Terms/Poems

Monologue

a speech delivered by a speaker (ex. ". . .Prufrock" is an interior monologue; Browning's "My Last Duchess" is a dramatic monologue)

Motif

a theme, device, or topic developed in a work, often by repetition

Simile

attributes or characteristics of one thing are compared to or overlaid upon another thing using "like" or "as"

Objectivism

school of poetry in the early 1930's that promoted poems as art objects divorced from historical factors, authorial intent or theory.

Syntax

sentence structure

Quatrain

stanza or poem of four lines; most common stanzaic form in English

Metonymy

substituting an entity's characteristics for itself, or vice versa (ex. "king" for "crown")

Scansion

system and process of examining meter

Montage

technique juxtaposing disparate images, states of being or thought, or references to create a unified whole

Negative Capability

term coined by John Keats referring to a poet's state of receptivity to beauty and truth; the term is commonly used to refer to an intense awareness that results in the acceptance of poetry and whatever subject matter and execution that is "received" with it.

Synecdoche

using part for the whole: Eliot's claws, for example, in ". . .Prufrock"

Syllabic Verse

number of syllables total in a line of verse

Andrew Hudgins-Day Job and Night Job

After my night job, I sat in class and ate, every thirteen minutes, an orange peanut-butter cracker. Bright grease adorned my notes. At noon I rushed to my day job and pushed a broom enough to keep the boss calm if not happy. In a hiding place, walled off by bolts of calico and serge, I read my masters and copied Donne, Marlowe, Dickinson, and Frost, scrawling the words I envied, so my hand could move as theirs had moved and learn outside of logic how the masters wrote. But why? Words would never heal the sick, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, blah, blah, blah. Why couldn't I be practical, Dad asked, and study law— or take a single business class? I stewed on what and why till driving into work one day, a burger on my thigh and a sweating Coke between my knees, I yelled, "Because I want to!"— pained—thrilled!—as I looked down from somewhere in the blue and saw beneath my chastened gaze another slack romantic chasing his heart like an unleashed dog chasing a pickup truck. And then I spilled my Coke. In sugar I sat and fought a smirk. I could see my new life clear before me. It looked the same. Like work.

Gary Gildner-First Practice

After the doctor checked to see we weren't ruptured, the man with the short cigar took us under the grade school, where we went in case of attack or storm, and said he was Clifford Hill, he was a man who believed dogs ate dogs, he had once killed for his country, and if there were any girls present for them to leave now. No one left. OK, he said, he said I take that to mean you are hungry men who hate to lose as much as I do. OK. Then he made two lines of us facing each other, and across the way, he said, is the man you hate most in the world, and if we are to win that title I want to see how. But I don't want to see any marks when you're dressed, he said. He said, Now.

Marilyn Nelson-To Market

All the long way from Jamaica in the nightmare the old folks always told you would carry you off someday, you stank of boat-sickness, your first woman-blood doubling you over with cramps, but you hustled anyway when they told you to, then teetered, blinded by sunshine, praise Jesus on dry land again. From New Orleans you were part of a shipment of twenty-four new and used slaves. You heard them call Natchez, Vicksburg, Rosedale, Memphis, Blytheville, Dyersburg, Hickman. With each strange name you lost two or three holdmates. The last name you heard was Columbus, Kentucky. Given a week to rest, you washed and replaited your hair, hemmed the dress the dealer had thrown in your lap. You were three together in the holding house; they whispered terrible tales: Bastard's woman love me better, the reason Master sold me away from home. Master catched me when I run away north: the son of the devil thought he could whip me. Sold me, instead. One morning before dawn, the dealer announced your next stop: Clinton. Twelve dusty miles you marched barefoot, one ankle raw from the chain. The dealer rode in front, high on his broad-backed brown horse, whistling quietly. Children ran to see you up close through splintery split-rail fences; men and women chopping cotton straightened up to watch you walk past.

Claude McKay-The Harlem Dancer

Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutes And watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway; Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes Blown by black players upon a picnic day. She sang and danced on gracefully and calm, The light gauze hanging loose about her form; To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm Grown lovelier for passing through a storm. Upon her swarthy neck black, shiny curls Profusely fell; and, tossing coins in praise, The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls, Devoured her with their eager, passionate gaze; But, looking at her falsely-smiling face I knew her self was not in that strange place.

