This quarantine, I decided to embark on a personal project. To be a little more truthful, this is actually the only one out of many that stuck, which, I suppose, says quite a bit about me. 

To contextualize: for the past year or so, I made an effort to read more poetry, with the help of the trusty (albeit a little janky) Poetry Foundation app on my phone. This resulted in me having a google drive folder titled “Good Poetry” where I kept the archives of all that I had read (and liked). 

When quarantine first began, I decided to make it a task to go through every single one of my Good Poems, record it out loud, and sort it into a folder by mood or theme. This is, by all measures, an entirely pointless task, especially given that there are over two hundred poems in the folder, but I’ve been making great progress nevertheless (in fact, I’m already on letter “U” alphabetically!)

A positive side effect of this effort to keep myself busy is that I’ve been keeping track of my favorite poems and poets, making this article far less difficult to write. Of course, narrowing my list down to five was a cruel and haunting task, but I got through it. 

Without further ado… 

Five Poets to Know and Read

1. Ocean Vuong

Vietnamese-born and Connecticut-raised, Ocean Vuong writes about trauma, desire, and transformation. Though many of his works explore political and social themes such as his Asian-American identity, queerness, and the Vietnam War, every single word remains sharply personal and emotionally charged. 

His collections and chapbooks have won numerous awards of incredible prestige, and he currently teaches poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. 

His poetry combines deeply cutting imagery and ever-changing form that follows the story’s emotional arc, no matter how jarring. I discovered Ocean’s writing through his four-page poem “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” (which bears the same name as an acclaimed novel he published) and it continues to be one of the works closest to my heart.

2. Ron Padgett

As a high school student in Oklahoma during the 1950s, Ron Padgett’s passion for poetry led him to found an avant-garde literary magazine that published works of his great contemporaries as well as other students. After moving to New York and launching his career as a poet, Ron won many awards for his work—work that speaks as openly of political issues as it does about Ron’s innermost thoughts. 

His style often resembles stream-of-consciousness prose as well as the casual language of modern slam. Most of all, though, his poetry is alight with ideas and thoughts of the world, ones that resonate with me in their wonder. Throughout his work, it seems as though Ron is a child, experiencing each emotion with awe, as if for the first time. Though I love many of his works, “How Long” is a poem that I hold particularly dearly (despite its daunting length).

3. Franny Choi

With roots in modern slam poetry, much of Franny’s work revolves around social activism and explores the many facets of her identity—her Korean-American upbringing, her queerness, and her gender. As a high school student, she joined her school’s spoken word team and is now a recipient of many awards, both for her written work and participation in poetry slams. Her beginnings as a slam poet are apparent in her work—her powerful ideas and images are aided by auditory tools so much so that each poem of hers aches to be read out loud. 

Though I was introduced to her through a poem that had little to do with activism, I fell in love with Franny’s political commentary and her poem, “The World Keeps Ending and the World Goes On.”

4. Danez Smith

Minnesota-born Danez Smith is an African-American poet and has focused their work on building multicultural arts communities and festivals for others. Like Frannie Choi, Danez is an active member of the slam community, and their poetry provides important commentary on the oppression that black Americans face, as well as their relationship with gender identity and queerness. 

Their poetry is proudly free-verse, with often disjointed narratives and powerful imagery of body and violence, desire, and fear. Most of the work is deeply contemplative and reflective of the author’s experiences while stretching into the universal themes of their identity. In their most recent collection Homie, Danez explores the meaning of friendship in the often violent society that we live in. One of beauty and youth and queerness like in “The 17-Year-Old & The Gay Bar.”

5. Anne Waldman

One of the most original poets of her time, Anne Waldman grew up in New York City and became connected to the Beat movement, known to be the beginning of spoken word poetry in America. Anne is also a practicing Buddhist, which has influenced her spoken poetry to include dance, chant, song, and even visual art through collaborations with artists of different mediums. 

She has been awarded many honors, not the least being her status as a “resident poet” during Bob Dylan’s famed tour in 1975. To her, poetry is just as inherently political as it is inherently personal, and many of her works call for environmental justice and international peace, among other causes. One of her poems, “Revolution,” is especially special to me in that it never fails to make me cry.

Eva is a high school senior, an INFP, a Slytherin, and, among other things, a poet. Growing up in Russia in a family of political dissidents, she struggled with her parents' and peers' expectations. Now, a refugee in Chicago, she has learned to let go (a little bit) and notice the beauty in the world. And write about it. She is passionate about the Beatnik movement, the 1920s, electoral politics, contemporary art, and people-watching. She also occasionally exists on Instagram at @evagelmann.

This article was edited by EIC Kailah Figueroa