaking the lines You can't remember. Somewhere, days before that, This invitation went out, this one you're reading On your knees in the attic, the contents of a trunk Piled beside you. Forget about your passport. You don't need to go to Paris just yet. Europe will seem even more beautiful Once you complete the journey you begin today.
"Working in the Rain," by Robert Morgan
My father loved more than anything to work outside in wet weather. Beginning at daylight he'd go out in dripping brush to mow or pull weeds for hog and chickens. First his shoulders got damp and the drops from his hat ran down his back. When even his armpits were soaked he came in to dry out by the fire, make coffee, read a little. But if the rain continued he'd soon be restless, and go out to sharpen tools in the shed or carry wood in from the pile, then open up a puddle to the drain, working by steps back into the downpour. I thought he sought the privacy of rain, the one time no one was likely to be out and he was left to the intimacy of drops touching every leaf and tree in the woods and the easy muttering of drip and runoff, the shine of pools behind grass dams. He could not resist the long ritual, the companionship and freedom of falling weather, or even the cold drenching, the heavy soak and chill of clothes and sobbing of fingers and sacrifice of shoes that earned a baking by the fire and washed fatigue after the wandering and loneliness in the country of rain.
"There Comes the Strangest Moment," by Kate Light
There comes the strangest moment in your life, when everything you thought before breaks free-- what you relied upon, as ground-rule and as rite looks upside down from how it used to be. Skin's gone pale, your brain is shedding cells; you question every tenet you set down; obedient thoughts have turned to infidels and every verb desires to be a noun. I want--my want. I love--my love. I'll stay with you. I thought transitions were the best, but I want what's here to never go away. I'll make my peace, my bed, and kiss this breast… Your heart's in retrograde. You simply have no choice. Things people told you turn out to be true. You have to hold that body, hear that voice. You'd have sworn no one knew you more than you. How many people thought you'd never change? But here you have. It's beautiful. It's strange.
"A Physics," by Heather McHugh When you get down to it, Earth has our own great ranges of feeling-Rocky, Smoky, Blue- and a heart that can melt stones.
The still pools fill with sky, as if aloof, and we have eyes for all of this-and more, for Earth's reminding moon. We too are ruled
by such attractions-spun and swaddled, rocked and lent a light. We run our clocks on wheels, our trains on time. But all the while we want
to love each other endlessly-not only for a hundred years, not only six feet up and down. We want the suns and moons of silver in ourselves, not only counted coins in a cup. The whole
idea of love was not to fall. And neither was the whole idea of God. We put him well above ourselves, because we meant, in time, to measure up.
"Things" by Lisel Mueller
What happened is, we grew lonely living among the things, so we gave the clock a face, the chair a back, the table four stout legs which will never suffer fatigue.
We fitted our shoes with tongues as smooth as our own and hung tongues inside bells so we could listen to their emotional language,
and because we loved graceful profiles the pitcher received a lip, the bottle a long, slender neck.
Even what was beyond us was recast in our image; we gave the country a heart, the storm an eye, the cave a mouth so we could pass into safety.
"Just Now," by W.S. Merwin
In the morning as the storm begins to blow away the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me that there has been something simpler than I could ever believe simpler than I could have begun to find words for not patient not even waiting no more hidden than the air itself that became part of me for a while with every breath and remained with me unnoticed something that was here unnamed unknown in the days and the nights not separate from them not separate from them as they came and were gone it must have been here neither early nor late then by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks
* "Some Details of Hebredean House Construction" - Thomas A. Clark * "The Icelandic Language" - Bill Holm * "The Cloths of Heaven" - W B Yeats * "Ox Cart Man" - Donald Hall * "Wild Geese" - Mary Oliver * "For C.W.B." - Elizabeth Bishop * "A Ritual to Read to Each Other" - William Stafford * "On the Strength of All Conviction and the Stamina of Love" - Jennifer Michael Hecht * "A Red, Red Rose" - Robert Burns"Trees" - John Tagliabue * "Postscript" - Seamus Heaney * "On a Tree Fallen Across the Road" - Robert Frost * "Parable Of The Four-Poster" - Erica Jong * "Dirge Without Music" - Edna St. Vincent Millay * "The British Museum Reading Room" - Louis Macneice * "Names of Horses" - Donald Hall * "How to See Deer" - Philip Booth * "Bats" - Randall Jarrell * "Her First Calf" - Wendell Berry * "To Be of Use" - Marge Piercy * "Prayer for a Marriage" - Steve Scafidi * "After Forty Years of Marriage, She Tries a New Recipe for Hamburger Hot Dish" - Leo Dangel * "The Middle Years" - Walter McDonald * "This Is Just To Say" - William Carlos Williams * "The Grain of Sound" - Robert Morgan * "Elevator Music" - Henry Taylor * "Her Door" - Mary Leader * "Late Hours" - Lisel Mueller
I checked this book out at the library after realizing my adoration with poetry thanks to the lovely Ms. Templeton. Two days later, and 50 pages in, I had to buy my own copy. It is now filled with scribbles and highlighting and flags consisting of my thoughts and analyzations on the poems in this book. Keillor put together a stunning selection of poems, classic and contemporary split into 18 chapters which are categories that reflected certain experiences or feelings in life. There was a diverse mix of simple, easy to understand poetry and more challenging, metaphorical poetry... all of which resonate with the reader. I feel I will always come back to this book and everything within it in times of happiness and strife when I simply need a poem to rely on. I loved this book and am excited to read his other poetry selections. What a great start to 2019!