Thomas Lux -Dead Horse

At the fence line, I was about to call him in when, at two-thirds profile, head down and away from me, he fell first to his left front knee and then the right, and he was down, dead before he hit the . . . My father saw him drop, too, and a neighbor, who walked over. He was a good horse, old, foundered, eating grass during the day and his oats and hay at night. He didn't mind or try to boss the cows with which he shared these acres. My father said: "Happens." Our neighbor walked back to his place and was soon grinding towards us with his new backhoe, of which he was proud but so far only used to dig two sump holes. It was the knacker We'd usually call to haul away a cow. A horse, a good horse, you buried where he, or she, fell. Our neighbor cut a trench beside the horse and we pushed him in. I'd already said goodbye before I closed his eyes. Our neighbor returned the dirt. In it, there were stones, stones never, never seen before by a human's, nor even a worm's, eye. Malcolm, our neighbor's name, returned the dirt from where it came and, with the back of a shovel, we tamped it down as best we could. One dumb cow stood by. It was a Friday, I remember, for supper we ate hot dogs, with beans on buttered white bread, every Friday, hot dogs and beans.

Stephen Dunn-The Artist as Lefthander

Each morning, thinking of you, I rise from the counterworld of sleep into those right-handed conventions of day, so right I know they must be wrong. Surely the world belongs to others. Stick shifts. Can openers. Definitions of decency. I never recognize myself when America gives back its images. The sitcoms, billboards; sometimes I feel insane. Only baseball with its beautiful word southpaw has given me a proper name. Southpaw. I'm about to attack, I'm crouching in the woods with a name like that. The other side, my advantaged ones, is always angry, and is not dumb. I've learned your language. I've gotten in to your workplaces and your homes.

Ruth Stone-Translations

Forty-five years ago, Alexander Mehielovitch Touritzen, son of a white Russian owner of a silk stocking factory in Constantinople, we rumpled your rooming-house bed, sneaked past your landlady and turned your plaster Madonna to the wall. Are you out there short vulgar civil-engineer? Did you know I left you for a Princeton geologist who called me girlie? Ten years later he was still in the midwest when he died under a rock fall. I told you I was pregnant. You gave me money for the abortion. I lied to you. I needed clothes to go out with the geologist. You called me Kouschka, little cat. Sometimes I stopped by the civil-engineering library where you sat with other foreign students. You were embarrassed; my husband might catch you. He was in the chemistry lab with his Bunsen burner boiling water for tea. Alexander Mehielovitch Touritzen, fig of my pallid college days, plum of my head, did the silk stocking factory go up in flames? Did the German fox jump out of the desert's sleeve and gobble your father up? Are you dead? Second-hand engine, formula concrete, we were still meeting in stairwells when the best chess player in Champaign-Urbana went to the Spanish Civil War. He couldn't resist heroic gestures. For years I was haunted by the woman who smashed her starving infant against the Spanish wall. Cautious, staid Mehielovitch, so quick to pick my hairpins out of your bed. Average lover, have your balls decayed? Mehielovitch, my husband the chemist with light eyes and big head, the one whose body I hated, came back in the flesh fifteen years ago. He was wearing a tight western shirt he had made himself. (There wasn't anything he couldn't do.) He talked about wine- and cheese-tasting parties. We folk danced at a ski lodge. So this is life, I said. He told my daughter he was her daddy. It wasn't true. You are all so boring. My friend from Japan, Cana Maeda, the scholar of classical haiku, whose fingers, whose entire body had been trained to comply: her face pale without powder, her neck so easily bent, after she died from the radiation her translations of Bashō were published by interested men who failed to print her correct name. So the narrow book appears to have been written by a man. Faded in these ways, she is burned on my flesh as kimonos were burned on the flesh of women in the gamma rays of Hiroshima. She wasn't one of those whose skin peeled in the holocaust, whose bones cracked. Graceful and obscure, she was among all those others who died later. Where are you my repulsive white Russian? Are you also lost? Pimpled obscene boy employed at an early age by your father, you pandered his merchandise on trays using your arm as a woman's leg slipped inside a silk stocking with a woman's shoe on your hand. Do you understand that later I lived with a transvestite, a hair-dresser who wore wigs? When he felt that way he would go out and pick up an English professor. After we quarreled, I cut up his foam-rubber falsies. I had a garage sale while he was out of town. I sold his mail-order high heels, his corsets, his sequined evening gowns. Those afternoons in bed listening to your memories of prostitutes with big breasts, how you wanted to roll on a mattress of mammary glands; the same when Rip Hanson told me about the invasion of France. Crossing the channel he saw infantry, falling past him from split open cargo planes, still clinging to tanks and bulldozers. Statistical losses figured in advance. The ripped-open remnants of a Russian girl nailed up by the Germans outside her village, also ancient, indigenous. But what can I tell you about death? Even your sainted mother's soft dough body: her flour dusted breasts by now are slime paths of microorganisms. Where were you when they fed the multitudes to the ovens? Old fetid fisheyes, did they roll you in at the cannery? Did you build their bridges or blow them up? Are you burned to powder? Were you mortarized? Did you die in a ditch, Mehielovitch? Are you exorcised? Poor innocent lecher, you believed in sin. I see you rising with the angels, thin forgotten dirty-fingered son of a silk stocking factory owner in Constantinople, may you be exonerated. May you be forgiven. May you be a wax taper in paradise, Alexander Mehielovitch Touritzen.

