Poetry Quiz 2

What is the name of this poem and who wrote it? Because I could not stop for Death - He kindly stopped for me - The Carriage held but just Ourselves - And Immortality. We slowly drove - He knew no haste And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility - We passed the School, where Children strove At Recess - in the Ring - We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain - We passed the Setting Sun - Or rather - He passed Us - The Dews drew quivering and Chill - For only Gossamer, my Gown - My Tippet - only Tulle - We paused before a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground - The Roof was scarcely visible - The Cornice - in the Ground - Since then - 'tis Centuries - and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses' Heads Were toward Eternity -

"Because I could not stop for death," Emily Dickinson

What is the name of this poem and who wrote it? They lie like stones and dare not shift. Even asleep, everyone hears in prison. Dwayne Betts deserves more than this dry ink for his teenage years in prison. In the film we keep watching, Nina takes Darius to a steppers ball. Lovers hustle, slide, and dip as if none of them has a brother in prison. I eat with humans who think any book full of black characters is about race. A book full of white characters examines insanity—but never in prison. His whole family made a barricade of their bodies at the door to room 403. He died without the man he wanted. What use is love at home or in prison? We saw police pull sharks out of the water just to watch them not breathe. A brother meets members of his family as he passes the mirrors in prison. Sundays, I washed and dried her clothes after he threw them into the yard. In the novel I love, Brownfield kills his wife, gets only seven years in prison. I don't want to point my own sinful finger, so let's use your clean one instead. Some bright citizen reading this never considered a son's short hair in prison. In our house lived three men with one name, and all three fought or ran. I left Nelson Demery III for Jericho Brown, a name I earned in prison.

"Hustle" by Jericho Brown

villanelle

A French verse form consisting of five three-line stanzas and a final quatrain, with the first and third lines of the first stanza repeating alternately in the following stanzas. These two refrain lines form the final couplet in the quatrain.

Who is this? 1941- ___________ was born in New York City on March 22, 1941. He is the author of several books of poetry, including Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems (Random House, 2013), Horoscopes for the Dead: Poems (Random House, 2012); Ballistics: Poems (Random House, 2008); She Was Just Seventeen (Modern Haiku Press, 2006); The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems (Random House, 2005); Nine Horses (Pan Macmillan, 2002); Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (Random House, 2001); Picnic, Lightning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998); The Art of Drowning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), which was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Questions About Angels (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), which was selected by Edward Hirsch for the National Poetry Series; The Apple That Astonished Paris (University of Arkansas Press, 1988); Video Poems (Applezaba Press, 1979); and Pokerface (Kenmore Press, 1977). A recording of Shis reading thirty-three of his poems, The Best Cigarette, was released in 1997. His poetry has appeared in anthologies, textbooks, and a variety of periodicals, including Poetry, American Poetry Review, American Scholar, Harper's, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker. His work has also been featured in the Pushcart Prize anthology and has been chosen several times for the annual Best American Poetry series. He has edited Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry (Random House, 2003), an anthology of contemporary poems for use in schools, and was a guest editor for the 2006 edition of The Best American Poetry. About him, the poet Stephen Dunn has said, "We seem to always know where we are in a________ poem, but not necessarily where he is going. I love to arrive with him at his arrivals. He doesn't hide things from us, as I think lesser poets do. He allows us to overhear, clearly, what he himself has discovered." He served as U.S. poet laureate from 2001 to 2003, and as the New York State poet laureate from 2004 to 2006. His other honors and awards include the Mark Twain Prize for Humor in Poetry, as well as fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1992, he was chosen by the New York Public Library to serve as "Literary Lion." He has conducted summer poetry workshops in Ireland at University College Galway, and taught at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Lehman College, City University of New York. He lives in Somers, New York.

Billy Collins

What is the name of this poem and who wrote it? All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now, and after this one just a dozen to launch a little ship on love's storm-tossed seas, then only ten more left like rows of beans. How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan and insist the iambic bongos must be played and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines, one for every station of the cross. But hang on here wile we make the turn into the final six where all will be resolved, where longing and heartache will find an end, where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen, take off those crazy medieval tights, blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.

