Poetry

Rules for captain ahabs provincetown poetry workshop (Martin Espada)

1. Ye shall be free to write a poem on any subject, as long as it's the White Whale. 2. A gold doubloon shall be granted to the first among ye who in a poem sights the White Whale. 3. The Call Me Ishmael Award shall be given to the best poem about the White Whale, with publication in The White Whale Review. 4. The Herman Melville Memorial Picnic and Softball Game shall be open to whosoever of ye writes a poem about following thy Captain into the maw of hell to kill the White Whale. 5. There shall be a free floating coffin for any workshop participant who falls overboard whilst writing a poem about the White Whale. 6. There shall be a free leg, carved from the jawbone of a whale, for any workshop participant who is dismasted whilst writing a poem about the White Whale. 7. There shall be a free funeral at sea, complete with a chorus of stout hearties singing sea chanteys about the White Whale, for any workshop participant who is decapitated whilst writing a poem about the White Whale. 8. Ye who seek not the White Whale in thy poems shall be harpooned.

Thirteen Ways of Thinking about the Poetic Line (Dana Gioia)

1.The most obvious difference between prose and verse is lineation. In art the obvious is always important—although it is usually exactly what experts ignore. Poetic technique consists almost entirely of exploiting the expressive possibilities of lineation as a formal principle to communicate and intensify meaning. 2.The three common principles of organization for the poetic line are metrical, syntactic, and visual. Each system operates by different rules, but all systems share the assumption of the paramount importance of lineation in focusing the expressive energy and meaning of the poem. 3.Every element in a poem—every word, line break, stanza pattern, indentation, even all punctuation—potentially carries expressive meaning. If you do not shape that potential expressivity, each passive detail weakens the overall force of the poem. Those passive elements are dead weight the poem is obliged to carry. 4.There should be a reason why every line ends where it does. Line breaks are not neutral. Lineation is the most basic and essential organizing principle of verse. A reader or auditor need not understand the principle behind each line break intellectually, but he or she must intuitively feel its appropriateness and authority. 5.The purpose of lineation in verse is to establish a rhythm of expectation that heightens the listener's attention and apprehension. The purpose of poetic technique, especially meter, is to enchant the listener—to create a gentle hypnotic state that lowers the listener's resistance and heightens attention. Free verse lacks the steady physical beat of metrical poetry, but it seeks the same neural effect by different means. Lineation is the central organizing principle of free verse. 6.The reasons determining line length should be consistent within a poem— unless there is an overwhelming expressive necessity to violate them. It takes time and energy to establish a pattern of expectation. Violate the pattern too easily or too often, and the governing pattern falls apart. A badly executed pattern is worse than no pattern. Without an expressive pattern there is no poem. 7.Every poem should have a model line. The standard line length should be clear—consciously or unconsciously—to the listener or reader. The standard should be maintained throughout the poem, except for meaningful expressive variation. After each of these disruptive junctures, the poem either returns to the model line or creates a new standard. The expressive value of all disruptions should be greater than the loss of momentum and the breaking of the pattern's spell. 8.Each poetic line has two complementary obligations—to work well within the total pattern of the poem, and to embody in itself the power of poetic language. The successful poem does not merely balance those differing obligations; it uses them as partners in a seamless dance. Unless they dance, there isn't poetry, only versified language. 9.Each line should have some independent expressive force. Filling out a pattern is not sufficient justification for a line of verse. It should have some independent vitality in musical, imaginative, or narrative terms. The individual line is the microcosm of the total poem. It should embody the virtues of the whole. That is one reason that poetry can be quoted with such advantage. 10.The lineation tells the reader how to hear, see, and understand the poem. As the central formal principle of verse, lineation establishes the auditory and semantic patterns of the poem. The overall formal power of the poem cannot be achieved if lineation is done carelessly. 11.Line endings represent one of the most powerful expressive elements in poetic form. Poetic lines turn on the final word in each line. (The original meaning of versus is "to turn a plow making furrows in a field"—hence "the turn" is one of the ancient governing metaphors for poetry and poetic technique.) This verbal turning point, even when it isn't rhymed, offers enormous potential for meaningful effect. 12.The word at the end of a poetic line should bear the weight of imaginative or musical scrutiny. The end word of a line is highly visible and audible. Never end lines on weak words unless there is a strong expressive necessity. The end words—rhymed or unrhymed—should generate energy for the poem. 13.The line break is nearly always audible (and always visible), even if only as a tiny pause or echo. One doesn't hear the bar in music, but the trained listener always knows where it is by the shape of the notes around it. Since the line break is so prominent, it must be used for expressive effect. If it doesn't work for the poem, it will work against it.

