20th century poetry1
- 1. Poetry of the 2000s American Poets
- 2. Maya Angelou 1928 to present: She is a writer, dancer, television director, radio show host, and an African-American activist. She has written five autobiographies.
- 3. Poor Girl You’ve got another love You’re going to leave her too and I know it and I know it Someone who adores you She’ll never know just like me what made you go Hanging on your words She’ll cry and wonder like they were gold what went wrong Thinking that she understands your soul Then she’ll begin Poor Girl to sing this song Just like me. Poor Girl Just like me. You’re breaking another heart and I know it And there’s nothing I can do If I try to tell her what I know She’ll misunderstand and make me go Poor Girl Just like me.
- 4. On Reaching Forty Other acquainted years sidle with modest decorum across the scrim of toughened tears and to a stage planked with laughter boards and waxed with rueful loss But forty with the authorized brazenness of a uniformed cop stomps no-knocking into the script bumps a funky grind on the shabby curtain of youth and delays the action. Unless you have the inborn wisdom and grace and are clever enough to die at thirty-nine.
- 5. Tears Tears The crystal rags Viscous tatters Of a worn-through soul Moans Deep swan song Blue farewell Of a dying dream. Sounds Like Pearls Sounds Like pearls Roll of your tongue To grace this eager ebon ear. Doubt and fear, Ungainly things, With blushings Disappear.
- 6. Gwendolyn Brooks 1917-2000: She was born in Topeka, Kansas. In her early writings, she used a strict technical form and lofty word choice. In 1967 her work achieved a new tone and vision, as she changed to a more simple writing style so that her themes could come across more strongly.
- 7. Martin Luther King Jr. April 4, 1968 A man went forth with gifts. He was a prose poem. He was a tragic grace. He was a warm music. He tried to heal the vivid volcanoes. His ashes are reading the world. His Dream still wishes to anoint the barricades of faith and of control. His word still burns the center of the sun, above the thousands and the hundred thousands. The word was Justice. It was spoken. So it shall be spoken. So it shall be done.
- 8. Best Friends Getting to home means joining Very Best Friends – from the very wide shelf my father put on a wall for me. One Friend, or another, knows what to say to me on Monday, or Thursday, for Monday or Thursday need. If I want Repairing – or something to lock me up – or a happy key to open me – or fire when school has made me crispy-cold – coming home I choose from Very Best Friends on the very wide shelf my father put on a wall for me.
- 9. We Real Cool We real cool. We Left School. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. we Die soon.
- 10. Billy Collins 1941 to present: Using a sarcastic, funny writing voice, he creates simplistic stanzas to try to create images that pull the reader away from real life. Bruce Weber of the New York Times calls him the most popular poet in America.
- 11. On Turning Ten The whole idea of it makes me feel like I’m coming down with something, something worse than any stomach ache or the headaches I get from reading in bad light – a kind of measles of the spirit, a mumps of the psyche, a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. You tell me it is too early to be looking back, but that is because you have forgotten the perfect simplicity of being one and the beautiful complexity introduced by two. But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit. At four I was an Arabian wizard. I could make myself invisible by drinking a glass of milk a certain way. at seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince. But now I am mostly at the window watching the late afternoon light. Back then it never felt so solemnly against the side of my tree house,
- 12. and my bicycle never leaned against the garage as it does today, all the dark blue speed drained out of it. This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself, as I walk through the universe in my sneakers. It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends, time to turn the first big number. It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed.
- 13. Introduction to Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
- 14. Passengers At the gate, I sit in a row of blue seats with the possible company of my death, this sprawling miscellany of people – carry-on bags and paperbacks – that could be gathered in a flash into a band of pilgrims on the last open road. Not that I think if our plane crumpled into a mountain we would all ascend together, holding hands like a ring of sky divers, into a sudden gasp of brightness, or that there would be some common spot for us to reunite to jubilize the moment, some spaceless, pillarless Greece where we could, at the count of three, toss our ashes into the sunny air. (continued)
- 15. It’s just that the way that man has his briefcase so carefully arranged, the way that girl is cooling her tea, and the flow of the comb that woman passes through her daughter’s hair . . . and when you consider the altitude, the secret parts of the engines, and all the hard water and the deep canyons below . . . well, I just think it would be good if one of us maybe stood up and said a few words, or, so as not to involve the police, at least quietly wrote something down.