Billy Collins, "Sonnet"

Who is this? 1892-1950 Poet and playwright ______ was born in Rockland, Maine, on February 22, 1892. In 1912, she entered her poem "Renascence" to The Lyric Year's poetry contest, where she won fourth place and publication in the anthology. This brought her immediate acclaim and a scholarship to Vassar College, where she continued to write poetry and became involved in the theater. In 1917, the year of her graduation, she published her first book, Renascence and Other Poems (Harper, 1917). At the request of Vassar's drama department, she also wrote her first verse play, The Lamp and the Bell (1921), a work about love between women. After graduating from Vassar, she moved to New York City's Greenwich Village, where she lived with her sister, Norma, in a nine-foot-wide attic. She published poems in Vanity Fair, the Forum, and others while writing short stories and satire under the pen name Nancy Boyd. She and Norma acted with the Provincetown Players in the group's early days, befriending writers such as poet Witter Bynner, critic Edmund Wilson, playwright and actress Susan Glaspell, and journalist Floyd Dell. She published A Few Figs from Thistles (Harper & Brothers, 1920), a volume of poetry which drew much attention for its controversial descriptions of female sexuality and feminism. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (Flying Cloud Press, 1922). In addition to publishing three plays in verse, she also wrote the libretto of one of the few American grand operas, The King's Henchman (Harper & Brothers, 1927). She married Eugen Boissevain in 1923, and the two were together for twenty-six years. Boissevain gave up his own pursuits to manage her literary career, setting up the readings and public appearances for which she grew famous. She died at the age of fifty-eight on October 18, 1950, in Austerlitz, New York.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

What is the name of this poem and who wrote it? What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten, and what arms have lain Under my head till morning; but the rain Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh Upon the glass and listen for reply, And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain For unremembered lads that not again Will turn to me at midnight with a cry. Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree, Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, Yet knows its boughs more silent than before: I cannot say what loves have come and gone, I only know that summer sang in me A little while, that in me sings no more.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, "What Lips my Lips Have Kissed and Where and Why"

Who is this? 1911-1979 _________ was born on February 8, 1911, in Worcester, Massachusetts. When she was less than a year old, her father died, and shortly thereafter, her mother was committed to an asylum. He was first sent to live with her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia and later lived with paternal relatives in Worcester and South Boston. She earned a bachelor's degree from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1934. She was independently wealthy, and from 1935 to 1937 she spent time traveling to France, Spain, North Africa, Ireland, and Italy and then settled in Key West, Florida, for four years. Her poetry is filled with descriptions of her travels and the scenery that surrounded her, as with the Florida poems in her first book of verse, North & South (Houghton Mifflin), published in 1946. She was influenced by the poet Marianne Moore, who was a close friend, mentor, and stabilizing force in her life. Unlike her contemporary and good friend Robert Lowell, who wrote in the Confessional style, her poetry avoids explicit accounts of her personal life and focuses instead with great subtlety on her impressions of the physical world. Her images are precise and true to life, and they reflect her own sharp wit and moral sense. She lived for many years in Brazil, communicating with friends and colleagues in America only by letter. She published sparingly, and her work is often praised for its technical brilliance and formal variety. She received the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for her collection Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1955). Her Complete Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), won the National Book Award in 1970. That same year, She began teaching at Harvard University, where she worked for seven years. For years she was considered a "poet's poet," but with the 1977 publication of her last book, Geography III (Chatto and Windus), She was finally established as a major force in contemporary literature. She was awarded an Academy Fellowship in 1964 for distinguished poetic achievement, and served as a Chancellor from 1966 to 1979. She died in her apartment at Lewis Wharf in Boston on October 6, 1979.

