Ramazani, Jahan; Richard Ellman; Robert O'Clair;
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, v.2 Contemporary Poetry (3d edition)
W. W. Norton & Company 2003-04 (Two volumes, slipcased $75.00)
ISBN 9780393324297 / 039332429X
topics: | poetry | anthology
One of the better known anthologies of modern English poetry. The selection is US-centric; major British poets get fewer pages. Beyond Western poets, the book also includes a number of poets from commonwealth nations: Louise Bennett (Jamaica), Kamau Braithwaite (Barbados) and Grace Nichols (Guyana); Okot p'Bitek (Uganda) and Christopher Okigbo and Wole Soyinka (Nigeria); AK Ramanujan, Eunice D'Souza and Agha Shahid Ali (India).
b. in Massachussetts, 1911, attended Vassar college where she met Marianne Moore. At the age of 40, she went to Brazil where she fell in love with the aristocratic Lota de Macdeo Soares, with whom she spent fifteen years before returning to the US in 1967. Much of her work was published posthmously. She is among the poets with the highest coverage in NAMCP.
Land lies in water; it is shadowed green. Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges where weeds hang to the simple blue from green. Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under, drawing it unperturbed around itself? Along the fine tan sandy shelf is the land tugging at the sea from under? The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still. Labrador's yellow, where the moony Eskimo has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays, under a glass as if they were expected to blossom, or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish. The names of seashore towns run out to sea, the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains -the printer here experiencing the same excitement as when emotion too far exceeds its cause. These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods. Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is, lending the land their waves' own conformation: and Norway's hare runs south in agitation, profiles investigate the sea, where land is. Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors? -What suits the character or the native waters best. Topography displays no favorites; North's as near as West. More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors. source: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-map/
Here, above,
cracks in the buldings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to records in thermometers.
But when the Man-Moth
pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,
the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges
from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks
and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.
He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.
Up the façades,
his shadow dragging like a photographer's cloth behind him
he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage
to push his small head through that round clean opening
and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.
(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)
But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although
he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.
Then he returns
to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.
The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way
and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,
without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.
He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.
Each night he must
be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.
Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie
his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,
for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,
runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease
he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep
his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.
If you catch him,
hold up a flashlight to his eye. It's all dark pupil,
an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids
one tear, his only possession, like the bee's sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you're not paying attention
he'll swallow it. However, if you watch, he'll hand it over,
cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.
Now can you see the monument? It is of wood built somewhat like a box. No. Built like several boxes in descending sizes one above the other. Each is turned half-way round so that its corners point toward the sides of the one below and the angles alternate. Then on the topmost cube is set a sort of fleur-de-lys of weathered wood, long petals of board, pierced with odd holes, four-sided, stiff, ecclesiastical. From it four thin, warped poles spring out, (slanted like fishing-poles or flag-poles) and from them jig-saw work hangs down, four lines of vaguely whittled ornament over the edges of the boxes to the ground. The monument is one-third set against a sea; two-thirds against a sky. The view is geared (that is, the view's perspective) so low there is no "far away," and we are far away within the view. A sea of narrow, horizontal boards lies out behind our lonely monument, its long grains alternating right and left like floor-boards--spotted, swarming-still, and motionless. A sky runs parallel, and it is palings, coarser than the sea's: splintery sunlight and long-fibred clouds. "Why does the strange sea make no sound? Is it because we're far away? Where are we? Are we in Asia Minor, or in Mongolia?" An ancient promontory, an ancient principality whose artist-prince might have wanted to build a monument to mark a tomb or boundary, or make a melancholy or romantic scene of it... "But that queer sea looks made of wood, half-shining, like a driftwood, sea. And the sky looks wooden, grained with cloud. It's like a stage-set; it is all so flat! Those clouds are full of glistening splinters! What is that?" It is the monument. "It's piled-up boxes, outlined with shoddy fret-work, half-fallen off, cracked and unpainted. It looks old." --The strong sunlight, the wind from the sea, all the conditions of its existence, may have flaked off the paint, if ever it was painted, and made it homelier than it was. "Why did you bring me here to see it? A temple of crates in cramped and crated scenery, what can it prove? I am tired of breathing this eroded air, this dryness in which the monument is cracking." It is an artifact of wood. Wood holds together better than sea or cloud or and could by itself, much better than real sea or sand or cloud. It chose that way to grow and not to move. The monument's an object, yet those decorations, carelessly nailed, looking like nothing at all, give it away as having life, and wishing; wanting to be a monument, to cherish something. The crudest scroll-work says "commemorate," while once each day the light goes around it like a prowling animal, or the rain falls on it, or the wind blows into it. It may be solid, may be hollow. The bones of the artist-prince may be inside or far away on even drier soil. But roughly but adequately it can shelter what is within (which after all cannot have been intended to be seen). It is the beginning of a painting, a piece of sculpture, or poem, or monument, and all of wood. Watch it closely.
