Poem of the Week

An Anonymous Poem from Iran

2009-06-20T09:59:00.004-04:00

Friday the 19th of June, 2009
Tomorrow, Saturday
Tomorrow is a day of destiny
Tonight the cries of Allah-o Akhbar
Are heard louder and louder than the nights before

Where is this place?
Where is this place where every door is closed?
Where is this place where people are simply calling God?
Where is this place where the sound of Allah-o Akhbar gets louder and louder?
I wait every night to see if the sounds will get louder and whether the number increases
It shakes me
I wonder if God is shaken

Where is this place where so many innocent people are entrapped?
Where is this place where no one comes to our aid?
Where is this place where only with our silence we are sending our voices to the world?
Where is this place where the young shed blood and then people go and pray?
Standing on that same blood and pray?

Where is this place where the citizens are called vagrants?
Where is this place? You want me to tell you?
This place is Iran
The homeland of you and me
This place is Iran

Lesson by Ellen Bryant Voigt

2009-06-12T19:21:00.003-04:00

Lesson

Whenever my mother, who taught
small children forty years,
asked a question, she
already knew the answer.
"Would you like to" meant
you would. "Shall we" was
another, and "Don't you think."
As in "Don't you think
it's time you cut your hair."

So when, in the bare room,
in the strict bed, she said,
"You want to see?" her hands
were busy at her neckline,
untying the robe, not looking
down at it, stitches
bristling where the breast
had been, but straight at me.

I did what I always did:
not weep --she never wept--
and made my face a kindly
whitewashed wall, so she
could write, again, whatever
she wanted there.

Ellen Bryant Voigt was born and raised in VIrginia. Her poetry is influenced by her background in music. She has written several books of poetry and served as the Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She currently lives in Vermont and teaches for the Warren Wilson low-residency MFA program.

Personals by C.D. Wright

2009-06-05T17:11:00.002-04:00

Personals

Some nights I sleep with my dress on. My teeth
are small and even. I don't get headaches.
Since 1971 or before, I have hunted a bench
where I could eat my pimento cheese in peace.
If this were Tennessee and across that river, Arkansas,
I'd meet you in West Memphis tonight. We could
have a big time. Danger, shoulder soft.
Do not lie or lean on me. I'm still trying to find a job
for which a simple machine isn't better suited.
I've seen people die of money. Look at Admiral Benbow. I wish
like certain fishes, we came equipped with light organs.
Which reminds me of a little known fact:
if we were going the speed of light, this dome
would be shrinking while we were gaining weight.
Isn't the road crooked and steep.
In this humidity, I make repairs by night. I'm not one
among millions who saw Monroe's face
in the moon. I go blank looking at that face.
If I could afford it I'd live in hotels. I won awards
in spelling and the Australian crawl. Long long ago.
Grandmother married a man named Ivan. The men called him
Eve. Stranger, to tell the truth, in dog years I am up there.

C. D. Wright was born in 1949 in Mountain Home, Arkansas. She is the author of numerous books of poetry and currently teaches at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

Prayer by Carol Ann Duffy

2009-05-27T19:00:00.006-04:00

I love Carol Ann Duffy's "Prayer," and the poem is even more remarkable when you consider how strictly she's stayed true to the Shakespearean sonnet form--and how well she's hidden it. The last line, which I'm told is familiar to Brits, is somewhat lost in translation. It's part of a nightly radio maritime weather forecast.

Prayer

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims1 sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade I piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Carol Ann Duffy was born in in 1955 in Glasgow, Scotland. She was recently named the first female (and the first Scottish) poet laureate in British history.

You Who Never Arrived by Rainer Maria Rilke

2009-05-20T14:21:00.004-04:00

You Who Never Arrived

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-- , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced
upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...

--Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague in 1875. He resided throughout Europe during his lifetime, including a 12-year residency is Paris, where he befriending the famed sculptor Auguste Rodin. His best known work includes his Duino Elegies and his Sonnets to Orpheus.

Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

2009-05-15T23:13:00.005-04:00

This is good advice to anyone just starting to read poetry. And if you've ever been in a poetry workshop, you know what Collins is talking about in the last two stanzas.

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Billy Collins was born in New York City in 1941. He served as the Poet Laureate in 2001 and is the author of several books of poetry.

Alone by Edgar Allan Poe

2009-05-08T15:14:00.002-04:00

Old school this week. What do you think?

Alone

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were--I have not seen
As others saw--I could not bring
My passions from a common spring--
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow--I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone--
And all I lov'd--I lov'd alone--

Then--in my childhood--in the dawn
Of a most stormy life--was drawn
From ev'ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still--
From the torrent, or the fountain--
From the red cliff of the mountain--
From the sun that 'round me roll'd
In its autumn tint of gold--
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass'd me flying by--
From the thunder, and the storm--
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view--

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809, and was raised in Virginia. He is remembered as one of the first American writers to become a major figure in world literature.

Ave Maria by Frank O'Hara

2009-05-02T12:20:00.004-04:00

Amen.

Ave Maria

Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies
get them out of the house so they won't
know what you're up to
it's true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by
silvery images
and when you grow old as grow old you
must
they won't hate you
they won't criticize you they won't know
they'll be in some glamorous
country
they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or
playing hookey
they may even be grateful to you
for their first sexual experience
which only cost you a quarter
and didn't upset the peaceful
home
they will know where candy bars come
from
and gratuitous bags of popcorn
as gratuitous as leaving the movie before
it's over
with a pleasant stranger whose apartment
is in the Heaven on
Earth Bldg
near the Williamsburg Bridge
oh mothers you will have made
the little
tykes
so happy because if nobody does pick
them up in the movies
they won't know the difference
and if somebody does it'll be
sheer gravy
and they'll have been truly entertained
either way
instead of hanging around the yard
or up in their room hating you
prematurely since you won't have done
anything horribly mean
yet
except keeping them from life's darker joys
it's unforgivable the latter
so don't blame me if you won't take this
advice
and the family breaks up
and your children grow old and blind in
front of a TV set
seeing
movies you wouldn't let them see when
they were young

Frank O'Hara became one of the most distinguished members of the New York School of poets, which also included John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch. O'Hara's association with the painters Larry Rivers, Jackson Pollock, and Jasper Johns, also leaders of the New York School, became a source of inspiration for his highly original poetry. He attempted to produce with words the effects these artists had created on canvas.

Mirror by Sylvia Plath

2009-04-24T20:22:00.003-04:00

I love this one, but it hurts.

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1932. She spent part of her short life in England, and married the English poet Ted Hughes. In 1963, Plath published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Then, on February 11, 1963, during one of the worst English winters on record, Plath wrote a note to her downstairs neighbor instructing him to call the doctor, then she committed suicide. She was the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize after death.

The Long Boat by Stanley Kunitz

2009-04-18T01:32:00.002-04:00

The Long Boat

When his boat snapped loose
from its mooring, under
the screaking of the gulls,
he tried at first to wave
to his dear ones on shore,
but in the rolling fog
they had already lost their faces.
Too tired even to choose
between jumping and calling,
somehow he felt absolved and free
of his burdens, those mottoes
stamped on his name-tag:
conscience, ambition, and all
that caring.
He was content to lie down
with the family ghosts
in the slop of his cradle,
buffeted by the storm,
endlessly drifting.
Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didn't matter
which way was home;
as if he didn't know
he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever.

Stanley Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1905. He attended Harvard College, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1926 and a master's degree in 1927. He served in the Army in World War II, after a request for conscientious objector status was denied. Following the war, he began teaching, first at Bennington College in Vermont, and later at universities including Columbia, Yale, Princeton, Rutgers, and the University of Washington. He was named Poet Laureate of the U.S. in 2000. He died at the age of 100 on May 14, 2006.

Eating Poetry by Mark Strand

2009-04-11T11:22:00.003-04:00

Hungry?

Eating Poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

Mark Strand was born on Prince Edward Island in Canada in 1934. He has served as the Poet Laureate of the United States and his 1998 collection Blizzard of One won the Pulitzer Prize. He currently teaches at Columbia University in New York.

Not Here by Rumi

2009-04-03T15:30:00.003-04:00

This week, some wisdom from Rumi.

Not Here

There's courage involved if you want
to become truth. There is a broken-

open place in a lover. Where are
those qualities of bravery and sharp

compassion in this group? What's the
use of old and frozen thought? I want

a howling hurt. This is not a treasury
where gold is stored; this is for copper.

We alchemists look for talent that
can heat up and change. Lukewarm

won't do. Halfhearted holding back,
well-enough getting by? Not here.

Translated by Coleman Barks

Rumi (Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi) was a 13th century Persian muslim poet, jurist, and theologian. His name literally means "Majesty of Religion". He was born in Balkh (now part of Afghanistan) and died in present-day Turkey. His works are widely read in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and are in translation in Turkey, Azerbaijan, the U.S., and South Asia. He lived most of his life in, and produced his works under, the Seljuk Empire. Rumi's importance is considered to transcend national and ethnic borders.

Untitled by E.E. Cummings

2009-03-28T17:17:00.003-04:00

Cummings shows us that a good poem can be only four words long.

l(a

le
af
fa
ll

s)
one
l

iness

E.E. Cummings (1894-1962) discovered an original way of describing the chaotic immediacy of sensuous experience. He played games with language and form and put forth a deliberately simplistic view of the world, giving his poems a gleeful and precocious tone. He was born in Cambridge, Mass., attended Harvard and studied Art in Paris.

Underground by Seamus Heaney

2009-03-20T23:04:00.002-04:00

On the surface, "Underground" is about a memory, but I think it's also about the process of writing poetry. Notice how the speaker returns to examine the scene in the last two stanzas, bare and tense and "all attention." That reads like Heaney the poet (not Heaney the husband) to me.

Underground

There we were in the vaulted tunnel running,
You in your going-away coat speeding ahead
And me, me then like a fleet god gaining
Upon you before you turned to a reed

Or some new white flower japped with crimson
As the coat flapped wild and button after button
Sprang off and fell in a trail
Between the Underground and the Albert Hall.

Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms,
Our echoes die in that corridor and now
I come as Hansel came on the moonlit stones
Retracing the path back, lifting the buttons

To end up in a draughty lamplit station
After the trains have gone, the wet track
Bared and tensed as I am, all attention
For your step following and damned if I look back.