Elizabeth Bishop

What is the name of this poem and who wrote it? 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, "One Art"

Who is this? 1830-1886 She was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, but only for one year. Her father, was actively involved in state and national politics, serving in Congress for one term. Her brother, Austin, who attended law school and became an attorney, lived next door with his wife, Susan Gilbert. Dickinson's younger sister, Lavinia, also lived at home, and she and Austin were intellectual companions for Dickinson during her lifetime. Her poetry was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England, as well as her reading of the Book of Revelation and her upbringing in a Puritan New England town, which encouraged a Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative approach to Christianity. She admired the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as John Keats. Though she was dissuaded from reading the verse of her contemporary Walt Whitman by rumors of its disgracefulness, the two poets are now connected by the distinguished place they hold as the founders of a uniquely American poetic voice. While she was extremely prolific and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, she was not publicly recognized during her lifetime. The first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890 and the last in 1955. She died in Amherst in 1886. Upon her death, her family discovered forty handbound volumes of nearly 1,800 poems, or "fascicles," as they are sometimes called. She assembled these booklets by folding and sewing five or six sheets of stationery paper and copying what seem to be final versions of poems. The handwritten poems show a variety of dash-like marks of various sizes and directions (some are even vertical). The poems were initially unbound and published according to the aesthetics of her many early editors, who removed her annotations. The current standard version of her poems replaces her dashes with an en-dash, which is a closer typographical approximation to her intention. The original order of the poems was not restored until 1981, when Ralph W. Franklin used the physical evidence of the paper itself to restore her intended order, relying on smudge marks, needle punctures, and other clues to reassemble the packets. Since then, many critics have argued that there is a thematic unity in these small collections, rather than their order being simply chronological or convenient. The Manuscript Books of _________ (Belknap Press, 1981) is the only volume that keeps the order intact.

Emily Dickinson

What is the name of this poem and who wrote it? Success is counted sweetest By those who ne'er succeed. To comprehend a nectar Requires sorest need. Not one of all the purple Host Who took the Flag today Can tell the definition So clear of victory As he defeated - dying - On whose forbidden ear The distant strains of triumph Burst agonized and clear!

Emily Dickinson, "Success is Counted Sweetest"

What is the name of this poem and who wrote it? Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind —

Emily Dickinson, "Tell all the truth but tell it slant"

What is the name of this poem and who wrote it? The Soul selects her own Society — Then — shuts the Door — To her divine Majority — Present no more — Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing — At her low Gate — Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling Upon her Mat — I've known her — from an ample nation — Choose One — Then — close the Valves of her attention — Like Stone —

Emily Dickinson, "The Soul Selects"

Who is this? 1917-2000 She was born in Topeka on June 7, 1917, to _________, the son of a runaway slave, and Keziah Corinne (née Wims), and raised in Chicago. Brooks began writing poetry in her teenage years and published her first poem in American Childhood magazine. She sent her early poems to both Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson, and both elder poets responded with letters of encouragement. Brooks also became a regular contributor to the Chicago Defender's "Lights and Shadows" poetry column when she was sixteen. She graduated from Woodrow Wilson Junior College in 1936. She was the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including Children Coming Home (The David Co., 1991); Blacks (The David Co., 1987); To Disembark (Third World Press, 1981); The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (The David Co., 1986); Family Pictures (Broadside Press, 1970); Riot (Broadside Press, 1969); In the Mecca (Harper & Row, 1968), a finalist for the National Book Award; The Bean Eaters (Harper, 1960); Annie Allen (Harper, 1949), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize; and A Street in Bronzeville (Harper & Brothers, 1945), a collection admired by fellow Chicagoan and writer Richard Wright. She also wrote the novel, Maud Martha (Harper, 1953) and Report from Part One: An Autobiography (Broadside Press, 1972). She edited Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology (Broadside Press, 1971). Her books for children include Bronzeville Boys and Girls (Harper, 1956), later rereleased in 2015 and illustrated by Faith Ringgold. After going to a literary conference at Fisk University in 1967, which was also attended by Amiri Baraka and other poets from the Black Arts Movement, she became an activist in the Black Power movement. She also started a poetry workshop from her home. Participants included Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti). In 1968, she was named poet laureate for the state of Illinois. In 1976, she became the first African American to join the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1985, she was the first Black woman appointed as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress (now, poet laureate). She also received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Frost Medal, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. Additionally, she earned more than fifty honorary degrees during her career. In 1995, she was awarded the National Medal of the Arts. She spent her later years dedicated to public service. She conducted poetry readings at prisons and hospitals and attended annual poetry contests for school children, which she often funded. She lived in Chicago until her death on December 3, 2000.

