Aight bros here's the deal.
I don't like poetry. Well, maybe that's a strong way to phrase it.
I'm almost completely ambivalent to poetry. There we go. It stirs nothing whatsoever inside me, I feel no emotional pull, it doesn't inspire me, it bores me to tears. I mean it gives me MEGO Syndrome (My Eyes Glaze Over) from HELL. I'd rather read Ayn Rand. I'd rather read Ulysses. I'd rather read The Bible, than poetry. I see poetry as masturbatory self-aggrandizement, and don't understand why people engage in it when there isn't meant to be any musical accompaniment, or it isn't meant to be a song. There are songs that are essentially poetry sung with no music, and those are all right I suppose, but the only poetry that's ever moved me has instruments backing it up. Usually some form of rock and roll, but other musical genres as well. So when I say "poetry", I mean stuff like Whitman, Kipling, Frost, Ginsberg, you know, POETRY™. Not music. So don't come at me with "Music is basically poetry with instruments, brah!" because I don't react to them in any kind of similar fashion. Music I'm good with, poetry are flat words in a book that don't get any kind of reaction out of me other than boredom.
I should mention that I respect the art form. I understand that it takes skill to write poetry, just like I understand that it takes skill to play baseball or football. It's just something I'm completely uninterested in. So I'm not slagging off poets or people that like poetry here. I'm saying it doesn't rev my engine, and I don't understand what's so appealing about it. It's definitely an art form, just not one that I'm into.
So now that I've laid out basically how I feel about the writing format of poetry, here's the crux of my problem. I've been told by several people (some professional authors, whose opinions on things like this I value more than Joe Blow off the street) that I need to start reading poetry to improve my prose. Personally I think this is a load of hogwash, however I trust their opinions and advice enough to try it out.
Given that Twitter is a damn dumpster fire of a site that's near impossible to navigate without losing the thread of where you were going, I thought it'd be useful to put these things somewhere in a thread where I could keep track of them and so that things wouldn't get lost in the scrum of a site like Twitter. So I'm going to ask you who are poetry buffs a favor.
Recommend me some poetry.
Right here, in the chin, hard as you can, hit me with your best shot.
You can recommend as many individual poems as you'd like, but if you're going to recommend me a poet generally please give me one or two of their poems to start out with so that I don't just put their stuff on a d20 and roll it hoping I get something good. Because I'll do that if I don't get a specific recommendation for a poem, and everybody has that one thing that's just crap, and knowing my luck that'll be the one I land on if you don't give me some of their good shit. I'm also already predisposed to not like poetry just by nature, so if I get a crap poem my first try I'm liable to write the entire poet off as crap. I just need some help getting started because frankly, as I said, I don't like poetry and have no idea what separates a good poet from a bad one.
Unless we're talking "slam poetry" here. That's an abomination against God, Man, and the Universe itself. I don't think you have to know dick about poetry to know that, because I know that and I know dick about poetry. Anyway.
If this is what I gotta do to write better prose, then it's what I gotta do. I guess it's like eating your vegetables when you're a kid. And who knows? Maybe it will actually help my writing.
Personally I don't think I'm going to ever actually enjoy reading poetry. I can't envision a future where I'll think to myself, "Oh boy! Oh goodie! It's time to read POETRY™!" It's possible, but supremely unlikely. However, as I said, if I gotta, I gotta.
So go ahead my dudes. Hit me with your best shot.
Recommendations:
BTW, I'm not a poetry person either, but these are my favorites.
Shane Koyczan — "The Crickets Have Arthritis," "Heaven, or Whatever," "Instructions for a Bad Day." No matter what I've said about poetry before, this guy has brought me to tears with his words. He's proof that no matter where you go with stories, there's power in coming from a place of truth.
Steven Jesse Bernstein — "Face," "The Man Upstairs," and "Murdered in the Middle of the Night." Bernstein has a droning kind of voice, but if it doesn't bother you, you can find lots of his readings on YouTube.
Rime of the Ancient Mariner — This one might be more your speed, Jim, if you haven't read it already. This story is wild.
It really depends on what you want to get out of poetry, in all honesty. Functionally, poetry has done a lot of different things from culture to culture.
Given that you're a story man, you may want to give the epic poets a try, assuming that you can find a good poetic translation of Homer, Virgil, or Dante. Even much of Chaucer is poetry, though the Middle English can be tricky. Milton's Paradise Lost is definitely worth the effort and can be read by anyone who can read Shakespeare.
I'm a big fan of G K Chesterton's poetry, though I know it only piecemeal. He has poems from the humorous (eg. "The Song of the Strange Ascetic"), to the historical (eg, "Lepanto") to the religious (eg, "The Donkey").
Probably the most influential poet on my own work is Edgar Lee Masters. His Spoon River Anthology tells what's really going on in a small American town by having the citizens speak from beyond the grave. Several events are narrated by various of the deceased, and you as the reader can only piece what's going on by seeing several perspectives.
And of course there's haiku, but that probably deserves its own response. If you can find a copy of Blyth's 4-volume collection, that's where I really started appreciating the genre. William J. Higginson's Haiku Handbook has the advantage of being only one volume.