Ellen Bryant Voigt-Amaryllis

Having been a farmer's daughter she didn't want to be a farmer's wife, didn't want the smell of ripe manure in all his clothes, the corresponding flies in her kitchen, a pail of slop below the sink, a crate of baby chicks beside the stove, piping beneath their bare lightbulb, cows calling at the gate for him to come, cows standing in the chute as he crops their horns with his long sharp shears. So she nagged him toward a job in town; so she sprang from the table, weeping, when he swore; so, after supper, she sulks over her mending as he unfolds his pearl pocketknife to trim a callus on his palm. Too much like her mother, he says, not knowing any other reason why she spoils the children, or why he comes in from the combine with his wrenches to find potatoes boiled dry in their pot, his wife in the parlor on the bench at her oak piano—not playing you understand, just sitting like a fern in that formal room. So much time to think, these long hours: like her mother, each night she goes to bed when her husband's tired, gets up when he gets up, and in between tries not to move, listening to the sleep of this good man who lies beside and over her. So much time alone, since everything he knows is practical. Just this morning, he plunged an icepick into the bloated side of the cow unable to rise, dying where it fell, its several stomachs having failed— too full, he said, of sweet wet clover.

Joy Harjo-Climbing the Streets of Worcester, Mass.

Houses lean forward with their hands on thin hips. I walk past their eyes of pigeon grey, hear someone playing horn, and there's the wind trying to teach some trees to fly. It could happen. LA is tempted by the ocean. And sleeping storms erupt the weakest hearts. I scan the street. Know up one hill groans a sacred fire and down the next could be a crazy trick: three crows laugh kick up the neighbor's trash. Telling jokes they re-create the world. All night while I was making other plans the wind drew circles around this town; scraped clean the dead skin of its soul but left three crows, a horn some trees to talk it back again.

Symbol

phrase, word, image that represents something literal but is charged with a set of values, connotations and ideas that are interpreted via context

Lorna Dee Cervantes-Colorado Blvd.

I wanted to die so I walked the streets. Dead night, black as iris, cold as the toes on a barefoot drunk. Not a sound but my shoes asking themselves over, What season is this? Why is the wind stuttering in its stall of nightmares? Why courage or the bravery of dripping steel? Given branches rooted to their cunning, a kind of snow lay fallow upon the hearth of dried up trunks, wan and musing like an absent guitarist strumming wildly what she's forgotten most. Bats fell about me like fire or dead bark from my brow beaten autumn. A kind of passing through and when it called, the startled bird of my birth, I left it, singing, or fallen from its nest, it was silent as the caves of my footfalls left ridden in their absent burials. What good was this? My cold hearing, nothing, more desire than protection. When would it come? In that clove of cottonwood, perhaps that shape in the mist, secret as teeming lions. Is it my own will that stalks me? Is it in the slowed heart of my beatings or the face that mists when I least expect it? Frost covered the windshields of the left behind autos. In his parking lot, my savior rests, lighting his crack pipe, semi-automatic poised at my nipple or the ear I expose to witches and thieves: Here it is. Will you kill for it?