Gwendolyn Brooks

What is the name of this poem and who wrote it? 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.

Gwendolyn Brooks, "the rites for Cousin Vit"

Who is this? 1980-- Poet, performance artist, and photographer _______ grew up in Hilo, Hawai'i and lives in San Francisco, California. The manuscript for her debut poetry collection La Chica's Field Guide to Banzai Living (2020) received the San Francisco Foundation's Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award and the collection itself was longlisted for The Believer Book Award in Poetry. In a review of this book for his blog, Rob McLennan writes, "Her lyrics write slant on home and displacement, from the traveller to the immigrant to the notion of the alien (both immigrant and extraterrestrial). ... This is an impressive debut, and her poems are remarkably vibrant, as the performance elements resound from the page with a force enough to echo, refusing to lay flat but to spark and sparkle with energy."

Jennifer Hasegawa

What is the name of this poem and who wrote it? She was half his size, but her arm was light years long. He was straight-backed and strode in never-been-wet boat shoes. How his soft honey hair jerked when Schoolgirl knocked him down. Dookie braids escaped gravity on her head made strong by the verdict of twelve strangers. No change of venue as her fist to his face broadcast the news light years long. Our heads bobbed against hazy bus windows all along the route from Slauson to downtown, but as her fist flew at McClintock, we all knew that Schoolgirl knocked him down. The driver whistled low and switched his radio on as the motor moaned to damns signaling corner coups that would reveal a city, burn down blocks light years long. Shopping carts rattled, careened unboxed TVs sidelong. Out store doors flattened shoeboxes bloomed their grey pulp hues while men on roofs held rifles 'cause Schoolgirl knocked him down. Hair trigger, DUI, orange juice, and truncheon wrong into law of brick and fire. Oh pyriscence, you cruise, burn through resins, put a spit-shine on fear light years long. Kam sa ham ni da. How you like us now? Schoolgirl knocked him down.

Jennifer Hasegawa, "Villanelle on Los Angeles 1992"

Who is this? 1978- He grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, and worked as a speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans before earning his PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of New Orleans and graduated with a BA from Dillard University in 1998. He is the author of The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry; The New Testament (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), which received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; and Please (New Issues, 2008), which received the 2009 American Book Award. Of his work, Ilya Kaminsky writes, "His lyrics are memorable, muscular, majestic. His voice in these lines is alive—something that is quite rare in his generation of very bookish and very ironic poetics. His poems are living on the page, and they give the reader that much: a sense of having been alive fully." He is the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award and has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. In 2022, he received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, which recognizes distinguished poetic achievement. He has taught at the University of Houston, San Diego State University, and the University of San Diego, as well as at numerous conferences and workshops. He is currently an associate professor of English and creative writing and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and poetry editor at The Believer.