Seamus Heaney was born into a family of farmers in County Derry, Northern Ireland in 1939. He currently lives in Dublin, but spends a part of each year teaching at Harvard University. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.

The Freaks at Spurgin Road Field by Richard Hugo

2009-03-14T02:07:00.005-04:00

This week, Richard Hugo's powerful villanelle about memories he's trying (unsuccessfully) to forget.

The Freaks at Spurgin Road Field

The dim boy claps because the others clap.
The polite word, handicapped, is muttered in the stands.
Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back.

One whole day I sit, contrite, dirt, L.A.
Union Station, ’46, sweating through last night.

The dim boy claps because the others clap.

Score, 5 to 3. Pitcher fading badly in the heat.
Isn’t it wrong to be or not be spastic?
Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back.

I’m laughing at a neighbor girl beaten to scream
by a savage father and I’m ashamed to look.
The dim boy claps because the others clap.

The score is always close, the rally always short.
I’ve left more wreckage than a quake.
Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back.

The afflicted never cheer in unison.
Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back
to stammering pastures where the picnic should have worked.

The dim boy claps because the others clap.

Richard Hugo was born in a Seattle suburb in 1923. He wrote many books of poetry and a popular book on how to write poetry called The Triggering Town. He died in 1982.

Epilogue to The Tempest by William Shakespeare

2009-03-06T18:41:00.003-05:00

In a remarkably contemporary moment at the end of The Tempest, Shakespeare's wizard Prospero addresses the audience directly, breaking down the boundaries of the play. He informs them that the play is over, his powers are gone, and thus his escape from the play's island setting depends on their applause--that they, in effect, get to decide his fate.

He pulls a similar trick with Puck at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint. Now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell,
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

William Shakespeare 1564-1616

Moles by Mary Oliver

2009-02-28T00:39:00.003-05:00

This week, an animal poem by Mary Oliver

Moles

Under the leaves, under
the first loose
levels of earth
they're there -- quick
as beetles, blind
as bats, shy
as hares but seenless than these --
traveling
among the pale girders
of appleroot,
rockshelf, nests
of insects and black
pastures of bulbs
peppery and packed full
of the sweetest food:
spring flowers.
Field after field
you can see the traceries
of their long
lonely walks, then
the rains blur
even this frail hint of them --
so excitable,
so plush,so willing to continue
generation after generation
accomplishing nothing
but their brief physical lives
as they live and die,
pushing and shoving
with their stubborn muzzles against
the whole earth,
finding it
delicious.

Mary Oliver was born on September 10, 1935 in Maple Heights, Ohio. She is the author of many book , including American Primitive (1983), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. She currently lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Above Pate Valley by Gary Snyder

2009-02-20T22:48:00.004-05:00

Gary Snyder is one of our best nature poets. I think you can see here how Zen Buddhism has influenced him--he treats nature with a reverence.

Above Pate Valley

We finished clearing the last
Section of trail by noon,
High on the ridge-side
Two thousand feet above the creek
Reached the pass, went on
Beyond the white pine groves,
Granite shoulders, to a small
Green meadow watered by the snow,
Edged with Aspen—sun
Straight high and blazing
But the air was cool.
Ate a cold fried trout in the
Trembling shadows. I spied
A glitter, and found a flake
Black volcanic glass—obsidian—
By a flower. Hands and knees
Pushing the Bear grass, thousands
Of arrowhead leavings over a
Hundred yards. Not one good
Head, just razor flakes
On a hill snowed all but summer,
A land of fat summer deer,
They came to camp. On their
Own trails. I followed my own
Trail here. Picked up the cold-drill,
Pick, singlejack, and sack
Of dynamite.
Ten thousand years.

Gary Snyder was born in San Francisco in 1930. He was a member of the beat generation and is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He is currently a professor at the University of California at Davis.

Design by Robert Frost

2009-02-13T21:52:00.003-05:00

Frost was a master of the sonnet. In "Design" he takes on the classic argument for design: that the design evident in the natural world is proof of the existence of God.

Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874. He moved to New England at the age of eleven and became interested in reading and writing poetry during his high school years in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Frost lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont, and died in Boston on January 29, 1963.

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop

2009-02-06T18:26:00.004-05:00

Bishop's famous poem begins with a playful tone, then builds to a serious and powerful ending. You might recognize the form (the villanelle) from Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night."

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts, but grew up with her grandparents in Nova Scotia. She is considered to have been one of the great American poets of the 20th Century, and is best known for her remarkable book Geography III. She died in 1979.

The House Was Quiet... by Wallace Stevens

2009-01-29T16:55:00.006-05:00

I think that anyone who loves reading will take to this one. The poem's mood--created by the lulling music, repetition and the lack of strong verbs--complements the subject so well.

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), a lawyer and business man for most of his life, is considered one of the great American poets of the 20th Century. More than any other modern poet, Stevens was concerned with the transformative power of the imagination. Composing poems on his way to and from the office and in the evenings, Stevens continued to spend his days behind a desk at the office, and led a quiet, uneventful life.

The Buck in the Snow by Edna St. Vincent Millay

2009-01-23T18:33:00.005-05:00

"The Buck in the Snow" is a crisp, powerful poem. Millay briefly personifies the sky and the trees, but she leans almost entirely on clear imagery and music to create the poem's impact. The repeated O sounds call up the long lovely leaps of the deer. And notice the effect when she finally interrupts the rhyme scheme.

The Buck in the Snow

White sky, over the hemlocks bowed with snow,
Saw you not at the beginning of evening the antlered buck and his doe
Standing in the apple-orchard? I saw them. I saw them suddenly go,
Tails up, with long leaps lovely and slow,
Over the stone-wall into the wood of hemlocks bowed with snow.

Now he lies here, his wild blood scalding the snow.

How strange a thing is death, bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers
The buck in the snow.
How strange a thing--a mile away by now, it may be,
Under the heavy hemlocks that as the moments pass
Shift their loads a little, letting fall a feather of snow--
Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.

You might also enjoy "First Fig"

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, ME in 1892. Her fourth book of poetry, The Harp Weaver, earned her the Pulitzer Prize.

The Little Mute Boy by Federico Garcia Lorca

2009-01-16T12:49:00.004-05:00

Lorca may have been the most important Spanish poet of the 20th Century. His surrealist work like "The Little Mute Boy"--which sought to tap into the unconscious--had a profound impact on American poetry.

The Little Mute Boy

The little boy was looking for his voice.
(The king of the crickets had it.)
In a drop of water
the little boy was looking for his voice.
I do not want it for speaking with;
I will make a ring of it
so that he may wear my silence
on his little finger

In a drop of water
the little boy was looking for his voice.

(The captive voice, far away,
put on a cricket's clothes.)

Translated by William S. Merwin

Federico Garcia Lorca was born in Granada, Spain in 1899. He later moved to Madrid where he became part of a group of surrealists that included the painter Salvador Dali. He was killed by Franco's soldiers in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War.

How Many Nights by Galway Kinnell

2009-01-09T18:45:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year from Poem of the Week! I set the blog on auto update while I was on vacation and it failed me (sigh). But we'll be back on schedule now. To start the year, here's "How Many Nights" by Galway Kinnell, who I think writes about nature as well as any living poet.

How Many Nights

How many nights
hive I lain in terror,
O Creator Spirit, Maker of night and day,

only to walk out
the next morning over the frozen world
hearing under the creaking of snow
faint, peaceful breaths . . .
snake,

bear, earthworm, ant . . .
and above me a wild crow crying 'yaw yaw yaw'
from a branch nothing cried from ever in my life.

If you want to read another, take a look at Saint Francis and the Sow.

Galway Kinnell was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1927. He has won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He was a professor of Creative Writing at NYU, but is now retired and at his home in Vermont.

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe by Elizabeth Alexander

2008-12-20T09:24:00.004-05:00

This week, a poem by Elizabeth Alexander, who will read at Obama's inauguration. You can read more of her poems here. Do you like Obama's choice?

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

Poetry, I tell my students,
 is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves,
 (though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”) 
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps, 
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
 in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
 in the details, the only way

to get from here to there. 
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

Elizabeth Alexander was born in Harlem, New York in 1962, and is a professor at Yale. She is the author of four books of poetry. Her latest collection American Sublime was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.

Drum by Philip Levine

2008-12-12T16:05:00.003-05:00

Levine, who has long celebrated the working class in his poetry, uses thick, palpable imagery to bring this scene to life. In the third stanza, he conflates the blue-collar with the classical for a powerful ending.

Drum

Leo's Tool & Die, 1950

In the early morning before the shop
opens, men standing out in the yard
on pine planks over the umber mud.
The oil drum, squat, brooding, brimmed
with metal scraps, three-armed crosses,
silver shavings whitened with milky oil,
drill bits bitten off. The light diamonds
last night's rain; inside a buzzer purrs.
The overhead door stammers upward
to reveal the scene of our day.

We sit
for lunch on crates before the open door.
Bobeck, the boss's nephew, squats to hug
the overflowing drum, gasps and lifts. Rain
comes down in sheets staining his gun-metal
covert suit. A stake truck sloshes off
as the sun returns through a low sky.
By four the office help has driven off. We
sweep, wash up, punch out, collect outside
for a final smoke. The great door crashes
down at last.

In the darkness the scents
of mint, apples, asters. In the darkness
this could be a Carthaginian outpost sent
to guard the waters of the West, those mounds
could be elephants at rest, the acrid half light
the haze of stars striking armor if stars were out.
On the galvanized tin roof the tunes of sudden rain.
The slow light of Friday morning in Michigan,
the one we waited for, shows seven hills
of scraped earth topped with crab grass,
weeds, a black oil drum empty, glistening
at the exact center of the modern world.

Philip Levine, born in Detroit, Michigan in 1928, has written sixteen books of poetry. He lives in Fresno, California and New York City, where he currently teaches at NYU.

The Rose is Obsolete by William Carlos Williams

2008-12-05T20:42:00.005-05:00

As I've written here before, Williams' power stems from his imagery, his clarity of language, and the "energy" he creates using line breaks. This poem is about what the rose has come to symbolize and what it really is.