Metaphor

a figurative expression that involves a direct, nonliteral comparison or substitution of one thing for another

Narrative Poem

poem that tells a story

Gerald Stern-The Dancing

In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots I have never seen a post-war Philco with the automatic eye nor heard Ravel's "Bolero" the way I did in 1945 in that tiny living room on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming, my mother red with laughter, my father cupping his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum, half fart, the world at last a meadow, the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us screaming and falling, as if we were dying, as if we could never stop—in 1945— in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away from the other dancing—in Poland and Germany— oh God of mercy, oh wild God.

Stanley Kunitz-Robin Redbreast

It was the dingiest bird you ever saw, all the color washed from him, as if he had been standing in the rain, friendless and stiff and cold, since Eden went wrong. In the house marked FOR SALE, where nobody made a sound, in the room where I lived with an empty page, I had heard the squawking of the jays under the wild persimmons tormenting him. So I scooped him up after they knocked him down, in league with that ounce of heart pounding in my palm, that dumb beak gaping. Poor thing! Poor foolish life! without sense enough to stop running in desperate circles, needing my lucky help to toss him back into his element. But when I held him high, fear clutched my hand, for through the hole in his head, cut whistle-clean . . . through the old dried wound between his eyes where the hunter's brand had tunneled out his wits . . . I caught the cold flash of the blue unappeasable sky.

David Bottoms-Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump

Loaded on beer and whiskey, we ride to the dump in carloads to turn our headlights across the wasted field, freeze the startled eyes of rats against mounds of rubbish. Shot in the head, they jump only once, lie still like dead beer cans. Shot in the gut or rump, they writhe and try to burrow into garbage, hide in old truck tires, rusty oil drums, cardboard boxes scattered across the mounds, or else drag themselves on forelegs across our beams of light toward the darkness at the edge of the dump. It's the light they believe kills. We drink and load again, let them crawl for all they're worth into the darkness we're headed for.

Richard Wilbur-The Pardon

My dog lay dead five days without a grave In the thick of summer, hid in a clump of pine And a jungle of grass and honeysuckle-vine. I who had loved him while he kept alive Went only close enough to where he was To sniff the heavy honeysuckle-smell Twined with another odor heavier still And hear the flies' intolerable buzz. Well, I was ten and very much afraid. In my kind world the dead were out of range And I could not forgive the sad or strange In beast or man. My father took the spade And buried him. Last night I saw the grass Slowly divide (it was the same scene But now it glowed a fierce and mortal green) And saw the dog emerging. I confess I felt afraid again, but still he came In the carnal sun, clothed in a hymn of flies, And death was breeding in his lively eyes. I started in to cry and call his name, Asking forgiveness of his tongueless head. . . . I dreamt the past was never past redeeming: But whether this was false or honest dreaming I beg death's pardon now. And mourn the dead.

New Criticism

School of literary criticism developed at Vanderbilt University which privileges close reading of the text itself rather than interpretation based on biography, societal, or historical contexts. The Fugitive Poets championed New Criticism.

Wendell Berry-The Vacation

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation. He went flying down the river in his boat with his video camera to his eye, making a moving picture of the moving river upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly toward the end of his vacation. He showed his vacation to his camera, which pictured it, preserving it forever: the river, the trees, the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat behind which he stood with his camera preserving his vacation even as he was having it so that after he had had it he would still have it. It would be there. But he would not be in it. He would never be in it.

Sujata Bhatt-What Is Worth Knowing?

That Van Gogh's ear, set free wanted to meet the powerful nose of Nevsky Avenue. That Spain has decided to help NATO. That Spring is supposed to begin on the 21st of March. That if you put too much salt in the keema just add a few bananas. That although the Dutch were the first to help the people of Nicaragua they don't say much about their history with Indonesia. That Van Gogh collected Japanese prints. That the Japanese considered the Dutch to be red-haired barbarians. That Van Gogh's ear remains full of questions it wants to ask the nose of Nevsky Avenue. That the vaccinations for cholera, typhoid and yellow fever are no good—they must be improved. That red, green and yellow are the most auspicious colours. That turmeric and chilli powder are good disinfectants. Yellow and red. That often Spring doesn't come until May. But in some places it's there in January. That Van Gogh's ear left him because it wanted to become a snail. That east and west meet only in the north and south—but never in the east or west. That in March 1986 Darwinism is being reintroduced in American schools. That there's a difference between the pigeons and doves, although a ring-dove is a wood-pigeon. That the most pleasant thing is to have a fever of at least 101—because then the dreams aren't merely dreams but facts. That during a fever the soul comes out for fresh air, that during a fever the soul bothers to speak to you. That tigers are courageous and generous-hearted and never attack unless provoked— but leopards, leopards are malicious and bad-tempered. That buffaloes too, water-buffaloes that is, have a short temper. That a red sky at night is a good sign for sailors, for sailors . . . what is worth knowing? What is worth knowing?

