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
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.