The Altar (George Herbert)

A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant rears, Made of a heart and cemented with tears; Whose parts are as thy hand did frame; No workman's tool hath touch'd the same. A HEART alone Is such a stone, As nothing but Thy pow'r doth cut. Wherefore each part Of my hard heart Meets in this frame To praise thy name. That if I chance to hold my peace, These stones to praise thee may not cease. Oh, let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine, And sanctify this ALTAR to be thine.

A slumber did my spirit seal (william Wordsworth)

A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees.

The Business of Fancydancing (Sherman Alexie)

After driving all night, trying to reach arlee in time for the fancydance

adolescence II (Rita Dove)

Although it is night, I sit in the bathroom, waiting. Sweat prickles behind my knees, the baby-breasts are alert. Venetian blinds slice up the moon; the tiles quiver in pale strips. Then they come, the three seal men with eyes as round As dinner plates and eyelashes like sharpened tines. They bring the scent of licorice. One sits in the washbowl, One on the bathtub edge; one leans against the door. "Can you feel it yet?" they whisper. I don't know what to say, again. They chuckle, Patting their sleek bodies with their hands. "Well, maybe next time." And they rise, Glittering like pools of ink under moonlight, And vanish. I clutch at the ragged holes They leave behind, here at the edge of darkness. Night rests like a ball of fur on my tongue.

Poetics (A.R. Ammons)

Autoplay next video I look for the way things will turn out spiralling from a center, the shape things will take to come forth in so that the birch tree white touched black at branches will stand out wind-glittering totally its apparent self: I look for the forms things want to come as from what black wells of possibility, how a thing will unfold: not the shape on paper -- though that, too -- but the uninterfering means on paper: not so much looking for the shape as being available to any shape that may be summoning itself through me from the self not mine but ours.

The rites for cousin Vit (Gwendolyn Brooks)

Carried her unprotesting out the door. Kicked back the casket-stand. But it can't hold her, That stuff and satin aiming to enfold her, The lid's contrition nor the bolts before. Oh oh. Too much. Too much. Even now, surmise, She rises in the sunshine. There she goes, Back to the bars she knew and the repose In love-rooms and the things in people's eyes. Too vital and too squeaking. Must emerge. Even now she does the snake-hips with a hiss, Slops the bad wine across her shantung, talks Of pregnancy, guitars and bridgework, walks In parks or alleys, comes haply on the verge Of happiness, haply hysterics. Is.

My Last Duchess (Robert Browning)

FERRARA That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, Looking as if she were alive. I call That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf's hands Worked busily a day, and there she stands. Will't please you sit and look at her? I said "Fra 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 Fra 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 pretense 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!

The Disclosure (Denise Levertov)

From the shrivelling gray silk of its cocoon

My brother at 3 A.M. (Natalie Diaz)

He sat cross-legged, weeping on the steps when Mom unlocked and opened the front door. O God, he said. O God. He wants to kill me, Mom. When Mom unlocked and opened the front door at 3 a.m., she was in her nightgown, Dad was asleep. He wants to kill me, he told her, looking over his shoulder. 3 a.m. and in her nightgown, Dad asleep, What's going on? she asked. Who wants to kill you? He looked over his shoulder. The devil does. Look at him, over there. She asked, What are you on? Who wants to kill you? The sky wasn't black or blue but the green of a dying night. The devil, look at him, over there. He pointed to the corner house. The sky wasn't black or blue but the dying green of night. Stars had closed their eyes or sheathed their knives. My brother pointed to the corner house. His lips flickered with sores. Stars had closed their eyes or sheathed their knives. O God, I can see the tail, he said. O God, look. Mom winced at the sores on his lips. It's sticking out from behind the house. O God, see the tail, he said. Look at the *******ed tail. He sat cross-legged, weeping on the front steps. Mom finally saw it, a hellish vision, my brother. O God, O God, she said.

In Memory of W.B. Yeats (W.H. Auden)

I He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, And snow disfigured the public statues; The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day. Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems. But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, An afternoon of nurses and rumours; The provinces of his body revolted, The squares of his mind were empty, Silence invaded the suburbs, The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers. Now he is scattered among a hundred cities And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections, To find his happiness in another kind of wood And be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living. But in the importance and noise of to-morrow When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse, And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed, And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom, A few thousand will think of this day As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day. II You were silly like us; your gift survived it all: The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth. III Earth, receive an honoured guest: William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry. In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate; Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye. Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.