A. E. Stallings-Explaining an Affinity for Bats

That they are only glimpsed in silhouette, And seem something else at first—a swallow— And move like new tunes, difficult to follow, Staggering towards an obstacle they yet Avoid in a last-minute pirouette, Somehow telling solid things from hollow, Sounding out how high a space, or shallow, Revising into deepening violet. That they sing—not the way the songbird sings (Whose song is rote, to ornament, finesse)— But travel by a sort of song that rings True not in utterance, but harkenings, Who find their way by calling into darkness To hear their voice bounce off the shape of things.

Modernism

The Modern era began roughly around WWI and involved great innovation in literature and criticism. Some Modern poets: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Frost, Stevens, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane. Some of the following terms and topics are useful in understanding Modernism: Confessional Poetry, Structuralism, Imagism, New Criticism, Fugitive Poets

Jehanne Dubrow-Nonessential Equipment

The dog and I are first among those things that will not be deployed with him. Forget civilian clothes as well. He shouldn't bring too many photographs, which might get wet, the faces blurred. He only needs a set of uniforms. Even his wedding ring gives pause (what if it fell?—he'd be upset to dent or scratch away the gold engraving). The seabag must be light enough to sling across his shoulder, weigh almost nothing, each canvas pocket emptied of regret. The trick is packing less. No wife, no pet, no perfumed letters dabbed with I-love-yous, or anything he can't afford to lose.

Margaret Atwood-Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing

The world is full of women who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself if they had the chance. Quit dancing. Get some self-respect and a day job. Right. And minimum wage, and varicose veins, just standing in one place for eight hours behind a glass counter bundled up to the neck, instead of naked as a meat sandwich. Selling gloves, or something. Instead of what I do sell. You have to have talent to peddle a thing so nebulous and without material form. Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way you cut it, but I've a choice of how, and I'll take the money. I do give value. Like preachers, I sell vision, like perfume ads, desire or its facsimile. Like jokes or war, it's all in the timing. I sell men back their worse suspicions: that everything's for sale, and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see a chain-saw murder just before it happens, when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple are still connected. Such hatred leaps in them, my beery worshippers! That, or a bleary hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads and upturned eyes, imploring but ready to snap at my ankles, I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge to step on ants. I keep the beat, and dance for them because they can't. The music smells like foxes, crisp as heated metal searing the nostrils or humid as August, hazy and languorous as a looted city the day after, when all the rape's been done already, and the killing, and the survivors wander around looking for garbage to eat, and there's only a bleak exhaustion. Speaking of which, it's the smiling tires me out the most. This, and the pretence that I can't hear them. And I can't, because I'm after all a foreigner to them. The speech here is all warty gutturals, obvious as a slab of ham, but I come from the province of the gods where meanings are lilting and oblique. I don't let on to everyone, but lean close, and I'll whisper: My mother was raped by a holy swan. You believe that? You can take me out to dinner. That's what we tell all the husbands. There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around. Not that anyone here but you would understand. The rest of them would like to watch me and feel nothing. Reduce me to components as in a clock factory or abattoir. Crush out the mystery. Wall me up alive in my own body. They'd like to see through me, but nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency. Look—my feet don't hit the marble! Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising, I hover six inches in the air in my blazing swan-egg of light. You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn.

Robert Hass-A Story About the Body

The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity—like music—withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl—she must have swept them from the corners of her studio—was full of dead bees.