- 16. Rita Dove 1952 to present: She speaks with a direct voice in her poems and with dramatic intensity. In addition to writing prose and poetry, she has written text for musical composers and is an accomplished modern cello musician.
- 17. Variation on Pain Two strings, one pierced cry. So many ways to imitate The ringing in his ears. He lay on the bunk, mandolin In his arms. Two strings For each note and seventeen Frets; ridged sound Humming beneath calloused Fingertips. There was a needle In his head but nothing Fit through it. Sound quivered Like a rope stretched clear To land, tensed and brimming, A man gurgling air. Two greased strings For each pierced lobe: So is the past forgiven.
- 18. Happenstance When you appeared it was as if magnets cleared the air. I had never seen that smile before or your hair, flying silver. Someone waving goodbye, she was silver, too. Of course you didn’t see me. I called softly so you could choose not to answer – then called again. You turned in the light, your eyes seeking your name.
- 19. Heart to Heart It’s neither red I want, I want – nor sweet. but I can’t open it: It doesn’t melt there’s no key. or turn over, I can’t wear it break or harden, on my sleeve, so it can’t feel or tell you from pain, the bottom of it yearning, how I feel. Here, regret. it’s all yours, now – but you’ll have It doesn’t have to take me, a tip to spin on, too. it isn’t even shapely – just a thick clutch of muscle, lopsided, mute. Still, I feel it inside its cage sounding a dull tattoo:
- 20. Robert Hass 1941 to present: He writes in a manner that allows clarity of expression, conciseness, and strong imagery. Topics are those found in everyday life. He is also very fond of Japanese haiku poems.
- 21. Child Naming Flowers When old crones wandered in the woods, I don’t know how we survive it. I was the hero on the hill On this sunny morning in clear sunlight. in my life as an adult, I am looking in a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe. Death’s hounds feared me. It is all the fullness that there is in light. A towhee scratches in the leaves Smell of wild fennel, outside my open door. high loft of sweet fruit high in the branches He always does. of the flowering plum. A moment ago I felt so sick Then I am cast down and so cold into the terror of childhood, I could hardly move. into the mirror and the greasy knives, the dark woodpile under the fig trees in the dark. It is only the malice of voices, the old horror that is nothing, parents quarreling, somebody drunk.
- 22. Emblems of a Prior Order Patient cultivation, as the white petals of the climbing rose were to some man a lifetime’s careful work, the mess of petals on the lawn was bred to fall there as a dog is bred to stand – gardens are a history of art, this fin-de-siècle flower & Dobermann’s pinscher, all deadly sleekness in the neighbor’s yard, were born, brennende liebe, under the lindens that bear the morning toward us on a silver tray.
- 23. Measure Recurrences. Coppery light hesitates again in the small-leaved Japanese plum. Summer and sunset, the peace of the writing desk and the habitual peace of writing, these things form an order I only belong to in the idleness of attention. Last light rims the blue mountain and I almost glimpse what I was born to, not so much in the sunlight or the plum tree as in the pulse that forms these lines.
- 24. Ted Kooser 1939 to present: It is said of Mr. Kooser that he has written more perfect poems than any other poet of his generation. He is acclaimed for his plainspoken style, gift of metaphor, and of his finding beauty in ordinary things. He is currently an English professor at the Univ. of Nebraska at Lincoln.
- 25. Sparklers I scratched your name in longhand on the night, then you wrote mine. I couldn’t see you, near me, laughing and chasing my name through the air, but I could hear your heart, I think, and feel your breath against the darkness, hurrying. One word swirled out of your hand as you rushed hard to write it all the way out to its end before its beginning was gone. It left a frail red line trembling along on the darkness, and that was my name, my name.