Witch Doctor (Robert Hayden)

I He dines alone surrounded by reflections of himself. Then after sleep and benzedrine descends the Cinquecento stair his magic wrought from hypochondria of the well- to-do and nagging deathwish of the poor; swirls on smiling genuflections of his liveried chauffeur into a crested lilac limousine, the cynosure of mousey neighbors tittering behind Venetian blinds and half afraid of him and half admiring his outrageous flair. II Meanwhile his mother, priestess in gold lamé, precedes him to the quondam theater now Israel Temple of the Highest Alpha, where the bored, the sick, the alien, the tired await euphoria. With deadly vigor she prepares the way for mystery and lucre. Shouts in blues-contralto, "He's God's dictaphone of all-redeeming truth. Oh he's the holyweight champeen who's come to give the knockout lick to your bad luck; say he's the holyweight champeen who's here to deal a knockout punch to your hard luck." III Reposing on cushions of black leopard skin, he telephones instructions for a long slow drive across the park that burgeons now with spring and sailors. Peers questingly into the green fountainous twilight, sighs and turns the gold-plate dial to Music For Your Dining-Dancing Pleasure. Smoking Egyptian cigarettes rehearses in his mind a new device that he must use tonight. IV Approaching Israel Temple, mask in place, he hears ragtime allegros of a "Song of Zion" that becomes when he appears a hallelujah wave for him to walk. His mother and a rainbow-surpliced cordon conduct him choiring to the altar-stage, and there he kneels and seems to pray before a lighted Jesus painted sealskin-brown. Then with a glittering flourish he arises, turns, gracefully extends his draperied arms: "Israelites, true Jews, O found lost tribe of Israel, receive my blessing now. Selah, selah." He feels them yearn toward him as toward a lover, exults before the image of himself their trust gives back. Stands as though in meditation, letting their eyes caress his garments jewelled and chatoyant, cut to fall, to flow from his tall figure dramatically just so. Then all at once he sways, quivers, gesticulates as if to ward off blows or kisses, and when he speaks again he utters wildering vocables, hypnotic no-words planned (and never failing) to enmesh his flock in theopathic tension. Cries of eudaemonic pain attest his artistry. Behind the mask he smiles. And now in subtly altering light he chants and sinuously trembles, chants and trembles while convulsive energies of eager faith surcharge the theater with power of their own, a power he has counted on and for a space allows to carry him. Dishevelled antiphons proclaim the moment his followers all day have hungered for, but which is his alone. He signals: tambourines begin, frenetic drumbeat and glissando. He dances from the altar, robes hissing, flaring, shimmering; down aisles where mantled guardsmen intercept wild hands that arduously strain to clutch his vestments, he dances, dances, ensorcelled and aloof, the fervid juba of God as lover, healer, conjurer. And of himself as God.

Coal (Audre Lorde)

I Is the total black, being spoken From the earth's inside. There are many kinds of open. How a diamond comes into a knot of flame How a sound comes into a word, coloured By who pays what for speaking. Some words are open Like a diamond on glass windows Singing out within the crash of passing sun Then there are words like stapled wagers In a perforated book—buy and sign and tear apart— And come whatever wills all chances The stub remains An ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge. Some words live in my throat Breeding like adders. Others know sun Seeking like gypsies over my tongue To explode through my lips Like young sparrows bursting from shell. Some words Bedevil me. Love is a word another kind of open— As a diamond comes into a knot of flame I am black because I come from the earth's inside Take my word for jewel in your open light.

The wish (Donald Hall)

I kept her weary ghost inside me "oh, let me go," I hear her crying.

Conversation with a stone (wislawa Szymborska)

I knock at the stone's front door "It's only me, let me come in. I want to enter your insides, have a look around, breathe my fill of you." "Go away," says the stone. "I'm shut tight. Even if you break me to pieces, we'll all still be closed. You can grind us to sand, we still won't let you in." I knock at the stone's front door. "It's only me, let me come in. I've come out of pure curiosity. Only life can quench it. I mean to stroll through your palace, then go calling on a leaf, a drop of water. I don't have much time. My mortality should touch you." "I'm made of stone," says the stone. "And must therefore keep a straight face. Go away. I don't have the muscles to laugh." I knock at the stone's front door. "It's only me, let me come in. I hear you have great empty halls inside you, unseen, their beauty in vain, soundless, not echoing anyone's steps. Admit you don't know them well yourself. "Great and empty, true enough," says the stone, "but there isn't any room. Beautiful, perhaps, but not to the taste of your poor senses. You may get to know me but you'll never know me through. My whole surface is turned toward you, all my insides turned away." I knock at the stone's front door. "It's only me, let me come in. I don't seek refuge for eternity. I'm not unhappy. I'm not homeless. My world is worth returning to. I'll enter and exit empty-handed. And my proof I was there will be only words, which no one will believe." "You shall not enter," says the stone. "You lack the sense of taking part. No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part. Even sight heightened to become all-seeing will do you no good without a sense of taking part. You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what that sense should be, only its seed, imagination." I knock at the stone's front door. "It's only me, let me come in. I haven't got two thousand centuries, so let me come under your roof." "If you don't believe me," says the stone, "just ask the leaf, it will tell you the same. Ask a drop of water, it will say what the leaf has said. And, finally, ask a hair from your own head. I am bursting from laughter, yes, laughter, vast laughter, although I don't know how to laugh." I knock at the stone's front door. "It's only me, let me come in. "I don't have a door," says the stone.