The Rose is Obsolete

The rose is obsolete
but each petal ends in
an edge, the double facet
cementing the grooved
columns of air--The edge
cuts without cutting
meets--nothing--renewsitself in metal or porcelain--

whither? It ends--

But if it ends
the start is begun
so that to engage roses
becomes a geometry--

Sharper, neater, more cutting
figured in majolica--
the broken plate
glazed with a rose

Somewhere the sense
makes copper roses
steel roses--
The rose carried weight of love
but love is at an end--of roses

It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits

Crisp, worked to defeat
laboredness--fragile
plucked, moist, half-raised
cold, precise, touching

What

The place between the petal's
edge and the

From the petal's edge a line starts
that being of steel
infinitely fine, infinitely
rigid penetrates
the Milky Way
without contact--lifting
from it--neither hanging
nor pushing--

The fragility of the flower
unbruised
penetrates space

William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883. He was a practicing doctor, and a principal poet of the Imagist movement, which stressed precision of imagery, and clear, sharp language.

The Mower to the Glow-Worms by Andrew Marvell

2008-11-26T10:21:00.002-05:00

This week, a terrific poem in the English pastoral tradition. I love how convention is upended by the personal in the last stanza.

The Mower to the Glow-Worms

Ye living lamps, by whose dear light
The nightingale does sit so late,
And studying all the summer night,
Her matchless songs does meditate;

Ye county comets, that portend
No war nor prince’s funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grass’s fall;

Ye glow-worms, whose officious flame
To wand’ring mowers shows the way,
That in the night have lost their aim,
And after foolish fires do stray;

Your courteous lights in vain you waste,
Since Juliana here is come,
For she my mind hath so displac’d
That I shall never find my home.

Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) was a well-known politician in his day, holding office in Oliver Cromwell's government. Though good friends with John Milton, he was, himself, relatively unknown as a poet and his work was only published posthumously. He is now considered one of the great English poets of the 17th Century.

Separation by W.S. Merwin

2008-11-21T15:37:00.005-05:00

Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

William S. Merwin was born in New York City in 1927, the son of a Presbyterian minister. He has written more than 20 books of poetry, won numerous prestigious awards, and served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He currently resides in Hawaii.

Looking Around, Believing by Gary Soto

2008-11-14T16:25:00.003-05:00

This week, Gary Soto reminds us that we can always stop to find the world miraculous.

Looking Around, Believing

How strange that we can begin at any time.
With two feet we get down the street.
With a hand we undo the rose.
With an eye we lift up the peach tree
And hold it up to the wind — white blossoms
At our feet. Like today. I started
In the yard with my daughter,
With my wife poking at a potted geranium,
And now I am walking down the street,
Amazed that the sun is only so high,
Just over the roof, and a child
Is singing through a rolled newspaper
And a terrier is leaping like a flea
And at the bakery I pass, a palm,
Like a suctioning starfish, is pressed
To the window. We're keeping busy —
This way, that way, we're making shadows
Where sunlight was, making words
Where there was only noise in the trees.

Gary Soto was born in Fresno, California in 1952 to working-class, Mexican-American parents. He is the author of many books of poetry, including, most recently A Simple Plan (Chronicle books). Soto currently resides in Northern California.

I, Too, Sing America by Langston Hughes

2008-11-06T16:16:00.004-05:00

A repeat, but I thought it was a good time to post this one again.

I, Too, Sing America

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.

Langston Hughes was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. Through his poetry, fiction and plays he tried to accurately portray the African-American experience in early to mid-twentieth century America. He made major contributions to the Harlem Rennaisance, and is known for incorporating jazz influences into his work.

It Happens Like This

2008-10-27T09:44:00.002-04:00

Reading "It Happens Like This" by James Tate, I feel like the poem keeps slipping through my fingers as it evolves in surprising ways. Only this isn't frustrating at all--it's enjoyable.

The critic Dana Gioia said that Tate "domesticated surrealism," which, previously, seemed foreign to Americans. See if you like how Tate employs surrealism here.

It Happens Like This

I was outside St. Cecelia's Rectory
smoking a cigarette when a goat appeared beside me.
It was mostly black and white, with a little reddish
brown here and there. When I started to walk away,
it followed. I was amused and delighted, but wondered
what the laws were on this kind of thing. There's
a leash law for dogs, but what about goats? People
smiled at me and admired the goat. "It's not my goat,"
I explained. "It's the town's goat. I'm just taking
my turn caring for it." "I didn't know we had a goat,"
one of them said. "I wonder when my turn is." "Soon,"
I said. "Be patient. Your time is coming." The goat
stayed by my side. It stopped when I stopped. It looked
up at me and I stared into its eyes. I felt he knew
everything essential about me. We walked on. A police-
man on his beat looked us over. "That's a mighty
fine goat you got there," he said, stopping to admire.
"It's the town's goat," I said. "His family goes back
three-hundred years with us," I said, "from the beginning."
The officer leaned forward to touch him, then stopped
and looked up at me. "Mind if I pat him?" he asked.
"Touching this goat will change your life," I said.
"It's your decision." He thought real hard for a minute,
and then stood up and said, "What's his name?" "He's
called the Prince of Peace," I said. "God! This town
is like a fairy tale. Everywhere you turn there's mystery
and wonder. And I'm just a child playing cops and robbers
forever. Please forgive me if I cry." "We forgive you,
Officer," I said. "And we understand why you, more than
anybody, should never touch the Prince." The goat and
I walked on. It was getting dark and we were beginning
to wonder where we would spend the night.

James Tate was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1943. He was something of a prodigy, winning the prestigious Yale Younger Poets prize for his book The Lost Pilot when he was just 23 years old. He currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Coming Thro' the Rye by Robert Burns

2008-10-17T17:18:00.004-04:00

"Coming Thro' the Rye" is the poem referenced in J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye, from which Salinger hatched his title. Salinger's protagonist, Holden Caulfield, misquotes and misunderstands the poem, using it as the basis for a fantasy about catching children in a field before they fall off a cliff--thereby maintaining their innocence. But Burns beautiful poem is about innocence lost. It describes a woman, Jenny, who "meets" (if you know what I mean) a man in a rye field.

Coming thro' the rye, poor body,
Coming thro' the rye,
She draiglet a' her petticoatie
Coming thro' the rye.

O, Jenny's a' wat, poor body;
Jenny's seldom dry;
She draiglet a' her petticoatie
Coming thro' the rye.

Gin a body meet a body
Coming thro' the rye,
Gin a body kiss a body -
Need a body cry?

Gin a body meet a body
Coming thro' the glen,
Gin a body kiss a body -
Need the warld ken?

Robert Burns (1759-1796) is considered the national bard of Scotland. His poetry often depicts traditional Scottish culture and farm life.

Ode to Sean Hannity by John Cleese

2008-10-10T21:19:00.006-04:00

This week, a stirring portrait of a journalist by comedic icon John Cleese. It made me laugh.

Ode to Sean Hannity

Aping urbanity
Oozing with vanity
Plump as a manatee
Faking humanity
Journalistic calamity
Intellectual inanity
Fox Noise insanity
You’re a profanity
Hannity

Ed's note: Hannity also features himself on the most smug website ever.

John Cleese is...oh, you know who he is.

England in 1819 by Percy Bysshe Shelley

2008-10-03T23:52:00.005-04:00

This week, a brutal political poem from Shelley.

England in 1819

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,--mud from a muddy spring,
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless--a book sealed;
A Senate,--Time's worst statute unrepealed,
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestous day.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born August 4, 1792 in Sussex, England. He is considered to be one of the great poets of the British Romantic Period along with William Wordsworth, Lord Byron and John Keats. Like Keats, Shelley died young, drowning in a shipwreck shortly before his thirtieth birthday.

Rite of Passage by Sharon Olds

2008-09-26T16:22:00.003-04:00

Sharon Olds often writes openly about her issues with men and maleness. And while I want to take some offense to her making as much out of this anecdote as she does, I can't. It is a terrific little anecdote.

Besides, I've met her and she's extraordinarily kind.

Rite of Passage

As the guests arrive at our son’s party
they gather in the living room—
short men, men in first grade
with smooth jaws and chins.
Hands in pockets, they stand around
jostling, jockeying for place, small fights
breaking out and calming. One says to another
How old are you? —Six. —I’m seven. —So?
They eye each other, seeing themselves
tiny in the other’s pupils. They clear their
throats a lot, a room of small bankers,
they fold their arms and frown. I could beat you
up, a seven says to a six,
the midnight cake, round and heavy as a
turret behind them on the table. My son,
freckles like specks of nutmeg on his cheeks,
chest narrow as the balsa keel of a
model boat, long hands
cool and thin as the day they guided him
out of me, speaks up as a host
for the sake of the group.
We could easily kill a two-year-old,
he says in his clear voice. The other
men agree, they clear their throats
like Generals, they relax and get down to
playing war, celebrating my son’s life.

Born in San Francisco on November 19, 1942, Sharon Olds is the author of many successful books of poetry. She held the position of New York State Poet from 1998 to 2000. She currently teaches poetry workshops at New York University's Graduate Creative Writing Program.

Love Sonnet XI by Pablo Neruda

2008-09-19T17:02:00.003-04:00

Here's a spicy one. Neruda is relentless with his sensual metaphors.

Rowr.

Love Sonnet XI

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

(Translated by Stephen Tapscott)

Here's the original, per the requests. (Thanks to anonymous)

Soneto XI

Tengo hambre de tu boca, de tu voz, de tu pelo
y por las calles voy sin nutrirme, callado,
no me sostiene el pan, el alba me desquicia,
busco el sonido líquido de tus pies en el día.

Estoy hambriento de tu risa resbalada,
de tus manos color de furioso granero,
tengo hambre de la pálida piedra de tus uñas,
quiero comer tu piel como una intacta almendra.

Quiero comer el rayo quemado en tu hermosura,
la nariz soberana del arrogante rostro,
quiero comer la sombra fugaz de tus pestañas

y hambriento vengo y voy olfateando el crepúsculo
buscándote, buscando tu corazón caliente
como un puma en la soledad de Quitratúe.