- 26. Walking to Work Today, it’s the obsidian ice on the sidewalk with its milk white bubbles popping under my shoes that pleases me, and upon it a lump of old snow with a trail like a comet, that somebody, probably falling in love, has kicked all the way to the corner.
- 27. Daddy Longlegs Here, on the fine long legs springy as steel, a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill that skims along over the basement floor wrapped up in a simple obsession. Eight legs reach out like the master ribs of a web in which some thought is caught dead center in its own small world, a thought so far from the touch of things that we can only guess at it. If mine, it would be the secret dream of walking alone across the floor of my life with an easy grace, and with love enough to live on at the center of myself.
- 28. A Birthday Poem Just past dawn, the sun stands with its heavy red head in a black stanchion of trees, waiting for someone to come with his bucket for the foamy white light, and then a long day in the pasture. I too spend my days grazing, feasting on every green moment till darkness calls, and with the others I walk away into the night, swinging the little tin bell of my name.
- 29. Stanley Kunitz 1905 to 2006: He is considered to be the most distinguished and accomplished poet in our country. At age 95 he became the oldest person to receive the title of United States Poet Laureate.
- 30. Twilight I wait. I deepen in the room. Fed lions, glowing, congregate In corners, sleep and fade. For whom It may concern I, tawny, wait. Time flowing through the window; day Spilling on the board its bright Last blood. Folding (big, gauzy, gray), A moth sits on the western light. Sits on my heart that, darkened, drips No honey from its punctured core, Yet feed my hands and heeds my lips. The Moon, the Moon, is at the door!
- 31. Hermetic Poem The secret my heart keeps Flows into cracked cups. No saucer can contain This overplus of mine: It glisters to the floor, Lashing like lizard fire And ramps upon the walls Crazy with ruby ills. Who enters by my door Is drowned, burned, stung, and starred.
- 32. Change Dissolving in the ceramic vat Of time, man (gristle and fat), Corrupting on a rock in space That crumbles, lifts his impermanent face To watch the stars, his brain locked tight Against the tall revolving night. Yet is he neither here nor there Because the mind moves everywhere; And he is neither now nor then Because tomorrow comes again Foreshadowed, and the ragged wing Of yesterday’s remembering Cuts sharply the immediate moon; Nor is he always: late and soon Becoming, never being, till Becoming is a being still. Here, Now, and Always, man would be Inviolate eternally; This is his spirit’s trinity.
- 33. Mary Oliver 1935 to present: She often writes about the quiet side of nature, noticing the smallest of details. She was good friends with Edna Millay’s sister and helped organize the late poet’s papers after her death. The New York Times once described Ms. Oliver as America’s best- selling poet.
- 34. The Journey One day you finally knew It was already late what you had to do, and began, enough, and a wild night, though the voices around you and the road full of fallen kept shouting branches and stones. their bad advice – But little by little, though the whole house as you left their voices behind, began to tremble the stars began to burn and you felt the old tug through the sheets of clouds, at your ankles. and there was a new voice “Mend my life!” which you slowly each voice cried. recognized as your own, But you didn’t stop. that kept you company You know what you had to do, as you strode deeper and deeper though the wind pried into the world, with its stiff fingers determined to do at the very foundations, the only thing you could do – though their melancholy determined to save was terrible. the only life you could save.
- 35. The Sun Have you ever seen anything in your life more wonderful than the way the sun, every evening, relaxed and easy, floats toward the horizon and into the clouds or the hills, or the rumpled sea, and is gone – and how it slides again out of the blackness, every morning, on the other side of the world, like a red flower
- 36. Streaming upward on its heavenly oils, say, on a morning in early summer, at its perfect imperial distance – and have you ever felt for anything such wild love – do you think there is anywhere, in any language, a word billowing enough for the pleasure that fills you, as the sun reaches out, as it warms you as you stand there empty-handed – or have you too turned from this world – or have you too gone crazy for power, for things?
- 37. Themes in 2000’s Poetry: •Multicultural Voices •Ethnic Identity •Nature / Simplicity •Ordinary Objects