Ozymandias (Percy Bysshe Shelley)

I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said—"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Anecdote of the Jar (Wallace Stevens)

I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Poetry (Marianne Moore)

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in it after all, a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must, these things are important not because a high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the same thing may be said for all of us—that we do not admire what we cannot understand. The bat, holding on upside down or in quest of something to eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base- ball fan, the statistician—case after case could be cited did one wish it; nor is it valid to discriminate against "business documents and school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the autocrats among us can be "literalists of the imagination"—above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion— the raw material of poetry in all its rawness, and that which is on the other hand, genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

Persimmons (Li-Young Lee)

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker slapped the back of my head and made me stand in the corner for not knowing the difference between persimmon and precision. How to choose persimmons. This is precision. Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted. Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one will be fragrant. How to eat: put the knife away, lay down newspaper. Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat. Chew the skin, suck it, and swallow. Now, eat the meat of the fruit, so sweet, all of it, to the heart. Donna undresses, her stomach is white. In the yard, dewy and shivering with crickets, we lie naked, face-up, face-down. I teach her Chinese. Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I've forgotten. Naked: I've forgotten. Ni, wo: you and me. I part her legs, remember to tell her she is beautiful as the moon. Other words that got me into trouble were fight and fright, wren and yarn. Fight was what I did when I was frightened, Fright was what I felt when I was fighting. Wrens are small, plain birds, yarn is what one knits with. Wrens are soft as yarn. My mother made birds out of yarn. I loved to watch her tie the stuff; a bird, a rabbit, a wee man. Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class and cut it up so everyone could taste a Chinese apple. Knowing it wasn't ripe or sweet, I didn't eat but watched the other faces. My mother said every persimmon has a sun inside, something golden, glowing, warm as my face. Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper, forgotten and not yet ripe. I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill, where each morning a cardinal sang, The sun, the sun. Finally understanding he was going blind, my father sat up all one night waiting for a song, a ghost. I gave him the persimmons, swelled, heavy as sadness, and sweet as love. This year, in the muddy lighting of my parents' cellar, I rummage, looking for something I lost. My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs, black cane between his knees, hand over hand, gripping the handle. He's so happy that I've come home. I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question. All gone, he answers. Under some blankets, I find a box. Inside the box I find three scrolls. I sit beside him and untie three paintings by my father: Hibiscus leaf and a white flower. Two cats preening. Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth. He raises both hands to touch the cloth, asks, Which is this? This is persimmons, Father. Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk, the strength, the tense precision in the wrist. I painted them hundreds of times eyes closed. These I painted blind. Some things never leave a person: scent of the hair of one you love, the texture of persimmons, in your palm, the ripe weight.

Body & Kentucky Bourbon (Saeed Jones)

In the dark, my mind's night, I go back to your work-calloused hands, your body and the memory of fields I no longer see. Cheek wad of chew tobacco, Skoal-tin ring in the back pocket of threadbare jeans, knees worn through entirely. How to name you: farmhand, Kentucky boy, lover. The one who taught me to bear the back-throat burn of bourbon. Straight, no chaser, a joke in our bed, but I stopped laughing; all those empty bottles, kitchen counters covered with beer cans and broken glasses. To realize you drank so you could face me the morning after, the only way to choke down rage at the body sleeping beside you. What did I know of your father's backhand or the pine casket he threatened to put you in? Only now, miles and years away, do I wince at the jokes: white trash, farmer's tan, good ole boy. And now, alone, I see your face at the bottom of my shot glass before my own comes through.

Rotation (Natasha Trethewey)

Like the moon that night, my father — a distant body, white and luminous. How small I was back then, looking up as if from dark earth. Distant, his body white and luminous, my father stood in the doorway. Looking up as if from dark earth, I saw him outlined in a scrim of light. My father stood in the doorway as if to watch over me as I dreamed. When I saw him outlined — a scrim of light — he was already waning, turning to go. Once, he watched over me as I dreamed. How small I was. Back then, he was already turning to go, waning like the moon that night — my father.

