Seeing, hearing, enjoying better with poetry and word sensitivity

My own personal definition of poetry is "word play and sensitivity".  That may not distinguish it from other writings but it's my definition, after all.  I don't spend much of my time reading poetry but what I do flavors my life.  Being reminded of John Ciardi the other day, I started thinking about poetry.  I think of poems that I have enjoyed repeatedly for decades and think of these:

• Antigonish or The Little Man Who Wasn't There
• The King's Ring or This, Too, Shall Pass
• All the works of Odgen Nash
• Billy Collins - "Sailing Alone Around the Room", "Ballistics", "Horoscopes for the Dead", "The Apple that Astonished Paris" and anything else
• Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters
• Wislawa Szymborska
• Lynn Kirby - especially "Time Islands" and "Warning

I read that English makes especially strong use of prepostions.  "Stuck up" and "stuck on" mean very different things.  The expert special agent Ziva in the tv show NCIS sometimes has trouble with English idioms using prepositions.  When Tony was teasing her too much about the same old thing, she said,"Back up, Tony"  He knew what she meant and helpfully supplied the alternative wording "back off".  

Listening to the sound file that Karen Maezen Miller directed her readers to, I heard Prof. James Shapiro list some of the many contributions to English made by Shakespeare. It was a surprising list to say the least and he emphasized that the Bard has a much longer list than he had time for.  Here is a link to a couple of posts on the blog Love of Words about Shakey's many wonderful word inventions.

Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety