@challenges
Fun challenges curated by the Swell team. #AtoZPoetsChallenge
phil spade
@PhilΒ Β·Β 1:52
#PoetryMonth | Letter A - Share your favorite poet! Join the AtoZ Poets Challenge
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And the poet we are going to share today is the one you see on the cover image of this swell. This is W H Auden. W H Auden was an English American poet known for his intellectual and deeply personal poetry that explored themes of love, politics and morality. His work spanned a wide range of styles and forms from traditional sonnets to modernist free verse. One of his most famous poems is Funeral Blues. This was made famous by its inclusion in the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral
I would like to follow you up the long stairway again and become the boat that would row you back carefully, a flame in two cupped hands to where your body lies beside me and you enter it as easily as breathing in. I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed, and that necessary. I feel like that last line, there is an incredibly powerful line. There's a lot that we can unpack here. Emotionally romantically
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardesΒ Β·Β 1:29
So I want to read one of my favorite poems from her. It's called flowers. There's another skin inside my skin that gathers to your touch a lake to the light that loses its memory, its lost language into your tongue, erasing me into newness. Just when the body thinks it knows the ways of knowing itself, this second skin continues to answer
It's. This is neat and interesting and a fun way to introduce poets that we may not have known. I love this. So the person that I'm choosing is Maya Angelou, an African American poet, as well as so many other things. She was a civil rights activist. She wrote poetry and essays and a bunch of autobiographies. She also, like, sang and dance. So I really, really love her
Sharieka Butterfly
@ShariekaBFlyΒ Β·Β 0:45
You. So so I'm so excited about this challenge because the first date is letter A, and Maya Angelou is my favorite. My favorite, my favorite, my absolute favorite. Oh, my God. I'm just and the letter A is auspicious. So yes, all of this is auspicious. And we are starting with Maya Angelou. I have all these books that I'm going to read that I want to read, that I am reading, that I'm listening to on Audible
Laura L (she/her)
@LoloflowΒ Β·Β 4:39
The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives as they become known and accepted to ourselves. Our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change, and the conceptualization of any meaningful action
Laura L (she/her)
@LoloflowΒ Β·Β 0:42
You. Hi, Taylor. I too love Margaret Atwood. I was just reading some of her stuff the other day and was thinking how full of sort of seduction and longing and also kind of grief. And there is that cosmic aspect, like you said too, as well. It's intense. I took a screenshot of one of her poems called Eating Fire a couple of days ago, and I've included it here. It's another amazing one. So thanks for highlighting her
S. Sree
@studiosreeΒ Β·Β 0:50
One of my favorite poems was one that I studiosree in high school by a poet named Anne Brad Street. And the poem is called Verses upon the Burning of Our House, july 1066
Prabha Iyer
@PSPVΒ Β·Β 1:42
We scatter the leaves of our opening rows their widening scope their distant employ we shall never know and these stream as it flows sweeps them away each one is gone ever beyond into infinite ways we alone stay while years are yawn the flower fad falls through its dragons still stays. Thank you so much
Neena Verma
@GrowWithNeenaΒ Β·Β 3:28
So Division and here are some more favorite lines for me towards the end of the poetry, where she says when day comes, we step out of the shade of flame and unafraid the new dawn balloons as we free it, for there is always light. If only we were brave enough to sree it, if only we were brave enough to be it. And I hope that you will be brave enough today to see light in your life. And you will be brave enough to see light in your life
Bhavana Shrivastava
@BhavanashriΒ Β·Β 2:43
By making me drink the wine of love potion you have intoxicated intoxicated me by just a glance. My fair delicate wrists with green bangles in them have been held tightly by you with just a glance I give my life to you, O my clothe iyer you have died me in yourself by just a glance I give my whole life to you onijam you have made me your bride by just a glance
Laura L (she/her)
@LoloflowΒ Β·Β 0:29
You. Hi, Bhavana. I just wanted to say how much I absolutely loved your performance of this poem in song and then in word. I have a deep affinity for the Indian musical poet poetry. And to hear you perform it so beautifully, it just really touched me. So thank you so much for sharing
Pasju Kubert
@PasjuRelativelyΒ Β·Β 2:04
It's Tyler. Oh, my God. Wow. Fantastic, man. Pause. You here. I'm so excited because I never knew what the quote about. I'd like to be the air that inhabits you came from, but I will be sharing my poem to the whole group
Pasju Kubert
@PasjuRelativelyΒ Β·Β 2:14
And she says, Hansel, you're really bringing me down. And he says, Gretel, you can really be a b****. He says, I've wasted my life on our stupid legend when my one and only love was the Wicked witch. She said, what is history? And he said, History is an angel being blown backwards into the future. He said, History is a pile of debris
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