Facing It (Yusef Komunyakaa)

My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn't dammit: No tears. I'm stone. I'm flesh. My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. I turn this way—the stone lets me go. I turn that way—I'm inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again, depending on the light to make a difference. I go down the 58,022 names, half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke. I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap's white flash. Names shimmer on a woman's blouse but when she walks away the names stay on the wall. Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's wings cutting across my stare. The sky. A plane in the sky. A white vet's image floats closer to me, then his pale eyes look through mine. I'm a window. He's lost his right arm inside the stone. In the black mirror a woman's trying to erase names: No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

Quinceanera (Judith Ortiz Cofer)

My dolls have been put away like dead children in a chest I will carry with me when I marry. I reach under my skirt to feel a satin slip bought for this day. It is soft as the inside of my thighs. My hair has been nailed back with my mother's black hairpins to my skull. Her hands stretched my eyes open as she twisted braids into a tight circle at the nape of my neck. I am to wash my own clothes and sheets from this day on, as if the fluids of my body were poison, as if the little trickle of blood I believe travels from my heart to the world were shameful. Is not the blood of saints and men in battle beautiful? Do Christ's hands not bleed into your eyes from His cross? At night I hear myself growing and wake to find my hands drifting of their own will to soothe skin stretched tight over my bones, I am wound like the guts of a clock, waiting for each hour to release me.

Ode to a Nightingale (John Keats)

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,— That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease. O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth! O for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim: Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs, Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. Away! away! for I will fly to thee, Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy, Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves; And mid-May's eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy! Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain— To thy high requiem become a sod. Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

Oranges (Robert Morgan)

Not once a year gold christmas things, as parents recalled, still oranges were holiday and

Fetch (Ruth Schwartz)

Nothing is ever too hard for a dog, all big dumb happiness and effort. This one keeps swimming out into the icy water for a stick, he'd do it all day and all night if you'd throw it that long, he'd do it till it killed him, then he'd die dripping and shining, a black waterfall, the soggy broken stick still clenched in his doggy teeth, and watching him you want to cry for all the wanting you've forsworn, and how, when he hits deeper water, his body surges suddenly, as if to say Nothing could stop me now -- while you're still thinking everything you've ever loved meant giving up some other thing you loved, your hand, the stick stuck in the air, in the shining air.

Sonnet 75 (Edmund Spenser)

One day I wrote her name upon the strand, But came the waves and washed it away: Again I wrote it with a second hand, But came the tide, and made my pains his prey. "Vain man," said she, "that dost in vain assay, A mortal thing so to immortalize; For I myself shall like to this decay, And eke my name be wiped out likewise." "Not so," (quod I) "let baser things devise To die in dust, but you shall live by fame: My verse your vertues rare shall eternize, And in the heavens write your glorious name: Where whenas death shall all the world subdue, Our love shall live, and later life renew."

In an Artist's Studio (Christina Rossetti)

One face looks out from all his canvases, One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans: We found her hidden just behind those screens, That mirror gave back all her loveliness. A queen in opal or in ruby dress, A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens, A saint, an angel — every canvas means The same one meaning, neither more or less. He feeds upon her face by day and night, And she with true kind eyes looks back on him, Fair as the moon and joyful as the light: Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim; Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright; Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

Reward (kevin young)

RUN AWAY from this sub- scriber for the second time are TWO NEGROES, viz. SMART, an outlandish dark fellow with his country marks on his temples and bearing the remarkable brand of my name on his left breast, last seen wearing an old ragged negro cloth shirt and breeches made of fearnought; also DIDO, a likely young wench of a yellow cast, born in cherrytime in this parish, wearing a mixed coloured coat with a bundle of clothes, mostly blue, under her one good arm. Both speak tolerable plain English and may insist on being called Cuffee and Khasa respect- ively. Whoever shall deliver the said goods to the gaoler in Baton Rouge, or to the Sugar House in the parish, shall receive all reasonable charges plus a genteel reward besides what the law allows. In the mean time all persons are strictly forbid harbouring them, on pain of being prosecuted to the utmost rigour of the law. Ten guineas will be paid to anyone who can give intelligence of their being harboured, employed, or enter- tained by a white person upon his sentence; five on conviction of a black. All Masters of vessels are warned against carrying them out of state, as they may claim to be free. If any of the above Negroes return of their own accord, they may still be for- given by ELIZABETH YOUNG.