Jericho Brown

Who is this? 1795-1821 English Romantic poet _____ was born on October 31, 1795, in London. The oldest of four children, he lost both his parents at a young age. His father, a livery-stable keeper, died when he was eight; his mother died of tuberculosis six years later. After his mother's death, his maternal grandmother appointed two London merchants, Richard Abbey and John Rowland Sandell, as guardians. Abbey, a prosperous tea broker, assumed the bulk of this responsibility, while Sandell played only a minor role. When he was fifteen, Abbey withdrew him from the Clarke School, Enfield, to apprentice with an apothecary-surgeon and study medicine in a London hospital. In 1816 he became a licensed apothecary, but he never practiced his profession, deciding instead to write poetry. Around this time, he met Leigh Hunt, an influential editor of the Examiner, who published his sonnets "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" and "O Solitude." Hunt also introduced him to a circle of literary men, including the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Wordsworth. The group's influence enabled him to see his first volume, Poems by _____ published in 1817. Shelley, who was fond of him, had advised him to develop a more substantial body of work before publishing it. Keats, who was not as fond of Shelley, did not follow his advice. Endymion, a four-thousand-line erotic/allegorical romance based on the Greek myth of the same name, appeared the following year. Two of the most influential critical magazines of the time, the Quarterly Review and Blackwood's Magazine, attacked the collection. Calling the romantic verse of Hunt's literary circle "the Cockney school of poetry," Blackwood's declared Endymion to be nonsense and recommended that Keats give up poetry. Shelley, who privately disliked Endymion but recognized Keats's genius, wrote a more favorable review, but it was never published. Shelley also exaggerated the effect that the criticism had on Keats, attributing his declining health over the following years to a spirit broken by the negative reviews. He spent the summer of 1818 on a walking tour in Northern England and Scotland, returning home to care for his brother, Tom, who suffered from tuberculosis. While nursing his brother, He met and fell in love with a woman named Fanny Brawne. Writing some of his finest poetry between 1818 and 1819, he mainly worked on "Hyperion," a Miltonic blank-verse epic of the Greek creation myth. He stopped writing "Hyperion" upon the death of his brother, after completing only a small portion, but in late 1819 he returned to the piece and rewrote it as "The Fall of Hyperion" (unpublished until 1856). That same autumn he contracted tuberculosis, and by the following February he felt that death was already upon him, referring to the present as his "posthumous existence." In July 1820, he published his third and best volume of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems. The three title poems, dealing with mythical and legendary themes of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance times, are rich in imagery and phrasing. The volume also contains the unfinished "Hyperion," and three poems considered among the finest in the English language, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on Melancholy," and "Ode to a Nightingale." The book received enthusiastic praise from Hunt, Shelley, Charles Lamb, and others, and in August, Frances Jeffrey, influential editor of the Edinburgh Review, wrote a review praising both the new book and Endymion. The fragment "Hyperion" was considered by his contemporaries to be his greatest achievement, but by that time he had reached an advanced stage of his disease and was too ill to be encouraged. He continued a correspondence with Fanny Brawne and—when he could no longer bear to write to her directly—her mother, but his failing health and his literary ambitions prevented their getting married. Under his doctor's orders to seek a warm climate for the winter, he went to Rome with his friend, the painter Joseph Severn. He died there on February 23, 1821, at the age of twenty-five, and was buried in the Protestant cemetery.

John Keats

What is the name of this poem and who wrote it? When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, Before high-pilèd books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain; When I behold, upon the night's starred face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love—then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

John Keats, "When I have fears"

Who is this? 1978-- ___________ was born on September 4, 1978, and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe, she received her BA and MFA from Old Dominion University. She is the author of Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press, 2020), winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and finalist for the National Book Award and the Forward Prize in Poetry, and When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), winner of an American Book Award. Of her work, Academy Chancellor Dorianne Laux says, She is a poet who calls out to us in so many ways, who reaches out to embrace her lover, her people, and her country. A speaker of Mojave, Spanish and English, she has developed a language all her own. She calls attention to language both in her poetry and in her efforts to preserve her native tongue through the Fort Mojave Language Recovery Program where she works with its last remaining speakers. Native language, she says, is the "foundation of the American poetic lexicon" and believes it is an "important and dangerous time for language." There is no better emissary for poetry and the cultures, values and history it embraces, as well as the beauty and power of the human voice. She has received fellowships from The MacArthur Foundation, the Lannan Literary Foundation, the Native Arts Council Foundation, and Princeton University. She was awarded the Princeton Holmes National Poetry Prize and is a member of the Board of Trustees for the United States Artists, where she is an alumnus of the Ford Fellowship. A language activist, she is Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University, where she teaches in the MFA program. In 2021, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Phoenix.

Natalie Diaz

What is the name of this poem and who wrote it? 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.