The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda led a life charged with poetic and political activity. In 1923 he sold all of his possessions to finance the publication of his first book, Crepusculario ("Twilight"). The following year, he found a publisher for Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada ("Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair"). The book made a celebrity of Neruda, who gave up his studies at the age of twenty to devote himself to his craft. He died in 1973.

And Yet the Books by Czeslaw Milosz

2008-09-12T17:03:00.006-04:00

I love this one by Milosz...

And Yet The Books

And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,
And, touched, coddled, began to live
In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,
Tribes on the march, planets in motion.
“We are, ” they said, even as their pages
Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame
Licked away their letters. So much more durable
Than we are, whose frail warmth
Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.
I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant,
Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

Czeslaw Milosz was born on June 30, 1911, in Szetejnie, Lithuania (then under the domination of the Russian tsarist government). He spent most of World War II in Nazi-occupied Warsaw working for underground presses. In 1980, Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in August of 2004.

Loving in Truth by Sir Philip Sidney

2008-09-03T09:46:00.009-04:00

Loving in Truth is the opening sonnet of Sir Philip Sidney's great sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella. The sequence is said to record Sidney's courtship with a woman named Penelope Devereux, but was no doubt influenced by the conventions of courtly love.

When reading English Renaissance poetry, it helps me to remember that poets of the period celebrated invention. Part of the joy of reading Sidney's sonnet can be found in untangling the poem's clever syntax and extended metaphors.

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That the dear she might take some pleasure of my pain,
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe:
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay;
Invention, Nature's child, fled stepdame Study's blows;
And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:
"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write."

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86) was killed while fighting in the Netherlands for the protestant Dutch against their catholic Spanish rulers. Queen Elizabeth I called Sidney "The worthiest knight that lived." If he hadn't died young, many believe he would have become the first great poet of the English Renaissance.

The Waking by Theodore Roethke

2008-08-29T20:13:00.003-04:00

This week, Roethke's beautiful and mysterious poem, The Waking. I'm interested to hear your thoughts on what it means. I don't believe there's one right answer.

Notice the poem's form--the villanelle. You may recognize it from Dylan Thomas's famous poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. The villanelle form enhances this poem's content brilliantly.

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) was born in Saginaw, Michigan. Stylistically his work ranged from witty poems in strict meter and regular stanzas to free verse poems full of mystical and surrealistic imagery. At all times, however, the natural world in all its mystery, beauty, fierceness, and sensuality, is close by, and the poems are possessed of an intense lyricism.

The Song of Wandering Aengus

2008-08-18T10:10:00.004-04:00

The Song of Wandering Aengus is among the best of Yeats's early poems. His voice is very different from the powerful, more modern voice of his later years, but the poem enchants the ear and Yeats's imagination glimmers. The Song foreshadows the obsession with ideals that fueled and haunted Yeats throughout his life.

The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1865. He is remembered as an important cultural leader, a major playwright (he was one of the founders of the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin), and as one of the very greatest poets—in any language—of the century. W. B. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 and died in 1939 at the age of 73.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World by Richard Wilbur

2008-08-16T00:57:00.002-04:00

Here's one of my favorite Richard Wilbur poems. It's a great read to start your morning.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
``Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.''

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter loveTo accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

``Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.''

Richard Wilbur was born in 1921 in New York City. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and is a former poet laureate of the United States. He currently lives in Cummingham, Massachusetts.

Slam Poets

2008-08-08T11:12:00.005-04:00

The National Poetry Slam is taking place this week in Madison, Wisconsin, so I thought I'd post a few links to slam performances.

In case you aren’t familiar with slam poetry, it occupies a middle ground between traditional poetry and rap, and your ability as a performer is at least as important as your ability as a poet. Slam is rhythmic, spirited and contemporary. It often deals with young, urban themes and it can be very, very funny. You have to see it to appreciate it.

Here are some links to some of this week's preliminary bouts:

A clip of Chicago’s “Mental Graffiti” performing is available here.

Here’s “Hips for the Hop"

Finally, here’s Anis Mojgani—a two-time national poetry slam champion. He’s pretty fantastic. (A warning--he uses some colorful language.)

To Roosevelt by Ruben Dario

2008-08-01T16:47:00.004-04:00

Ruben Dario wrote "To Roosevelt" (for Teddy) shortly after the Spanish American War, when the rest of the Americas feared U.S. imperialism. It remains a strong statement about American power and the potential abuse of that power.

To Roosevelt

The voice that would reach you, Hunter, must speak
in Biblical tones, or in the poetry of Walt Whitman.
You are primitive and modern, simple and complex;
you are one part George Washington and one part Nimrod.
You are the United States,
future invader of our naive America
with its Indian blood, an America
that still prays to Christ and still speaks Spanish.
You are strong, proud model of your race;
you are cultured and able; you oppose Tolstoy.
You are an Alexander-Nebuchadnezzar,
breaking horses and murdering tigers.

(You are a Professor of Energy,
as current lunatics say).
You think that life is a fire,
that progress is an eruption,
that the future is wherever
your bullet strikes.
No.

The United States is grand and powerful.
Whenever it trembles, a profound shudder
runs down the enormous backbone of the Andes.
If it shouts, the sound is like the roar of a lion.

--Translated by Lysander Kemp

Ruben Dario, a native of Nicaragua, is considered one of the great poets of Spanish Literature, and was the leader of its Modernist movement. Dario's admirers included Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, Jorge Louis Borges and Octavio Paz.

Home is so Sad by Philip Larkin

2008-07-25T19:32:00.003-04:00

Home may be sad, but I don't find this poem to be. It's quiet, clever and intense. Larkin's music--the way he ebbs and flows within the form--is just gorgeous. Notice how the last few images resonate.

Home is so Sad

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

Philip Larkin was born in 1922 in Coventry, England. Like Thomas Hardy, he focused on intense personal emotion but strictly avoided sentimentality or self-pity. Deeply anti-social and a great lover (and published critic) of American jazz, Larkin never married and conducted an uneventful life as a librarian in the provincial city of Hull, where he died in 1985.

Patience by Kay Ryan

2008-07-20T14:43:00.004-04:00

This week, a poem by the woman who was just named America's next poet laureate.

Patience

Patience is
wider than one
once envisioned,
with ribbons
of rivers
and distant
ranges and
tasks undertaken
and finished
with modest
relish by
natives in their
native dress.
Who would
have guessed
it possible
that waiting
is sustainable—
a place with
its own harvests.
Or that in
time's fullness
the diamonds
of patience
couldn't be
distinguished
from the genuine
in brilliance
or hardness.

Kay Ryan who teaches in Marin County, California, is the author of six books of poetry.

The Portrait by Stanley Kunitz

2008-07-11T17:00:00.002-04:00

Kunitz generates so much emotion in this tiny poem. It's a tough one, but I really admire it.

The Portrait

My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave moustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.

Stanley Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1905. He attended Harvard College, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1926 and a master's degree in 1927. He served in the Army in World War II, after a request for conscientious objector status was denied. Following the war, he began teaching, first at Bennington College in Vermont, and later at universities including Columbia, Yale, Princeton, Rutgers, and the University of Washington. He was named Poet Laureate of the U.S. in 2000. He died at the age of 100 on May 14, 2006.

Introduction to Poetry

2008-07-04T21:36:00.002-04:00

Here's some cleverness from Billy Collins. As someone who's taught poetry, I can relate to this one.

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Billy Collins was born in New York City in 1941. He served as the Poet Laureate in 2001 and is the author of several books of poetry.

Death Will Come and Will Have Your Eyes by Cesare Pavese

2008-06-27T16:42:00.004-04:00

Cesare Pavese's "Death Will Come and Will Have Your Eyes" was among the poems found in his desk after his suicide. Considering the circumstances, it's strikingly haunting.

Death will come and will have your eyes—
this death that accompanies us
from morning till evening, unsleeping,
deaf, like an old remorse
or an absurd vice. Your eyes
will be a useless word,
a suppressed cry, a silence.
That’s what you see each morning
when alone with yourself you lean
toward the mirror. O precious hope,
that day we too will know
that you are life and you are nothingness.

Death has a look for everyone.
Death will come and will have your eyes.
It will be like renouncing a vice,
like seeing a dead face reappear in the mirror,
like listening to a lip that’s shut.
We’ll go down into the maelstrom mute.

--Translated by Geoffrey Brock

Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), a poet, novelist and critic, was a major Italian author of the 20th Century.

Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World by Sherman Alexie

2008-06-19T17:46:00.004-04:00

This week, a poem by American Indian poet Sherman Alexie. Grief Calls Us is funny, unpretentious and bluntly human. Notice how smoothly the poem springboards into the abstract in the last three stanzas, where the poet's anger finally comes forward.

Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World

The eyes open to a blue telephone
In the bathroom of this five-star hotel.

I wonder whom I should call? A plumber,
Proctologist, urologist, or priest?

Who is most among us and most deserves
The first call? I choose my father because

He's astounded by bathroom telephones.
I dial home. My mother answers. "Hey, Ma,

I say, "Can I talk to Poppa?" She gasps,
And then I remember that my father

Has been dead for nearly a year. "Shit, Mom,"
I say. "I forgot he’s dead. I’m sorry—

How did I forget?" "It’s okay," she says.
"I made him a cup of instant coffee

This morning and left it on the table—
Like I have for, what, twenty-seven years—

And I didn't realize my mistake
Until this afternoon." My mother laughs

At the angels who wait for us to pause
During the most ordinary of days

And sing our praise to forgetfulness
Before they slap our souls with their cold wings.

Those angels burden and unbalance us.
Those fucking angels ride us piggyback.

Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, is the author of many books and was a three time World Poetry Slam Champion.

The Blessing by James Wright

2008-06-13T13:20:00.002-04:00

This week's poem is a quiet but ecstatic encounter with nature. I love the ending. Wright often steps away with a beautiful bang.

The Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

James Wright was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, on December 13, 1927. His father worked for fifty years at a glass factory, and his mother left school at fourteen to work in a laundry; neither attended school beyond the eighth grade. In 1972, his Collected Poems received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. He died in New York City in 1980.