The Last Song of Sappho (Felicia Hemans)

SOUND on, thou dark unslumbering sea! My dirge is in thy moan; My spirit finds response in thee, To its own ceaseless cry-'Alone, alone !' Yet send me back one other word, Ye tones that never cease ! Oh ! let your secret caves be stirr'd, And say, dark waters! will ye give me peace? Away! my weary soul hath sought In vain one echoing sigh, One answer to consuming thought In human hearts-and will the wave reply ? Sound on, thou dark, unslumbering sea! Sound in thy scorn and pride ! I ask not, alien world, from thee, What my own kindred earth hath still denied. And yet I loved that earth so well, With all its lovely things! -Was it for this the death-wind fell On my rich lyre, and quench'd its living strings? -Let them lie silent at my feet ! Since broken even as they, The heart whose music made them sweet, Hath pour'd on desert-sands its wealth away. Yet glory's light hath touch'd my name, The laurel-wreath is mine- -With a lone heart, a weary frame- O restless deep ! I come to make them thine ! Give to that crown, that burning crown, Place in thy darkest hold! Bury my anguish, my renown, With hidden wrecks, lost gems, and wasted gold. Thou sea-bird on the billow's crest, Thou hast thy love, thy home; They wait thee in the quiet nest, And I, the unsought, unwatch'd-for-I too come! I, with this winged nature fraught, These visions wildly free, This boundless love, this fiery thought- Alone I come-oh ! give me peace, dark sea!

A Ball is for Throwing (Adrienne rich)

See it, the beautiful ball Poised in the toyshop window, Rounder than sun or moon. Is it red? is it blue? is it violet? It is everything we desire, And it does not exist at all. Non-existent and beautiful? Quite. In the rounding leap of our hands, In the longing hush of air, We know what that ball could be, How its blues and reds could spin To a headier violet. Beautiful in the mind, Like a word we are waiting to hear, That ball is construed, but lives Only in flash of flight, From the instant of release To the catch in another's hand. And the toy withheld is a token Of all who refrain from play- The shopkeepers, the collectors Like Queen Victoria, in whose adorable doll's house Nothing was ever broken.

Sonnet 18 (William Shakespear)

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date; Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st; Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Washing-Day (Anna Laetita Barbauld)

The Muses are turned gossips; they have lost The buskined step, and clear high-sounding phrase, Language of gods. Come, then, domestic Muse, In slip-shod measure loosely prattling on, Of farm or orchard, pleasant curds and cream, Or droning flies, or shoes lost in the mire By little whimpering boy, with rueful face — Come, Muse, and sing the dreaded washing day. Ye who beneath the yoke of wedlock bend, With bowed soul, full well ye ken the day Which week, smooth sliding after week, brings on Too soon; for to that day nor peace belongs, Nor comfort; ere the first grey streak of dawn, The red-armed washers come and chase repose. Nor pleasant smile, nor quaint device of mirth, Ere visited that day; the very cat, From the wet kitchen scared, and reeking hearth, Visits the parlour, an unwonted guest. The silent breakfast meal is soon despatched, Uninterrupted, save by anxious looks Cast at the louring, if sky should lour. From that last evil, oh preserve us, heavens! For should the skies pour down, adieu to all Remains of quiet; then expect to hear Of sad disasters — dirt and gravel stains Hard to efface, and loaded lines at once Snapped short, and linen-horse by dog thrown down, And all the petty miseries of life. Saints have been calm while stretched upon the rack, And Montezuma smiled on burning coals; But never yet did housewife notable Greet with a smile a rainy washing day. But grant the welkin fair, require not thou Who callest thyself, perchance, the master there, Or study swept, or nicely dusted coat, Or usual 'tendence; ask not, indiscreet, Thy stockings mended, though the yawning rents Gape wide as Erebus; nor hope to find Some snug recess impervious. Shouldst thou try The 'customed garden walks, thine eye shall rue The budding fragrance of thy tender shrubs, Myrtle or rose, all crushed beneath the weight Of coarse-checked apron, with impatient hand Twitched off when showers impend; or crossing lines Shall mar thy musings, as the wet cold sheet Flaps in thy face abrupt. Woe to the friend Whose evil stars have urged him forth to claim On such a dav the hospitable rites; Looks blank at best, and stinted courtesy Shall he receive; vainly he feeds his hopes With dinner of roast chicken, savoury pie, Or tart or pudding; pudding he nor tart That day shall eat; nor, though the husband try — Mending what can't be helped — to kindle mirth From cheer deficient, shall his consort's brow Clear up propitious; the unlucky guest In silence dines, and early slinks away. I well remember, when a child, the awe This day struck into me; for then the maids, I scarce knew why, looked cross, and drove me from them; Nor soft caress could I obtain, nor hope Usual indulgencies; jelly or creams, Relic of costly suppers, and set by For me their petted one; or buttered toast, When butter was forbid; or thrilling tale Of ghost, or witch, or murder. So I went And sheltered me beside the parlour fire; There my dear grandmother, eldest of forms, Tended the little ones, and watched from harm; Anxiously fond, though oft her spectacles With elfin cunning hid, and oft the pins Drawn from her ravelled stocking, might have soured One less indulgent. At intervals my mother's voice was heard, Urging dispatch; briskly the work went on, All hands employed to wash, to rinse, to wring, Or fold, and starch, and clap, and iron, and plait. Then would I sit me down, and ponder much Why washings were; sometimes through hollow hole Of pipe amused we blew, and sent aloft The floating bubbles; little dreaming then To see, Montgolfier, thy silken ball Ride buoyant through the clouds, so near approach The sports of children and the toils of men. Earth, air, and sky, and ocean hath its bubbles, And verse is one of them — this most of all.