Natalie Diaz, "My Brother at 3am"

Who is this? ________ was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother, Aurelia Schober, was a master's student at Boston University when she met her father, who was her professor. They were married in January of 1932. Otto taught both German and biology, with a focus on apiology, the study of bees. In 1940, when she was eight years old, her father died as a result of complications from diabetes. He had been strict, and both his authoritarian attitudes and his death drastically defined her relationships and her poems—most notably in her elegiac and infamous poem "Daddy." She kept a journal from the age of eleven and published her poems in regional magazines and newspapers. Her first national publication was in the Christian Science Monitor in 1950, just after graduating from high school. In 1950, she matriculated at Smith College, where she graduated summa cum laude in 1955. After graduation, she moved to Cambridge, England, on a Fulbright Scholarship. In early 1956, she attended a party and met the English poet Ted Hughes. Shortly thereafter, she and Hughes were married, on June 16, 1956. She returned to Massachusetts in 1957 and began studying with Robert Lowell. Her first collection of poems, Colossus, was published in 1960 in England, and two years later in the United States. She returned to England, where she gave birth to her children Frieda and Nicholas, in 1960 and 1962, respectively. In 1962, Ted Hughes left her for Assia Gutmann Wevill. That winter, she wrote most of the poems that would comprise her most famous book, Ariel. The following year, Plath published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. She died on February 11, 1963. Her poetry is often associated with the Confessional movement, and compared to the work of poets such as Lowell and fellow student Anne Sexton. Often, her work is singled out for the intense coupling of its violent or disturbed imagery and its playful use of alliteration and rhyme. Although only Colossus was published while she was alive, she was a prolific poet, and, in addition to Ariel, Hughes published three other volumes of her work posthumously, including The Collected Poems, which was the recipient of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. She was the first poet to posthumously win a Pulitzer Prize.

Sylvia Plath

What is the name of this poem and who wrote it? I'm a riddle in nine syllables, An elephant, a ponderous house, A melon strolling on two tendrils. O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers! This loaf's big with its yeasty rising. Money's new-minted in this fat purse. I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf. I've eaten a bag of green apples, Boarded the train there's no getting off.

Sylvia Plath, "Metaphors"

form

The physical structure of the poem; A set of rules that dictate the rhyme scheme, structure, rhythm, and meter of a poem.

What is the name of this poem and who wrote it? 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, "The Waking"

Who is this? 1908-1963 On May 25, 1908, _____________ was born in Saginaw, Michigan. As a child, he spent much time in the greenhouse owned by his father and uncle. His impressions of the natural world contained there would later profoundly influence the subjects and imagery of his verse. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Michigan in 1929. He later took a few graduate classes at Michigan and Harvard, but was unhappy in school. His first book, Open House (A. A. Knopf, 1941), took ten years to write and was critically acclaimed upon its publication. He went on to publish sparingly but his reputation grew with each new collection, including The Waking which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1954. He admired the writing of such poets as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, William Blake, and William Wordsworth, as well as W. B. Yeats and Dylan Thomas. 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. He had close literary friendships with fellow poets W. H. Auden, Louise Bogan, Stanley Kunitz, and William Carlos Williams. He taught at various colleges and universities, including Lafayette, Pennsylvania State, and Bennington, and worked last at the University of Washington, where he was mentor to a generation of Northwest poets that included David Wagoner, Carolyn Kizer, and Richard Hugo. He died on August 1, 1963.