Susan Mitchell-A Story

There is a bar I go to when I'm in Chicago which is like a bar I used to go to when I lived in New York. There are the same men racing toy cars at a back table, the money passing so fast from hand to hand, I never know who's winning, who's losing, only in the New York bar the racers sport Hawaiian shirts while in the Chicago bar they wear Confederate caps with crossed gold rifles pinned to their bands. Both bars have oversized TVs and bathrooms you wouldn't want to be caught dead in, though some have. Once in the New York bar I watched a film on psychic surgery, and I swear to you the surgeon waved a plump hand— the hand hovered like a dove over the patient's back, and where wings grow out of an angel's shoulders a liquid jetted, a clear water, as if pain were something you could see into like a window. Later, walking home with a friend who was also a little drunk, I practiced psychic surgery on our apartment building, passing my hands back and forth over the bricks. I don't know what I expected to happen, maybe I hoped a pure roach anguish would burst forth. But there was only the smell that rises out of New York City in August, a perennial urine—dog, cat, human— the familiar stench of the body returning to itself as alien. Sometimes, before stopping in at the Chicago bar, I would either sleep or go for a walk, especially in October when the leaves had turned red. As they swept past me, I thought of my blood starting to abandon my body, taking up residence elsewhere like the birds gathering in feverish groups on the lawns. In the Chicago bar there were men who never watched TV or played the video games. Mainly from the Plains tribes they sat in silence over their whiskey, and looking at them, I could even hear the IRT as it roared through the long tunnel between Borough Hall and Wall Street, the screech of darkness on steel. And it happened one night that a man, his hair loose to his shoulders, stood up and pulled a knife from his boot, and another man who must have been waiting all his life for this stood up in silence too, and in seconds one of them was curled around the knife in his chest as if it were a mystery he would not reveal to anyone. Sometimes I think my life is what I keep escaping. Staring at my hands, I almost expect them to turn into driftwood, bent and polished by the waves, my only proof I have just returned from a long journey. The night Tom Littlebird killed Richard Highwater with a knife no one knew he carried, not even during the five years he spent at Stateville, I thought of men and women who sell their blood for a drink of sleep in a doorway or for a bus ticket into a night which is also a long drink to nowhere, and I thought of the blood I was given when I was nineteen, one transfusion for each year of my life, and how I promised myself, if I lived, I would write a poem in honor of blood. First, for my own blood, which, like the letter that begins the alphabet, is a long cry AAAAH! of relief. Praise to my blood which is simple and accepts almost anything. And then for the blood that wrestled all night with my blood until my veins cramped and the fingers of one hand went rigid. Praise to the blood that wanted to remain alone, weeping into its own skin, so that when it flowed into me, my blood contracted on the knot in its throat. For you who raised a rash on my arms and made my body shiver for days, listen, whoever you are, this poem is for you.

William Stafford-Traveling through the Dark

Traveling through the dark I found a deer dead on the edge of the Wilson River road. It is usually best to roll them into the canyon: that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead. By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing; she had stiffened already, almost cold. I dragged her off; she was large in the belly. My fingers touching her side brought me the reason— her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting, alive, still, never to be born. Beside that mountain road I hesitated. The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights; under the hood purred the steady engine. I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red; around our group I could hear the wilderness listen. I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—, then pushed her over the edge into the river.

Edward Hirsch-The Skokie Theater

Twelve years old and lovesick, bumbling and terrified for the first time in my life, but strangely hopeful, too, and stunned, definitely stunned—I wanted to cry, I almost started to sob when Chris Klein actually touched me—oh God—below the belt in the back row of the Skokie Theatre. Our knees bumped helplessly, our mouths were glued together like flypaper, our lips were grinding in a hysterical grimace while the most handsome man in the world twitched his hips on the flickering screen and the girls began to scream in the dark. I didn't know one thing about the body yet, about the deep foam filling my bones, but I wanted to cry out in desolation when she touched me again, when the lights flooded on in the crowded theater and the other kids started to file into the narrow aisles, into a lobby of faded purple splendor, into the last Saturday in August before she moved away. I never wanted to move again, but suddenly we were being lifted toward the sidewalk in a crush of bodies, blinking, shy, unprepared for the ringing familiar voices and the harsh glare of sunlight, the brightness of an afternoon that left us gripping each other's hands, trembling and changed.