One Art (Elisabeth Bishop)

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.

The Universe Original motion picture soundtrack (Tracy K. Smith)

The first track still almost swings. High hat and snare, even A few bars of sax the stratosphere will singe-out soon enough. Synthesized strings. Then something like cellophane Breaking in as if snagged to a shoe. Crinkle and drag. White noise, Black noise. What must be voices bob up, then drop, like metal shavings In molasses. So much for us. So much for the flags we bored Into planets dry as chalk, for the tin cans we filled with fire And rode like cowboys into all we tried to tame. Listen: The dark we've only ever imagined now audible, thrumming, Marbled with static like gristly meat. A chorus of engines churns. Silence taunts: a dare. Everything that disappears Disappears as if returning somewhere.

The poet as Setting (Douglas kearney)

The jolt that comes to bones inside a tumbled streetcar is what the painter considers as she strokes her- self into story. There is less to the jolt that comes as he shuts his eyes before the monitor, save what he imagines—a lightning bolt, a god tapping the shoulder. He imagines the sky swelling with ceiling fans or the guano of extinct birds, a jolt riding from his shoulder blades to his eyelids, dropping with roller coaster clacks to his fingers. Here, he dreams of Frida Kahlo. Here, he says, let me spread my flesh out like a table linen, let my bones be silver that touches, making, again, that clack. My skull will be a glass, set properly, I have class enough. What jolt is it to chew over class, his body set before him as a reader sips (perhaps) a glass of something heady? We give books spines, we break them. The table will have its legs, its head. The body is upon us. Does the table have a stomach? Is it simply there to bear our hunger without its own, like a eunuch bathing a stripper? What is the poet without eyes or ears—reading, listening? He is a platform—a place to set, that to set it with. And if this is all, what will he do when the reader finishes a glass, rises from the poet's head, and passes into the city? Covered with a linen, he is waiting for something to spill, perhaps a girl in Mexico rolling her ankle in a street- car.

The Kingfisher (Mary Oliver)

The kingfisher rises out of the black wave like a blue flower, in his beak he carries a silver leaf. I think this is the prettiest world--so long as you don't mind a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life that doesn't have its splash of happiness? There are more fish than there are leaves on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher wasn't born to think about it, or anything else. When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water remains water--hunger is the only story he has ever heard in his life that he could believe. I don't say he's right. Neither do I say he's wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf with its broken red river, and with a rough and easy cry I couldn't rouse out of my thoughtful body if my life depended on it, he swings back over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it (as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.

The word plum (Helen Chasin)

The word plum is delicious pout and push, luxury of self-love, and savoring murmur full in the mouth and falling like fruit taut skin pierced, bitten, provoked into juice, and tart flesh question and reply, lip and tongue of pleasure.

To a Locomotive in Winter (Walt Whitman)

Thee for my recitative! Thee in the driving storm even as now, the snow, the winter-day declining, Thee in thy panoply, thy measur'd dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive, Thy black cylindric body, golden brass, and silvery steel, Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides, Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance, Thy great protruding head-light fix'd in front, Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple, The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack, Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels, Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily following, Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack, yet steadily careering; Type of the modern—emblem of motion and power—pulse of the continent, For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse, even as here I see thee, With storm and buffeting gusts of wind and falling snow, By day thy warning ringing bell to sound its notes, By night thy silent signal lamps to swing. Fierce-throated beauty! Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music, thy swinging lamps at night, Thy madly-whistled laughter, echoing, rumbling like an earthquake, rousing all, Law of thyself complete, thine own track firmly holding, (No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,) Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return'd, Launch'd o'er the prairies wide,across the lakes, To the free skies unpent and glad and strong.