"There is a pleasure in the pathless woods" by George Gordon, Lord Byron

2008-06-06T15:29:00.010-04:00

Byron is well-known for satirical work like Don Juan (wherein he rhymed "Juan" with "new one"), but I admire his quiet, passionate poetry just as much. "There is a pleasure..." is an excerpt from a long, partly autobiographical poem entitled Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

The poem is a Spenserian stanza (named for its inventor Edmund Spenser), and Byron manages the form brilliantly. It features an internal rhyming couplet--which he makes sing--and the final line has an extra beat which helps emphasize the ending.

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

One of the great poets of the British Romantic Period, Lord Byron was born in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1788. With the publication of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, he became quite famous. He lived passionately (and scandalously) until his death in 1824.

Quarantine by Eavan Boland

2008-05-30T16:31:00.003-04:00

Here's a tough, brilliant poem from one of our finest contemporary poets. I love the turn at the start of the fourth stanza.

Quarantine

In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking – they were both walking – north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.

Eavan Boland was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1944. She is the author of many books and currently teaches at Stanford University.

The Tay Bridge Disaster by William McGonagall

2008-05-23T16:27:00.007-04:00

For a little fun this week, here's a poem by William Topaz McGonagall, whom many consider to have been the worst poet ever. A folio of McGonagall's poems recently sold for $13,000 at auction because the poems are so laughably bad.

McGonagall wrote "The Tay Bridge Disaster" to memorialize a tragic bridge collapse near his hometown of Dundee, Scotland. Here are some excerpts (the rest is here). As you'll see, the poem itself is a disaster.

The Tay Bridge Disaster

So the train mov'd slowly along the Bridge of Tay,
Until it was about midway,
Then the central girders with a crash gave way,
And down went the train and passengers into the Tay.

I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

William Topaz McGonagall was born in 1830 in Edinburgh, Scotland. An actor, weaver and most notably a poet, McGonagall was a tragic figure. He seemed convinced of his poetic greatness, but was universally mocked. He died penniless and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare

2008-05-15T11:34:00.002-04:00

Your PW editor is off to a wedding this weekend (and a much needed vacation). In that spirit, here's one of my favorite Shakespeare sonnets.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no, it is an ever-fixèd mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his heighth be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

The Hand by Mary Ruefle

2008-05-09T14:50:00.008-04:00

This week, a quiet, beautiful poem by Mary Ruefle.

The Hand

The teacher asks a question.
You know the answer, you suspect
you are the only one in the classroom
who knows the answer, because the person
in question is yourself, and on that
you are the greatest living authority,
but you don’t raise your hand.
You raise the top of your desk
and take out an apple.
You look out the window.
You don’t raise your hand and there is
some essential beauty in your fingers,
which aren’t even drumming, but lie
flat and peaceful.
The teacher repeats the question.
Outside the window, on an overhanging branch,
a robin is ruffling its feathers
and spring is in the air.

Mary Ruefle is the author of several books of poetry. She currently teaches at Vermont College.

The Acrobats by Shel Silverstein

2008-05-02T15:36:00.003-04:00

Just in time for allergy season...

The Acrobats

I'll swing
By my ankles,
She'll cling
To your knees
As you hang
By your nose
From a high-up
Trapeze.
Just one thing, please,
As we float through the breeze--
Don't sneeze.

Silverstein's work, which he illustrated himself, is characterized by a deft mixing of the sly and the serious, the macabre and the just plain silly. His wicked, giddy humor is beloved by countless adults as well as by children. He died in May 1999.

The Anactoria Poem by Sappho

2008-04-25T10:05:00.003-04:00

This week: Jim Powell’s beautiful translation of Sappho’s Anactoria poem. Her passion, as always, shines through.

The Anactoria Poem

Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers,
others call a fleet the most beautiful of
sights the dark earth offers, but I say it's what-
ever you love best.

And it's easy to make this understood by
everyone, for she who surpassed all human
kind in beauty, Helen, abandoning her
husband--that best of

men--went sailing off to the shores of Troy and
never spent a thought on her child or loving
parents: when the goddess seduced her wits and
left her to wander,

she forgot them all, she could not remember
anything but longing, and lightly straying
aside, lost her way. But that reminds me
now: Anactória,

she's not here, and I'd rather see her lovely
step, her sparkling glance and her face than gaze on
all the troops in Lydia in their chariots and
glittering armor.

Sappho lived in 7th-6th Century BC on the Greek island of Lesbos. While not much is known about her life, she is believed to have run a school for women that was dedicated to the cult of Eros and Aphrodite. She was highly regarded by the ancients and remains highly regarded today.

This Is Just to Say by William Carlos Williams

2008-04-18T11:11:00.003-04:00

Williams was an oddity in that he rarely used metaphor. There are no hidden meanings in This Is Just to Say. The poem is exactly what it claims to be. Its power stems from its images, clarity of language, and the "energy" Williams creates using line breaks. He recreates the experience of actually tasting the plums.

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883. He was a practicing doctor, and a principal poet of the Imagist movement, which stressed precision of imagery, and clear, sharp language.

Nichol by Kwame Dawes

2008-04-11T09:00:00.003-04:00

Nichol, by Jamaican poet Kwame Dawes, is part of a series Dawes wrote about his home country's battle against HIV/AIDS. The Pulitzer Center has put together a terrific website on the issue, using Dawes' poems a launching point. Check it out here.

Nichol

How coolly it has broken you,
trying to mask the knowing
wit behind your eyes—

every smile, brilliant
against your gleaming
black skin, is defiance.

You stammer, push out
words; tell your story;
slap your knees to show

where your stroke frozen
body would crawl
across the concrete

to reach the yard,
with the gawking
on-lookers. You laugh

“Man must live.
Man must live.”
How casually broken.

Tall lanky man,
hands clawed, yams
dangling, and the sweet

club mans charm
in your grin, still all those
women slain by your art.

You stretch out your legs,
tell your story slow,
persistent as the crawl

you made towards sunlight,
the way you pulled
your body upright,

the way you made tender
the toughness of hard men
who would soon wash you,

feed you with oily fingers
full of mashed ackee
and tomatoes, who have

held you against
the night, men, tough
as teeth, hard men.

"Man must live.
Man must live."
The virus stalks

through your blood,
manages to tickle,
make you laugh

at a new sunny day--
and yours is the posture
of survival.

Kwame Dawes was born in Ghana and raised in Kingston Jamaica. He currently teaches English and is the Poet in Residence at the University of South Carolina.

Excerpt from The Ghost Trio by Linda Bierds

2008-04-04T14:32:00.008-04:00

This excerpt from her poem The Ghost Trio is Bierds at her best: evocative imagery and smooth yet dramatic transitions. The full poem is available here.

The Winter: 1748

A little satin like wind at the door.
My mother slips past in great side hoops,
arced like the ears of elephants
on her head a goat-white wig,
on her cheek a dollop of mole.

She has entered the evening, and I
her room with its hazel light.
Where her wig had rested is a leather head,
a stand, perfect in its shadow but
carrying in fact, where the face should be,
a swath of door. It cups

in its skull-curved closure
clay hair stays, a pouch of wig talc
that snows at random and lends to the table

a neck-shaped ring.
When I reach inside I am frosted,
my hand like a pond in winter, pale
fingers below of leaves or carp.

I have studied a painting from Holland,
where a village adjourns to a frozen river.
Skaters and sleighs, of course, but
ale tents, the musk of chestnuts,

someone thick on a chair with a lap robe.
I do not know what becomes of them
when the flow revisits. Or why
they have moved from their warm hearthstones
to settle there—except that one step

is a method of gliding,
the self for those moments
weightless and preened as my leather companion.
And I do not know if the fish there
have frozen, or wait in some stasis
like flowers. Perhaps they are stunned
by the strange heaven—dotted with

boot soles and chair legs
and are slumped on the mud-rich bottom—
waiting through time for a kind of shimmer,
an image perhaps, something
known and familiar, something

rushing above in their own likeness,
silver and blade-thin at the rim of the world.

Linda Bierds was raised in Anchorage, Alaska. She teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Washington. Her books include First Hand, The Seconds, and The Profile Makers.

The Guesthouse by Rumi

2008-03-28T14:55:00.004-04:00

This week, a little wisdom from the great Persian poet Rumi.

The Guesthouse

This being human is a guesthouse
Every morning a new arrival
A joy, a depression, a meanness
Some momentary awareness
Comes as an unexpected visitor

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows
Who violently sweep your house
Empty of its furniture
Still treat each guest honorably
He may be cleaning you out
For some new delight!

The dark thought, the shame, the malice
Meet them at the door laughing
And invite them in
Be grateful for whoever comes
Because each has been sent
As a guide from the beyond

Translated by Coleman Barks

Rumi (Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi) was a 13th century Persian muslim poet, jurist, and theologian. His name literally means "Majesty of Religion". He was born in Balkh (now part of Afghanistan) and died in present-day Turkey. His works are widely read in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and are in translation in Turkey, Azerbaijan, the U.S., and South Asia. He lived most of his life in, and produced his works under, the Seljuk Empire. Rumi's importance is considered to transcend national and ethnic borders.

Dream Variations by Langston Hughes

2008-03-21T15:03:00.002-04:00

Dream Variations

To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me--
That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening . . .
A tall, slim tree . . .
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.

Langston Hughes was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. Through his poetry, fiction and plays he tried to acurately portray the African-American experience in early to mid twentieth century America. He made major contributions to the Harlem Rennaisance, and is known for incorporating jazz influences into his work.

An Excerpt from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot

2008-03-14T09:30:00.006-04:00

Many poets and critics think Prufrock is the great poem of the 20th Century. I think it's as good a choice as any. People often champion the work's content and overlook its style and beauty.

This excerpt is one of my favorite parts. Notice the conflation of cosmic thoughts and a lonely and suffocating insecurity.

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?
"Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?

You can read the whole poem here.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in Missouri in 1888, but spent most of his life in London. Arguably the most influential poet of the 20th Century, he won the Noble Prize for Literature in 1948. Eliot died in London in 1965.

Poem by Frank O'Hara

2008-03-07T12:06:00.005-05:00

This week's is a lighthearted, stream-of-consciousness poem by Frank O'Hara. Enjoy.

