W. H. Auden
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
James Dickey
In the Mountain Tent
Sled Burial, Dream Ceremony
The Sheep Child
Adultery
Deer Among Cattle
False Youth: Autumn: Clothes of the Age
Doorstep, Lightning, Waif-Dreaming
Alan Dugan
Love Song: I and Thou
Tribute to Kafka for Someone Taken
Elegy
To a Red-Headed Do-Good Waitress
For Masturbation
Fabrication of Ancestors
Poem [What’s the balm]
Elegy for a Puritan Conscience
Prayer
On Leaving Town
“Space is Not Merely a Bacground for Events, but Poseesses and Autonomous Structure.” – A. Einstein
Untitled Poem [Once, one of my students read a book we had.]
On Find the Tree of Life
Last Statement for a Last Oracle
Robert Duncan
Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow
Poetry, A Natural Thing
Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal
Such is the Sickness of Many a Good Thing
Bending the Bow
My Mother Would be a Falconress
The Torso Passages 18
From Dante Etudes: The Work
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
[Constantly risking absurdity]
[Sometime during eternity]
[The pennycandystore beyond the El]
I Am Waiting
Monet’s Lilies Shuddering
The Photo of Emily
Isabella Gardner
Summers Ago
Gwendolyn Brooks
Negro Hero
We Real Cool
The Lovers of the Poor
An Aspect of Love Alive in the Ice and Fire
To Don at Salaam
Lucille Clifton
Admonitions
Miss Rosie
[If I Stand in My Window]
The Lost Baby Poem
God’s Mood
Roots
[Come Home From the Movies]
To a Dark Moses
She Understands Me
Cutting Greens
[At Last We Killed the Roaches]
Breaklight
The Carver
Homage to my Hips
Forgiving my Father
I Once Knew a Man
For the Lame
For the Mute
Perhaps
Speaking of Loss
Robert Creely
The Business
I Know a Man
A Form of Women
A Wicker Basket
The Flower
The Rain
The Memory
The Rescue
The Language
The Window
On Vacation
Moment
Outside
First Rain
Mother’s Voice
The Movie Run Backward
James Dickey
The Heaven of Animals
The Performance
The Hospital Window
Elizabeth Bishop
The Fish
Letter to N.Y.
The Armadillo
North Haven
In The Waiting Room
One Art
Robert Bly
Surprised by Evening
Waking from Sleep
Poem in Three Parts
Snowfall in the Afternoon
In a Train
Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter
Watering the Horse
After Long Busyness
Counting Small-Boned Bodies
Looking Into a Face
The Hermit
Shack Poem
Looking Into a Tide Pool
Visting Emily Dickenson’s Grave With Robert Francis
Insect Heads
Passing an Orchard by Train
Driving My Parents Home at Christmas
For My Son Noah, Ten Years Old
My Father’s Wedding
At Midocean
In Rainy September
Gwendolyn Brooks
from A Street in Bronzeville
kitchennette building
the mother
a song in the front yard
of De Will Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery
John Ashberry
The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers
“They Dream Only of America”
Leaving the Atocha Station
Definition of Blue
As You Came from the Holy Land
The Ice-Cream Wars
Street Musicians
Paradoxes and Oxymorons
Introduction
Marvin Bell
White Clover
The Extermination of the Jews
from The Escape Into You: Homage to the Runner
The Mystery of Emily Dickinson
To Dorothy
During the War
The Last Thing I Say
These Green-Going-to-Yellow
Drawn by Stones, by Earth, by Things That Have Been in the Fire
They
The Nest
Long Island
John Berryman
The Song of the Tortured Girl
from The Dream Songs
1 [Huffy Henry]
4 [Filling her compact & delicious body]
8 [The weather was fine]
9 [Deprived of his enemy]
13 [God bless Henry]
14 [Life, friends, is boring]
29 [There sat down, once]
45 [He stared at ruin]
46 [I am, outside]
55 [Peter’s not friendly]
230 [There are voices]
384 [The marker slants]
from Eleven Addresses to the Lord
1 [Master of beauty]
Henry’s Understanding
Elizabeth Bishop
The Man-Moth
Tool & Die
Calipers and micrometers, cradled by the red felt
lining the half opened drawers of the wooden toolbox that belonged to his father,
wait to measure the tolerances of parts that must work together without touching.
And his corrugated space smells of the sweet oil sliding down the bit,
smoking as metal bites into metal,
digging towards the core,
extruding the sharp helix that can tempt blood from my young fingers.
We hide behind masks, he and I,
as he draws a molten bead along the cold unparted edges,
the inscrutable panes protect our dark eyes.
We must not look directly at such couplings.
Even here, among the jagged edges and melting surfaces,
kindness lays down in the teeth.
The blade, oiled to cut softly through the angle iron
eases itself down under his sure fingers , chewing gently
through the 90º angles, 6″ at a time.
And there are no shadows here;
the cold fluorescent lights illuminate every square inch of my father’s workshop.
The only darknessess are the fears
lying beneath his clean work shirt,
beating against the pencils and rulers he carries in his breast pocket.
© 1994, John Lyon
Galway Kinnell, from The Book of Nightmares:
The Hen Flower
The Shoes of Wandering
Dear Stranger Extant in Memory by the Blue Juniata
In the Hotel of Lost Light
The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible
Little SleepsHead Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight
The Call Across the Valley of NotKnowing
The Path Among the Stones
Lastness
Richard Cecil:
In Search of the Great Dead
A.R. Ammons:
Apologia Pro Vita Sua
Laser
He Held a Radical Light
Working with Tools
The Unifying Principle
Cut the Grass
The City Limits
The Eternal City
White Dwarf
Distraction
Neighbors
Breaking Out
Extrication
Volitions
From the book Songs of Waking by Jonathan Simons.
Small Fire
In the Night
Madrid
Driftwood
Hungry Ghost
Salt Spring Island
On Forgetting
Polaris
Castaways
From the Shore
Moving Closer
The Factory
Midnight Sun
The Seamstress
When the Sun Sighs
Golden
Like a Soldier
The Butterfly
Solid Ground
Shelter
A Thousand Empty Rooms
Solitude
Currency
Mirage
Thirst
Upon the Banks of That River
Song from the Void
Tracks
When the Last Bell Tolls
Sensation of a Moment
Life on the Wing
From the Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnell
Under the Maud Moon
Happy New Year y’all. I hope this is a year of sanctuary, and shared values, surrounded by friends and loved ones.
So one of my goals last year was to read 1000 poems. I…I didn’t make it. I didn’t meet that goal.
So I’m going to try it again this year, but instead of posting the poems, I’ll just list them.
I don’t know what the year is going to hold, so the goal for my books is modest, just 2 a month. I set a goal of 16 books for 2024. I set it on November 6th. But I also had other goals. I was conflicted.I think I reached 12 books in the last 7 weeks of the year.
Anyhow. Watch this space for those 1000 poems and 24 books.
That said, the first poem of the year:
The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.