The Best Cigarette (Billy Collins)

There are many that I miss having sent my last one out a car window sparking along the road one night, years ago. The heralded one, of course: after sex, the two glowing tips now the lights of a single ship; at the end of a long dinner with more wine to come and a smoke ring coasting into the chandelier; or on a white beach, holding one with fingers still wet from a swim. How bittersweet these punctuations of flame and gesture; but the best were on those mornings when I would have a little something going in the typewriter, the sun bright in the windows, maybe some Berlioz on in the background. I would go into the kitchen for coffee and on the way back to the page, curled in its roller, I would light one up and feel its dry rush mix with the dark taste of coffee. Then I would be my own locomotive, trailing behind me as I returned to work little puffs of smoke, indicators of progress, signs of industry and thought, the signal that told the nineteenth century it was moving forward. That was the best cigarette, when I would steam into the study full of vaporous hope and stand there, the big headlamp of my face pointed down at all the words in parallel lines.

(1862) (Emily Dickinson)

There's a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons - That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes - Heavenly Hurt, it gives us - We can find no scar, But internal difference - Where the Meanings, are - None may teach it - Any - 'Tis the seal Despair - An imperial affliction Sent us of the Air - When it comes, the Landscape listens - Shadows - hold their breath - When it goes, 'tis like the Distance On the look of Death -

["This Living Hand"] (John Keats)

This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm'd-see here it is- I hold it towards you.

The Windhover (Gerard Manley Hopkins)

To Christ our Lord I caught this morning morning's minion, king- dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird, - the achieve of, the mastery of the thing! Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

A dedication to my wife (T.S. Eliot)

To whom I owe the leaping delight That quickens my senses in our wakingtime And the rhythm that governs the repose of our sleepingtime, the breathing in unison. Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other Who think the same thoughts without need of speech, And babble the same speech without need of meaning... No peevish winter wind shall chill No sullen tropic sun shall wither The roses in the rose-garden which is ours and ours only But this dedication is for others to read: These are private words addressed to you in public.

The Voice (Thomas Hardy)

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all to me, But as at first, when our day was fair. Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then, Standing as when I drew near to the town Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then, Even to the original air-blue gown! Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness Travelling across the wet mead to me here, You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness, Heard no more again far or near? Thus I; faltering forward, Leaves around me falling, Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward, And the woman calling.

In Another Country (Rafiq Kathwari)

for Agha Shahid Ali In Kashmir, half-asleep, Mother listens to the rain. In Manhattan, I feel her presence in the rain. A rooster precedes the Call to Prayer at Dawn: God is a namedropper: all names at once in the rain. Forsythias shrivel in a glass vase on her nightstand. On my windowsills, wilted petals, a petulance in the rain. She must wonder when I will put on the kettle, butter the crumpets, observe silence in the rain. She veils her hair, offers a prayer across the oceans, water on my hands becomes a reverence in the rain. At Jewel House in Srinagar, Mother reshapes my ghazal. "No enjambments!" she says as I listen in the rain. "Rafiq," I hear her call above the city din. The kettle whistles: Mother's scent in the rain.

Jasper texas (Lucille Clifton)

for j. byrd i am a man's head hunched in the road. i was chosen to speak by the members of my body. the arm as it pulled away pointed toward me, the hand opened once and was gone. why and why and why should i call a white man brother? who is the human in this place, the thing that is dragged or the dragger? what does my daughter say? the sun is a blister overhead. if i were alive i could not bear it. the townsfolk sing we shall overcome while hope bleeds slowly from my mouth into the dirt that covers us all. i am done with this dust. i am done.

Angelo-Saxon Riddles

my dress is silver, shimmering gray, spun with a blaze of garnets*. I craze most men: rash fools

XXII (whilliam Carlos Williams)

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

Beware: Do Not Read This Poem (Ishmael Reed)

tonite, thriller was about an old woman, so vain she surrounded herself with many mirrors it got so bad that finally she locked herself indoors & her whole life became the mirrors one day the villagers broke into her house, but she was too swift for them. she disappeared into a mirror each tenant who bought the house after that, lost a loved one to the old woman in the mirror: first a little girl then a young woman then the young woman's husband the hunger of this poem is legendary it has taken in many victims back off from this poem it has drawn in your feet back off from this poem it has drawn in your legs back off from thias poem it is a greedy mirror you are into this poem. from the waist down nobody can hear you can they? this poem has had you up to here belch this poem aint got no manners you cant call out from this poem relax now & go with this poem move & roll on to this poem do not resist this poem this poem has your eyes this poem has his head this poem has his arms this poem has his fingers this poem has his fingertips this poem is the reader & the reader the poem statistic: the US bureau of missing persons re- ports that in 1968 over 100,000 people disappeared leaving no solid clues nor trace only a space in the lives of their friends