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

Frank O'Hara became one of the most distinguished members of the New York School of poets, which also included John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch. O'Hara's association with the painters Larry Rivers, Jackson Pollock, and Jasper Johns, also leaders of the New York School, became a source of inspiration for his highly original poetry. He attempted to produce with words the effects these artists had created on canvas.

Paradise Motel by Charles Simic

2008-02-29T12:44:00.003-05:00

Simic's poems generally rely more on image and perspective than on music and rhythm. He wants you to feel off-balance reading his work. His language is straightforward--you won't see a glistening vocabulary. I read Paradise Motel as a brutally honest commentary on how we relate to war and suffering.

Paradise Motel

Millions were dead; everybody was innocent.
I stayed in my room. The President
Spoke of war as of a magic love potion.
My eyes were opened in astonishment.
In a mirror my face appeared to me
Like a twice-canceled postage stamp.

I lived well, but life was awful.
there were so many soldiers that day,
So many refugees crowding the roads.
Naturally, they all vanished
With a touch of the hand.
History licked the corners of its bloody mouth.

On the pay channel, a man and a woman
Were trading hungry kisses and tearing off
Each other's clothes while I looked on
With the sound off and the room dark
Except for the screen where the color
Had too much red in it, too much pink.

Charles Simic was born on May 9, 1938, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where he had a traumatic childhood during World War II. In 1953 he emigrated from Yugoslavia with his mother and brother to join his father in the United States. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990.

Another Reason I Don't Keep a Gun in the House by Billy Collins

2008-02-22T13:10:00.007-05:00

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

Billy Collins was born in New York City in 1941. He served as the Poet Laureate in 2001 and is the author of several books of poetry.

Valentine for Ernest Mann by Naomi Shihab Nye

2008-02-15T12:18:00.009-05:00

Naomi Shihab Nye's Valentine is a clever and moving explication of poetry. She takes a strong stance in the age old debate on whether poems are like tacos.

Valentine for Ernest Mann

You can't order a poem like you order a taco.
Walk up to the counter, say, "I'll take two"
and expect it to be handed back to you
on a shiny plate.

Still, I like your spirit.
Anyone who says, "Here's my address,
write me a poem," deserves something in reply.
So I'll tell you a secret instead:
poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them.

Once I knew a man who gave his wife
two skunks for a valentine.
He couldn't understand why she was crying.
"I thought they had such beautiful eyes."
And he was serious. He was a serious man
who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly
just because the world said so. He really
liked those skunks. So, he re-invented them
as valentines and they became beautiful.
At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding
in the eyes of skunks for centuries
crawled out and curled up at his feet.

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us
we find poems. Check your garage, the odd sock
in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.
And let me know.

Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1952 to a Palestinian father and an American mother. A good deal of her poetry focuses on her life as an Arab American. She currently lives in San Antonio, Texas.

A Drinking Song by William Butler Yeats

2008-02-08T12:14:00.001-05:00

Since Valentine's Day is coming up this week, here's a love poem by William Butler Yeats.

Yeats spent much of his life pining (unrequited) for a woman named Maud Gonne. He wrote a lot of poems about her, proposed to her four times, and got to be very, very good at pining:

A Drinking Song

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1865. He is remembered as an important cultural leader, a major playwright (he was one of the founders of the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin), and as one of the very greatest poets—in any language—of the century. W. B. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 and died in 1939 at the age of 73.

from Ulysses by Lord Alfred Tennyson

2008-02-01T10:05:00.000-05:00

This week's post is an excerpt from Tennyson's great poem Ulysses. The Greek hero and his crew are in their twilight years, and the poem is a rally call for one last heroic action. It's Tennyson at his most grand and inspirational. This was John F. Kennedy's favorite poem, and it reads like the best of Churchill's speeches.

For the full effect, the entire poem is here.

from Ulysses

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me,--
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads,-- you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends.
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,--
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Lord Alfred Tennyson was born in Lincolnshire England in 1809, one of 12 children. He was one of the most popular poets of his era, and amassed considerable wealth publishing his poems. His best-known work includes In Memoriam and Idylls of the King.

First Fig by Edna St. Vincent Millay

2008-01-25T15:24:00.000-05:00

This week's poem is a small, perfect one from Millay that recently made the news. Heath Ledger's father mentioned it (thinking it was Tennyson's), reflecting on his son's life. It seems a fitting tribute.

First Fig

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light.

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, ME in 1892. Her fourth book of poetry, The Harp Weaver, earned her the Pulitzer Prize. She was openly bisexual, which sheds some light on the otherwise mysterious title here.

The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter by Li Po

2008-01-18T11:48:00.000-05:00

This gentle, moving translation by Ezra Pound is a good example of Imagism, a movement Pound helped put forward based on traditional Chinese and Japanese poetry. Imagism stresses clarity, precision, and economy of language.

The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter

WHILE my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
Played I about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you,
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into fat Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noises overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early in autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

The Chinese poet Li Po lived during the 8th Century. He wandered throughout the country during his lifetime and legend has it he composed his poems at an astonishing speed.

Ezra Pound is considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers, and was famous for the generosity with which he advanced the work of many major contemporaries, most notably T. S. Eliot.

O sweet spontaneous by E.E. Cummings

2008-01-11T13:54:00.000-05:00

In this week's poem, E.E. Cummings offers some perspective on humanity's angst and curiosity. He is playful and stylized as per usual.

O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting
fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked

thee
, has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

beauty .how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover
thou answerest

them only with

spring)

E.E. Cummings (1894-1962) discovered an original way of describing the chaotic immediacy of sensuous experience. He played games with language and form and put forth a deliberately simplistic view of the world, giving his poems a gleeful and precocious tone. He was born in Cambridge, Mass., attended Harvard and studied Art in Paris.

Hope is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson

2008-01-04T13:30:00.000-05:00

This week's poem is a hopeful one from Emily Dickinson to start off the New Year. Her voice, which I usually find ethereal and unsettling, is grounded here.

Hope is the thing with feathers

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I ’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1830. She is known for her solitary lifestyle--she rarely left her house or hosted visitors. Along with Walt Whitman, she helped engender a uniquely American poetic voice. She died in 1886.

Wanderer by Antonio Machado

2008-01-02T23:37:00.001-05:00

Your editor is taking a trip to Spain this week, so here's a poem by the great Spanish poet Antonio Machado (translated by Betty Jean Craige)

Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road,
and upon glancing behind
one sees the path
that never will be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road--
Only wakes upon the sea.

Born in Seville in 1875, Antonio Machado is considered one of the great Spanish poets. In 1939, he died of an illness he contracted while fleeing from the armies of Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

2007-12-21T13:24:00.000-05:00

Here's a poem for the first day of winter. Happy holidays from Poem of the Week!

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it's queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there's some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874. He moved to New England at the age of eleven and became interested in reading and writing poetry during his high school years in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Frost lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont, and died in Boston on January 29, 1963.

I, Too, Sing America by Langston Hughes

2007-12-14T16:59:00.000-05:00

Reading Hughes's famous poem again, I'm struck by his ambition and fearlessness. I think his proud, challenging style here echoes Whitman who, along with Carl Sandburg and Paul Laurence Dunbar, were Hughes's major poetic influences. It stuns me to think that this was written--that Hughes faced these issues--just over fifty years ago.

I, Too, Sing America.

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.

Langston Hughes was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. Through his poetry, fiction and plays he tried to acurately portray the African-American experience in early to mid twentieth century America. He made major contributions to the Harlem Rennaisance, and is known for incorporating jazz influences into his work.

Let Evening Come by Jane Kenyon

2007-12-08T13:20:00.000-05:00

Let the light of late afternoon

shine through chinks in the barn, moving

up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing

as a woman takes up her needles

and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned

in long grass. Let the stars appear

and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.

Let the wind die down. Let the shed

go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop

in the oats, to the air in the lung

let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't

be afraid. God does not leave

us comfortless, so let evening come.

Jane Kenyon wrote most her poetry while living on Eagle Pond Farm in New Hampshire with her husband, the poet Donald Hall. When she died in April of 95, she was New Hampshire's poet laureate.

Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke

2007-11-30T15:49:00.000-05:00

Rilke served for a while as secretary to Auguste Rodin. The sculptor would send him on assignments to observe animals, objects, or great art and then talk about them. This poem could be the result of one of those assignments. The speaker seems to struggle to find the right words to describe the power in the torso of Apollo—he compares it to ripening fruit, a lamp, a beast, a star. This exploration leads to the epiphany in the final line. There, the poem reaches out and grabs the reader. It’s a sudden, unexpected and remarkable shift.

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague in 1875. He resided throughout Europe during his lifetime, including a 12-year residency is Paris, where he befriending the famed sculptor Auguste Rodin. His best known work includes his Duino Elegies and his Sonnets to Orpheus.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats

2007-11-21T11:31:00.000-05:00

The title of Keats's famous ballad translates to "the beautiful woman without mercy." Who is this woman? Did she really exist or did the knight dream her? A lot of this poem's appeal stems from its mystery--Keats leaves it up to the reader to imagine the details. It's a good example of what Keats termed "negative capability": when a writer "is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

I
Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

II
Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel's granary is full,
And the harvest's done.

III
I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

IV
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful - a faery's child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

V
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.

VI
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery's song.

VII
She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said -
'I love thee true'.

VIII
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

IX
And there she lulled me asleep
And there I dreamed - Ah! woe betide! -
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.

X
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried - 'La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!'

XI
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill's side.

XII
And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

John Keats (1795-1821) is considered one of the great British Romantic Poets along with Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley. Though he only lived to be 26, his work and his poetics (preserved in numerous letters) remain highly respected by contemporary poets and scholars. T.S. Eliot claimed that Keats was never wrong about poetry.

Resume by Dorothy Parker

2007-11-16T11:04:00.000-05:00

Dorothy Parker’s suicide attempts were no laughing matter, unless you asked her. The New York writer and poet lived a brilliant but tempestuous life, marked by a caustic sense of humor she turned even on her own difficulties. Resume is a great example of her dark wit hitting close to home.

Resume

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) was born in West End, New Jersey and raised in Manhattan. She became a well-known poet, writer and editor, working for Vogue and the New Yorker. Parker was a founding member of the "Algonquin Round Table," a group of intellectuals known for their vicious wit, along with Robert Benchley, Harpo Marx, George S Kaufman, and Edna Ferber.