Mark Doty-Broadway

Under Grand Central's tattered vault —maybe half a dozen electric stars still lit— one saxophone blew, and a sheer black scrim billowed over some minor constellation under repair. Then, on Broadway, red wings in a storefront tableau, lustrous, the live macaws preening, beaks opening and closing like those animated knives that unfold all night in jewelers' windows. For sale, glass eyes turned out toward the rain, the birds lined up like the endless flowers and cheap gems, the makeshift tables of secondhand magazines and shoes the hawkers eye while they shelter in the doorways of banks. So many pockets and paper cups and hands reeled over the weight of that glittered pavement, and at 103rd a woman reached to me across the wet roof of a stranger's car and said, I'm Carlotta, I'm hungry. She was only asking for change, so I don't know why I took her hand. The rooftops were glowing above us, enormous, crystalline, a second city lit from within. That night a man on the downtown local stood up and said, My name is Ezekiel, I am a poet, and my poem this evening is called fall. He stood up straight to recite, a child reminded of his posture by the gravity of his text, his hands hidden in the pockets of his coat. Love is protected, he said, the way leaves are packed in snow, the rubies of fall. God is protecting the jewel of love for us. He didn't ask for anything, but I gave him all the change left in my pocket, and the man beside me, impulsive, moved, gave Ezekiel his watch. It wasn't an expensive watch, I don't even know if it worked, but the poet started, then walked away as if so much good fortune must be hurried away from, before anyone realizes it's a mistake. Carlotta, her stocking cap glazed like feathers in the rain, under the radiant towers, the floodlit ramparts, must have wondered at my impulse to touch her, which was like touching myself, the way your own hand feels when you hold it because you want to feel contained. She said, You get home safe now, you hear? In the same way Ezekiel turned back to the benevolent stranger. I will write a poem for you tomorrow, he said. The poem I will write will go like this: Our ancestors are replenishing the jewel of love for us.

Sylvia Plath-Daddy

You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time— Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You— Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I'm finally through. The black telephone's off at the root, The voices just can't worm through. If I've killed one man, I've killed two-- The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There's a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

Russell Edson-Ape

You haven't finished your ape, said mother to father, who had monkey hair and blood on his whiskers. I've had enough monkey, cried father. You didn't eat the hands, and I went to all the trouble to make onion rings for its fingers, said mother. I'll just nibble on its forehead, and then I've had enough, said father. I stuffed its nose with garlic, just like you like it, said mother. Why don't you have the butcher cut these apes up? You lay the whole thing on the table every night; the same fractured skull, the same singed fur; like someone who died horribly. These aren't dinners, these are post-mortem dissections. Try a piece of its gum, I've stuffed its mouth with bread, said mother. Ugh, it looks like a mouth full of vomit. How can I bite into its cheek with bread spilling out of its mouth? cried father. Break one of the ears off, they're so crispy, said mother. I wish to hell you'd put underpants on these apes; even a jockstrap, screamed father. Father, how dare you insinuate that I see the ape as anything more thn simple meat, screamed mother. Well what's with this ribbon tied in a bow on its privates? screamed father. Are you saying that I am in love with this vicious creature? That I would submit my female opening to this brute? That after we had love on the kitchen floor I would put him in the oven, after breaking his head with a frying pan; and then serve him to my husband, that my husband might eat the evidence of my infidelity . . . ? I'm just saying that I'm damn sick of ape every night, cried father.

Quantitative Meter

duration of short and long syllables in a line of verse

Stanza

from the Italian for "room" - segment of a poem

Trope

general term for figurative language (i.e. metaphor and simile are tropes)

Lucille Clifton-Wishes for Sons

i wish them cramps. i wish them a strange town and the last tampon. I wish them no 7-11. i wish them one week early and wearing a white skirt. i wish them one week late. later i wish them hot flashes and clots like you wouldn't believe. let the flashes come when they meet someone special. let the clots come when they want to. let them think they have accepted arrogance in the universe, then bring them to gynecologists not unlike themselves.

Structuralism

literary analysis linked to linguistics that investigates language as it pertains to poetic form

Meter

measurement based on one of these systems of counting and patterns

Tone

mood or an author's attitude(s) toward subject matter or audience

Strong Stress Meter

number of accented syllables in a line of verse

Stuart Dybek-Little Oscar

was the midget in the '50s who represented the Oscar Meyer Meat Co. Maybe you remember him singing: acquire the desire to buy Oscar Meyer . . . He drove the Wiener Mobile—an enormous, motorized hotdog, with a yellow band around it. There were TV commercials of Little Oscar emerging from the Wiener Mobile, surrounded by cheering kids, and him throwing the hotdogs. It wasn't just something they filmed either, he actually rode around in it. I know because it was over at the A&P, just a few blocks from my house, that the Wiener Mobile ran over one of the kids ganged around it. The boy was killed, but even as the ambulance was pulling away, small snickering groups were splitting from the crowd—a few already laughing openly. The rest stood staring at the blood, fists clenched at their sides, muttering: "They shouldn't let a ****en midget drive a thing like that," glancing sidelong at one another.