Theodore Roethyke

Who is this? 1819-1892 __________ was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, on Long Island, New York. He was the second son of ______ a house-builder, and Louisa Van Velsor. In the 1820s and 1830s, the family, which consisted of nine children, lived in Long Island and Brooklyn, where he attended the Brooklyn public schools. At the age of twelve, he began to learn the printer's trade and fell in love with the written word. Largely self-taught, he read voraciously, becoming acquainted with the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the Bible. He worked as a printer in New York City until a devastating fire in the printing district demolished the industry. In 1836, at the age of seventeen, he began his career as teacher in the one-room schoolhouses of Long Island. He continued to teach until 1841, when he turned to journalism as a full-time career. He founded a weekly newspaper, The Long-Islander, and later edited a number of Brooklyn and New York papers, including the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. In 1848, he left the Brooklyn Daily Eagle to become editor of the New Orleans Crescent for three months. After witnessing the auctions of enslaved individuals in New Orleans, he returned to Brooklyn in the fall of 1848 and co-founded a "free soil" newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman, which he edited through the next fall. His attitudes about race have been described as "unstable and inconsistent." He did not always side with the abolitionists, yet he celebrated human dignity. In Brooklyn, he continued to develop the unique style of poetry that later so astonished Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1855, he took out a copyright on the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which consisted of twelve untitled poems and a preface. He published the volume himself, and sent a copy to Emerson in July of 1855. He released a second edition of the book in 1856, containing thirty-two poems, a letter from Emerson praising the first edition, and a long open letter by him in response. During his lifetime, he continued to refine the volume, publishing several more editions of the book. Noted scholar, M. Jimmie Killingsworth writes that "the 'merge,' as he conceived it, is the tendency of the individual self to overcome moral, psychological, and political boundaries. Thematically and poetically, the notion dominates the three major poems of 1855: 'I Sing the Body Electric,' 'The Sleepers,' and 'Song of Myself,' all of which were merged in the first edition under the single title 'Leaves of Grass' but were demarcated by clear breaks in the text and the repetition of the title." At the outbreak of the Civil War, he vowed to live a "purged" and "cleansed" life. He worked as a freelance journalist and visited the wounded at New York City-area hospitals. He then traveled to Washington, D.C. in December 1862 to care for his brother, who had been wounded in the war. Overcome by the suffering of the many wounded in Washington, he decided to stay and work in the hospitals; he ended up staying in the city for eleven years. He took a job as a clerk for the Bureau of Indian Affairs within the Department of the Interior, which ended when the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, discovered that he was the author of Leaves of Grass, which Harlan found offensive. After Harlan fired him, he went on to work in the attorney general's office. In 1873, he suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. A few months later he travelled to Camden, New Jersey, to visit his dying mother at his brother's house. He ended up staying with his brother until the 1882 publication of Leaves of Grass (James R. Osgood), which brought him enough money to buy a home in Camden. In the simple two-story clapboard house, He spent his declining years working on additions and revisions to his deathbed edition of Leaves of Grass (David McKay, 1891-92) and preparing his final volume of poems and prose, Good-Bye My Fancy (David McKay, 1891). After his death on March 26, 1892, he was buried in a tomb he designed and had built on a lot in Harleigh Cemetery. Along with Emily Dickinson, he is considered one of America's most important poets.

Walt Whitman

What is the name of this poem and who wrote it? 1 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. My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death. Creeds and schools in abeyance, Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten, I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy. 2 Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes, I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it, The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it. 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? Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,) You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self. 3 I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. Urge and urge and urge, Always the procreant urge of the world. Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex, Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life. To elaborate is no avail, learn'd and unlearn'd feel that it is so. Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams, Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery here we stand. Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul. Lack one lacks both, and the unseen is proved by the seen, Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn. Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes age, Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself. Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean, Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest. I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh, sing; As the hugging and loving bed-fellow sleeps at my side through the night, and withdraws at the peep of the day with stealthy tread, Leaving me baskets cover'd with white towels swelling the house with their plenty, Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes, That they turn from gazing after and down the road, And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent, Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead? 4 Trippers and askers surround me, People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation, The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new, My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues, The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love, The sickness of one of my folks or of myself, or ill-doing or loss or lack of money, or depressions or exaltations, Battles, the horrors of fratricidal war, the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events; These come to me days and nights and go from me again, But they are not the Me myself. Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it. Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders, I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait. 5 I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, And you must not be abased to the other. Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best, Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice. I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning, How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over upon me, And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart, And reach'd till you felt my beard, and reach'd till you held my feet. Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth, And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of the creation is love, And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields, And brown ants in the little wells beneath them, And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed. 10 Alone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt, Wandering amazed at my own lightness and glee, In the late afternoon choosing a safe spot to pass the night, Kindling a fire and broiling the fresh-kill'd game, Falling asleep on the gather'd leaves with my dog and gun by my side. The Yankee clipper is under her sky-sails, she cuts the sparkle and scud, My eyes settle the land, I bend at her prow or shout joyously from the deck. The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me, I tuck'd my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time; You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle. I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west, the bride was a red girl, Her father and his friends sat near cross-legged and dumbly smoking, they had moccasins to their feet and large thick blankets hanging from their shoulders, On a bank lounged the trapper, he was drest mostly in skins, his luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck, he held his bride by the hand, She had long eyelashes, her head was bare, her coarse straight locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach'd to her feet. The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside, I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile, Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak, And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him, And brought water and fill'd a tub for his sweated body and bruis'd feet, And gave him a room that enter'd from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes, And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness, And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles; He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass'd north, I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean'd in the corner. 11 Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore, Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly; Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome. She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank, She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window. Which of the young men does she like the best? Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her. Where are you off to, lady? for I see you, You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room. Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather, The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them. The beards of the young men glisten'd with wet, it ran from their long hair, Little streams pass'd all over their bodies. An unseen hand also pass'd over their bodies, It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs. The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them, They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch, They do not think whom they souse with spray. 52 The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. The last scud of day holds back for me, It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds, It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