To An Athlete Dying Young by A.E. Housman

2007-11-09T15:09:00.000-05:00

To An Athlete Dying Young is A.E. Housman's best-known poem, and there's a good chance you've come across it before. On the surface, the poem is an elegy with a straightforward theme: one should take solace in the fact that a young man died at the height of his glory. For me, the poem's real power is beneath the surface, where the struggle and emotional restraint that typified Housman's life is palpable.

It's remarkable that despite the poem's sing-songy form--iambic tetrameter is the standard meter of nursery rhymes--Housman conveys the sense of barrenness and deep sorrow that permeated so much of his work. His life was, by all accounts, melancholy and reclusive. He was gay (they probably didn't teach you that in school) in a world where it was far less accepted than it is today. He spent his life in love (unrequited) with a heterosexual friend. The first line of the third stanza gives me chills. That's where the man who lived and wrote so buttoned up starts letting his guard down.

To An Athlete Dying Young

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

A.E. Housman (1859-1936) was born in Fockbury, England, the oldest of seven children. A brilliant student, he won a scholarship to study Classics at Oxford. There, he fell in love with his heterosexual roommate Moses Jackson, a man who would become his lifelong friend. Housman worked as a professor of Latin at University College, London and translated many of the great Roman poets. He published only two books of poetry in his lifetime, the first, A Shropshire Lad, with money from his own pocket.

Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

2007-11-01T16:27:00.000-04:00

At a time when accounts of war were heavily romanticized, Wilfred Owen's poetry was blunt and real. Having been swayed to volunteer for service in World War I in part by the glory of war, Owen felt it was his duty to relay the harsher truth, writing in a letter to his mother: "All a poet can do today is warn." His best known poem: Dulce et Decorum Est, is brutal even by today's standards.

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen was born in 1893 in Shropshire, England. Teaching in France at the start of World War I, he joined the army in 1915. During that time met and befriended many writers, including Sigfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and H.G. Wells. He died in battle one week before the end of the war, and his parents heard of his death while the armistice bells were ringing. He would become one of the most admired war poets of all time.

Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll

2007-10-19T10:31:00.000-04:00

Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky appeared in the novel Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, his follow-up to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The poem is proof of a couple of things: 1) a poem doesn't have to make sense to be enjoyable; and 2) they had mind-altering drugs in Victorian England. After the poem I've included an excerpt from Through the Looking Glass in which the Humpty Dumpty(!) explains parts of the poem to Alice. It gives you a sense of Carroll's whimsical reasoning.

Jabberwocky

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

From Through the Looking Glass:

'You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir' said Alice. 'Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem called "Jabberwocky"?'

'Let's hear it,' said Humpty Dumpty. 'I can explain all the poems that ever were invented just yet.'

Alice remarked thoughtfully: 'and what are "toves"?'

'Well, "toves" are something like badgers - they're something like lizards - and they're something like corkscrews.'

'They must be very curious-looking creatures.'

'They are that,' said Humpty Dumpty: 'also they make their nests under sundials - also they live on cheese.'

Lewis Carroll was born is Cheshire (like the cat), England in 1832. He excelled at writing, mathematics, and photography. One of his favorote photography subjects was a girl named Alice Lidell, daughter of the Dean at Christ's Curch College, Oxford. She was the basis for Alice in Carroll's children's novels Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

Excerpts From Song of Myself by Walt Whitman

2007-10-11T09:15:00.000-04:00

These excerpts from Whitman's Song of Myself give you a sense of his rolling, relentless style. Whitman broke wildly from Western poetry's formal tradition (exemplified by the Dylan Thomas poem last week), choosing instead to write with no set meter or rhyme scheme--what we now call "free verse"--long before free verse became popular. Song of Myself, is, in part, about bucking convention and breaking boundaries: the poem ecstatically dissolves the borders between Whitman's body and the world and the borders between bodies. It is ambitious, sensual and unabashedly in love with nature. Written more than 150 years ago, its call to celebrate ourselves still resonates.

I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the
distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,

I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised
and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzz'd whispers, love-root, silk-thread,
crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the
passing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and
dark-color'd sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belch'd words of my voice loos'd to the
eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the
fields and hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising
from bed and meeting the sun.

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd
the earth much?
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) grew up in Brooklyn and Long Island. While a student of the classics, his style was perhaps most influenced by cadences in the Bible. His work was unique for its time and “free,” contrasting starkly with the rhyme and metrical regularity of most poetry of the period.

If you're interested in reading more of the poem, or learning more about Whitman, take a look at The Whitman Archive here.

Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night by Dylan Thomas

2007-10-05T16:56:00.000-04:00

You've probably read this classic Dylan Thomas poem before. It's written in a French form called the Villanelle, and a lot of its structure--the meter (iambic pentameter), the rhyme scheme, the stanza lengths, the repetition of the first and third line--is predetermined. The Villanelle is a good choice when a poet wants to keep pushing a certain sentiment, or, say, convey an obsession. In this case, Thomas uses the form to energize a son's pleas to his father, quickly infusing a high level of emotion. The speaker wants his father to fight for life while he still lives, and the poem seems to fight as well.

Do Not Go Gentle into that Good night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas was born in Wales in 1914. Fascinated by language, he excelled in English and reading, but neglected other subjects and dropped out of school at sixteen. His reading tours of the United States, which did much to popularize the poetry reading as new medium for the art, are famous and notorious, for Thomas was the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular American imagination: he was flamboyantly theatrical, a heavy drinker, engaged in roaring disputes in public, and read his work aloud with tremendous depth of feeling. He became a legendary figure, both for his work and the boisterousness of his life.

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio by James Wright

2007-09-27T12:07:00.001-04:00

Teaching intro workshops, I read a lot of bad poems about football. This is a good one.

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

James Wright was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, on December 13, 1927. His father worked for fifty years at a glass factory, and his mother left school at fourteen to work in a laundry; neither attended school beyond the eighth grade. In 1972, his Collected Poems received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. He died in New York City in 1980.

A Green Crab's Shell by Mark Doty

2007-09-21T11:56:00.001-04:00

Here's a poem that revels in its images. Notice how the poem celebrates the crab (it's an Ode, really) then springboards out to say something about human life. And you people eat these things!

A Green Crab's Shell

Not, exactly, green:
closer to bronze
preserved in kind brine,

something retrieved
from a Greco-Roman wreck,
patinated and oddly

muscular. We cannot
know what his fantastic
legs were like--

though evidence
suggests eight
complexly folded

scuttling works
of armament, crowned
by the foreclaws'

gesture of menace
and power. A gull's
gobbled the center,

leaving this chamber
--size of a demitasse--
open to reveal

a shocking, Giotto blue.
Though it smells
of seaweed and ruin,

this little traveling case
comes with such lavish lining!
Imagine breathing

surrounded by
the brilliant rinse
of summer's firmament.

What color is
the underside of skin?
Not so bad, to die,

if we could be opened
into this--
if the smallest chambers

of ourselves,
similarly,
revealed some sky.

Mark Doty was born in 1953. He is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently School of the Arts (HarperCollins, 2005), Source (2002), and Sweet Machine (1998). Doty has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Rockefeller, and Whiting foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Houston, Texas, where he teaches at the University of Houston.

Landscape With The Fall of Icarus by William Carlos Williams

2007-09-14T12:18:00.000-04:00

This William Carlos Williams poem is an example of ecphrasis: a written description of a visual work of art. It comes from the Greek for to "speak out" or "name" an inanimate object. I've included the Brueghel painting below. You can see poor Icarus' legs just below the ship.

Landscape With The Fall of Icarus

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883. He was a practicing doctor, and a principal poet of the Imagist movement, which stressed precision of imagery, and clear, sharp language. His major works include Kora in Hell (1920), Spring and All (1923), Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), the five-volume epic Paterson (1963, 1992), and Imaginations (1970). Williams's health began to decline after a heart attack in 1948 and a series of strokes, but he continued writing up until his death in New Jersey in 1963.

Chicago by Carl Sandburg

2007-08-31T10:11:00.000-04:00

Baker of deep dish pizzas,
Loser of many baseball games,
Shuffler to the Super Bowl.

Ok, not really. Sandburg's "Chicago" is a lot fiercer than I remembered. A little disturbing, even. A good example of how poetry can be "tough." (stop snickering)

Chicago

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your
painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: yes, it is true I have seen
the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women
and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my
city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be
alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall
bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted
against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked,
Sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

The Sandburgs were very poor; Carl left school at the age of thirteen to work odd jobs, from laying bricks to dishwashing, to help support his family. At seventeen, he traveled west to Kansas as a hobo. He then served eight months in Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American war. He wrote many celebrated books and won two Pulitzer Prizes. Carl Sandburg died in 1967.

The Explosion by Philip Larkin

2007-08-24T14:27:00.000-04:00

This week's poem, one of Philip Larkin's best-known, reflects on a mining disaster. Of course, it resonates these days.

The Explosion

On the day of the explosion
Shadows pointed towards the pithead:
In the sun the slagheap slept.

Down the lane came men in pitboots
Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke,
Shouldering off the freshened silence.

One chased after rabbits; lost them;
Came back with a nest of lark's eggs;
Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.

So they passed in beards and moleskins,
Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter,
Through the tall gates standing open.

At noon, there came a tremor; cows
Stopped chewing for a second; sun,
Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed.

The dead go on before us, they
Are sitting in God's house in comfort,
We shall see them face to face -

Plain as lettering in the chapels
It was said, and for a second
Wives saw men of the explosion

Larger than in life they managed -
Gold as on a coin, or walking
Somehow from the sun towards them,

One showing the eggs unbroken.

Philip Larkin was born in 1922 in Coventry, England. He became the preeminent British poet of his generation, and a leading voice of what came to be called "The Movement," a group of young English writers who rejected the prevailing fashion for neo-Romantic writing in the style of Yeats and Dylan Thomas. Like Thomas Hardy, Larkin focused on intense personal emotion but strictly avoided sentimentality or self-pity. Deeply anti-social and a great lover (and published critic) of American jazz, Larkin never married and conducted an uneventful life as a librarian in the provincial city of Hull, where he died in 1985.

Mending Wall by Robert Frost

2007-08-17T15:38:00.000-04:00

Frost's poems are often criticized by academics for being too simplistic, which translates roughly to "having appeal beyond academia." They can, of course, shove it. Mending Wall is written in what's known as "blank verse," or unrhymed iambic pentameter. It's rhythms are hypnotic--when you read Frost, you know you're in good hands.

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'

Mockingbirds by Mary Oliver

2007-08-10T11:55:00.000-04:00

Mary Oliver is a well-known contemporary poet who writes almost exclusively about nature. In Mockingbirds, she uses a myth as a lense for looking at her life. What connections does she draw between the myth and her life? Why does she do this? What is she trying to say about life?

Mockingbirds

This morning
two mockingbirds
in the green field
were spinning and tossing

the white ribbons
of their songs
into the air.
I had nothing

better to do
than listen.
I mean this
seriously.

In Greece,
a long time ago,
an old couple
opened their door

to two strangers
who were,
it soon appeared,
not men at all,

but gods.
It is my favorite story--
how the old couple
had almost nothing to give

but their willingness
to be attentive--
but for this alone
the gods loved them

and blessed them--
when they rose
out of their mortal bodies,
like a million particles of water

from a fountain,
the light
swept into all the corners
of the cottage,

and the old couple,
shaken with understanding,
bowed down--
but still they asked for nothing

but the difficult life
which they had already.
And the gods smiled, as they vanished,
clapping their great wings.

Wherever it was
I was supposed to be
this morning--
whatever it was I said

I would be doing--
I was standing
at the edge of the field--
I was hurrying

through my own soul,
opening its dark doors--
I was leaning out;
I was listening.

Mary Oliver was born on September 10, 1935 in Maple Heights, Ohio. She is the author of many book , including American Primitive (1983), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. She currently lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

To See by Adam Zagajewski

2007-08-02T12:14:00.000-04:00

I liked this poem so much, I decided to post it despite featuring Adam Zagajewski only a few weeks back. The imagery is striking throughout, and I like how Zagajewski conveys a genuine desire to explain the world to his “mute city.” Of course he isn’t just speaking to the city, he’s speaking to the reader, whom the poem helps (deliberately or not) appreciate the variety and depth of experience in the world. And I’m a sucker for the ending: the lush world disintegrating into the “white wasteland.”

To See

Oh my mute city, honey-gold,
buried in ravines, where wolves
loped softly down the cold meridian;
if I had to tell you, city
asleep beneath a heap of lifeless leaves,
if I needed to describe the ocean’s skin, on which
ships etch the lines of shining poems,
and yachts like peacocks flaunt their lofty sails
and the Mediterranean, rapt in salty concentration,
and cities with sharp turrets gleaming
in the keen morning sun,
and the savage strength of jets piercing the clouds,
the bureaucrats’ undying scorn for us, people,
Umbria’s narrow streets like cisterns
that stop up ancient time tasting of sweet wine,
and a certain hill, where the stillest tree is growing,
gray Paris, threaded by the river of salvation,
Krakow, on Sunday, when even the chestnut leaves
seem pressed by an unseen iron,
vineyards raided by the greedy fall
and by highways full of fear;
if I had to describe the sobriety of the night
when it happened,
and the clatter of the train running into nothingness
and the blade flaring on a makeshift skating rink;
I’m writing from the road, I had to see,
and not just know, to see clearly
the sights and fires of a single world,
but you unmoving city turned to stone,
my brethren in the shallow sand;
the earth still turns above you
and the Roman legions march
and a polar fox attends the wind
in a white wasteland where sounds perish.

Poet, novelist, and essayist Adam Zagajewski was born in Lwow, Poland in 1945. He is one of Poland's most famous contemporary poets. Since 1988, he has served as Visting Associate Professor of English at the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston.

One Kiss by Tess Gallagher

2007-07-20T09:35:00.000-04:00

I'm back after a week-long vacation to San Francisco. I like this Tess Gallagher poem about jealously, longing, and infinity. It's playful and surreal, and asks what life would be like if we did have the answer to everything.

One Kiss

A man was given one kiss, one
mouth, one tongue, one early dawn, one boat
on the sea, lust of an indeterminate
amount under stars. He was happy
and well fitted for life until he met a man
with two cocks. Then a sense of futility
and of the great unfairness of life befell him.
He lay about all day like a teenaged girl dreaming,
practicing all the ways to be unconsciously beautiful.

Gradually his competitive spirit began to fade
and in its place a gigantic kiss rowed toward him.
It seemed to recognize him, to have intended itself
only for him. It's just a kiss, he thought,
I'll use it up. The kiss had the same thing
on its mind—``I'll use up this man.''

But when two kisses kiss, it's like tigers
answering questions about infinity with their teeth.
Even if you are eaten, it's okay—you just become impossible
a new way—sleepless, stranger than fish, stranger
than some goofy man with two cocks. That's
what I meant about the hazards

of infinity. When you at last begin to seize those things
which don't exist,
how much longer will the night need to be?

Tess Gallagher, a poet, essayist, novelist, and playwright, was born in 1943 in Port Angeles, Washington. She received a Bachelor of Arts and Masters of Arts from the University of Washington, where she studied creative writing with Theodore Roethke, and a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Iowa.

An Untitled Poem by Kabir

2007-07-06T09:34:00.000-04:00

I talk to my inner lover, and I say, why such rush?
We sense that there is some sort of spirit that loves
birds and animals and the ants--
perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you in
your mother's womb.
Is it logical you would be walking around entirely
orphaned now?
The truth is you turned away yourself,
and decided to go into the dark alone.
Now you are tangled up in others, and have forgotten
what you once knew,
and that's why everything you do has some weird
failure in it.

Translated by Robert Bly

Kabir (1440-1518) Kabir is a very important figure in Indian history. He is unusual in that he is spiritually significant to Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims alike. Kabir openly criticized all sects and gave a new direction to Indian philosophy. Legend has it that when he died, his Hindu and Muslim followers started fighting about the last rites. When they lifted the cloth covering his body, they found flowers instead. The Muslim followers buried their half and the Hindu cremated their half.

My Last Duchess by Robert Browning

2007-06-29T12:06:00.000-04:00

This famous Robert Browning poem seems to plunk us down in the middle of a Victorian murder mystery, with Browning slowly unveiling the malevolence of his speaker. He wrote a lot of these dramatic monologues, influenced by verse playwrights like Shakespeare. I think his talent is most evident in his management of the poem's form: it's written as a series of iambic pentameter rhyming couplets, which is tough to pull off--you have to constantly disrupt the rhythm to keep the poem from getting maddeningly sing-songy.

Check out another good one here.

My Last Duchess

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will't please you sit and look at her? I said
"Frà Pandolf" by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, 'twas not
Her husband's presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps
Frà Pandolf chanced to say "Her mantle laps
Over my Lady's wrist too much," or "Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat": such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart — how shall I say? — too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, 'twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace — all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men, — good! but thanked
Somehow — I know not how — as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech — (which I have not) — to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, "Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark" — and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
--E'en then would be some stooping, and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will't please you rise? We'll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master's known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretence
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we'll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me.

Robert Browning was born on May 7, 1812, in Camberwell, England. His mother was an accomplished pianist and a devout evangelical Christian. His father was a bank clerk and collector of rare books. After reading Elizabeth Barrett's Poems (1844) and corresponding with her for a few months, Browning met her in 1845. They were married in 1846, against the wishes of Barrett's father. He died in 1889.

Summer Poems

2007-06-22T12:21:00.000-04:00

Some short ones for the start of summer.

Traditional Middle English Lyric

(appx. 1250)

Svmer is icumen in

Lhude sing cuccu!

Groweþ sed and bloweþ med

and springþ þe wde nu.

Sing cuccu!

Awe bleteþ after lomb,

lhouþ after calue cu,

Bulluc sterteþ, bucke uerteþ.

Murie sing cuccu!

cuccu, cuccu,

Wel singes þu cuccu.

ne swik þu nauer nu!

Sing cuccu nu, Sing cuccu!

(translation here)

from A Midsummer Nights Dream (III, I)

by William Shakespeare

...

Out of this wood do not desire to go:

Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no.

I am a spirit of no common rate;

The summer still doth tend upon my state;

And I do love thee: therefore, go with me;

I'll give thee fairies to attend on thee,

And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep,

And sing while thou on pressed flowers dost sleep;

And I will purge thy mortal grossness so

That thou shalt like an airy spirit go.

The Schoolboy

by William Blake

...

I love to rise in a summer morn,

When the birds sing on every tree;

The distant huntsman winds his horn,

And the skylark sings with me:

O what sweet company!

But to go to school in a summer morn,

--O it drives all joy away!

Under a cruel eye outworn,

The little ones spend the day

In sighing and dismay.

Ah then at times I drooping sit,

And spend many an anxious hour;

Nor in my book can I take delight,

Nor sit in learning’s bower,

Worn through with the dreary shower.

How can the bird that is born for joy

Sit in a cage and sing?

How can a child, when fears annoy,

But droop his tender wing,

And forget his youthful spring!

O father and mother if buds are nipped,

And blossoms blown away;

And if the tender plants are stripped

Of their joy in the springing day,

By sorrow and care’s dismay,

--How shall the summer arise in joy,

Or the summer fruits appear?

Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy,

Or bless the mellowing year,

When the blasts of winter appear?

O Western Wind

2007-06-15T11:45:00.000-04:00

I love this poem, written anonymously in the late 1400s, because of the humanity behind it. It's as though the author had some grander poem in mind while writing the first two lines, but the thought of rain spurs the burst of feeling, the sudden shift, and the quick ending.

O Western Wind

O Western wind, when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!

The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens

2007-06-08T11:41:00.000-04:00

It's creeping up towards 95 degrees here in DC today, so this well-known Stevens poem is nice to think on.

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), a lawyer and business man for most of his life, is considered one of the great American poets of the 20th Century. More than any other modern poet, Stevens was concerned with the transformative power of the imagination. Composing poems on his way to and from the office and in the evenings, Stevens continued to spend his days behind a desk at the office, and led a quiet, uneventful life.