Who is this? 1865-1939 Born in Dublin, Ireland on June 13, 1865, _______ was the son of the well-known Irish painter, ______ He spent his childhood in County Sligo, where his parents were raised, and in London. He returned to Dublin at the age of fifteen to continue his education and to study painting, but quickly discovered that he preferred poetry. Born into the Anglo-Irish landowning class, he became involved with the Celtic Revival, a movement against the cultural influences of English rule in Ireland during the Victorian period, which sought to promote the spirit of Ireland's native heritage. Though he never learned Irish Gaelic himself, his writing at the turn of the century drew extensively from sources in Irish mythology and folklore. Also a potent influence on his poetry was the Irish revolutionary, Maud Gonne, whom he met in 1889, a woman equally famous for her passionate nationalist politics and her beauty. Though she married another man in 1903 and grew apart from him (and he himself was eventually married to another woman, Georgie Hyde Lees), she remained a powerful figure in his poetry. He was deeply involved in politics in Ireland and, in the twenties, despite Irish independence from England, his verse reflected a pessimism about the political situation in Ireland and the rest of Europe, paralleling the increasing conservatism of his American counterparts in London, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. His work after 1910 was strongly influenced by Pound, becoming more modern in its concision and imagery, but he never abandoned his strict adherence to traditional verse forms. He had a life-long interest in mysticism and the occult, which was off-putting to some readers, but he remained uninhibited in advancing his idiosyncratic philosophy, and his poetry continued to grow stronger as he grew older. Appointed a senator of the Irish Free State in 1922, 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 greatest poets in any language of the twentieth century. He Wwas awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 and died in 1939 at the age of seventy-three.

William Butler Yeats

What is the name of this poem and who wrote it? A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

William Butler Yeats, "Leda and the Swan"

allusion

a brief and indirect reference to a person, place, thing or idea of historical, cultural, literary or political significance.

quatrain

a stanza of four lines, especially one having alternate rhymes.

approximate rhyme, half rhyme, imperfect rhyme, near rhyme, slant rhyme,

a type of rhyme with words that have similar, but not identical sounds. Most slant rhymes are formed by words with identical consonants and different vowels, or vice versa. (ex. long, lunge, lounge, or arrange and grunge, or peck, pick, pack)

rhyme

correspondence of sound between words or the endings of words, especially when these are used at the ends of lines of poetry.

free verse

poems that have no rhyming structure and often don't have a particular rhythm or syllable patterns

abstract diction

refers to words that do not appeal imaginatively to the reader's senses. Abstract words create no "mental picture" or any other imagined sensations for readers. They are generally related to things that can be perceived with the senses or emotions. Ex. love, hate, emotions, temptation, peace, freedom, intelligence, guilt, etc.

whole rhyme

rhyme in which the stressed vowels and all following consonants and vowels are identical, but the consonants preceding the rhyming vowels are different.

rhyme scheme

the ordered pattern of rhymes at the ends of the lines of a poem or verse.

alliteration

the repetition of an initial consonant sound in words that are in close proximity to each other.