I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He was speckled and barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down. While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen --the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly-- I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails, and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony. I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass. They shifted a little, but not to return my stare. --It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light. I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw, and then I saw that from his lower lip --if you could call it a lip grim, wet, and weaponlike, hung five old pieces of fish-line, or four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached, with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth. A green line, frayed at the end where he broke it, two heavier lines, and a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap when it broke and he got away. Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels--until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go.
At four o'clock in the gun-metal blue dark we hear the first crow of the first cock just below the gun-metal blue window and immediately there is an echo off in the distance, then one from the backyard fence, then one, with horrible insistence, grates like a wet match from the broccoli patch, flares,and all over town begins to catch. Cries galore come from the water-closet door, from the dropping-plastered henhouse floor, where in the blue blur their rusting wives admire, the roosters brace their cruel feet and glare with stupid eyes while from their beaks there rise the uncontrolled, traditional cries. Deep from protruding chests in green-gold medals dressed, planned to command and terrorize the rest, the many wives who lead hens' lives of being courted and despised; deep from raw throats a senseless order floats all over town. A rooster gloats over our beds from rusty irons sheds and fences made from old bedsteads, over our churches where the tin rooster perches, over our little wooden northern houses, making sallies from all the muddy alleys, marking out maps like Rand McNally's: glass-headed pins, oil-golds and copper greens, anthracite blues, alizarins, each one an active displacement in perspective; each screaming, "This is where I live!" Each screaming "Get up! Stop dreaming!" Roosters, what are you projecting? You, whom the Greeks elected to shoot at on a post, who struggled when sacrificed, you whom they labeled "Very combative..." what right have you to give commands and tell us how to live, cry "Here!" and "Here!" and wake us here where are unwanted love, conceit and war? The crown of red set on your little head is charged with all your fighting blood Yes, that excrescence makes a most virile presence, plus all that vulgar beauty of iridescence Now in mid-air by two they fight each other. Down comes a first flame-feather, and one is flying, with raging heroism defying even the sensation of dying. And one has fallen but still above the town his torn-out, bloodied feathers drift down; and what he sung no matter. He is flung on the gray ash-heap, lies in dung with his dead wives with open, bloody eyes, while those metallic feathers oxidize. St. Peter's sin was worse than that of Magdalen whose sin was of the flesh alone; of spirit, Peter's, falling, beneath the flares, among the "servants and officers." Old holy sculpture could set it all together in one small scene, past and future: Christ stands amazed, Peter, two fingers raised to surprised lips, both as if dazed. But in between a little cock is seen carved on a dim column in the travertine, explained by gallus canit; flet Petrus underneath it, There is inescapable hope, the pivot; yes, and there Peter's tears run down our chanticleer's sides and gem his spurs. Tear-encrusted thick as a medieval relic he waits. Poor Peter, heart-sick, still cannot guess those cock-a-doodles yet might bless, his dreadful rooster come to mean forgiveness, a new weathervane on basilica and barn, and that outside the Lateran there would always be a bronze cock on a porphyry pillar so the people and the Pope might see that event the Prince of the Apostles long since had been forgiven, and to convince all the assembly that "Deny deny deny" is not all the roosters cry. In the morning a low light is floating in the backyard, and gilding from underneath the broccoli, leaf by leaf; how could the night have come to grief? gilding the tiny floating swallow's belly and lines of pink cloud in the sky, the day's preamble like wandering lines in marble, The cocks are now almost inaudible. The sun climbs in, following "to see the end," faithful as enemy, or friend.
Although it is a cold evening, down by one of the fishhouses an old man sits netting, his net, in the gloaming almost invisible, a dark purple-brown, and his shuttle worn and polished. The air smells so strong of codfish it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water. The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up to storerooms in the gables for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on. All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, swelling slowly as if considering spilling over, is opaque, but the silver of the benches, the lobster pots, and masts, scattered among the wild jagged rocks, is of an apparent translucence like the small old buildings with an emerald moss growing on their shoreward walls. The big fish tubs are completely lined with layers of beautiful herring scales and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered with creamy iridescent coats of mail, with small iridescent flies crawling on them. Up on the little slope behind the houses, set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass, is an ancient wooden capstan, cracked, with two long bleached handles and some melancholy stains, like dried blood, where the ironwork has rusted. The old man accepts a Lucky Strike. He was a friend of my grandfather. We talk of the decline in the population and of codfish and herring while he waits for a herring boat to come in. There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb. He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty, from unnumbered fish with that black old knife, the blade of which is almost worn away. Down at the water's edge, at the place where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp descending into the water, thin silver tree trunks are laid horizontally across the gray stones, down and down at intervals of four or five feet. Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, element bearable to no mortal, to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly I have seen here evening after evening. He was curious about me. He was interested in music; like me a believer in total immersion, so I used to sing him Baptist hymns. I also sang "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." He stood up in the water and regarded me steadily, moving his head a little. Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug as if it were against his better judgment. Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us, the dignified tall firs begin. Bluish, associating with their shadows, a million Christmas trees stand waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones. I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, icily free above the stones, above the stones and then the world. If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately, your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn as if the water were a transmutation of fire that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame. If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
September rain falls on the house. In the failing light, the old grandmother sits in the kitchen with the child beside the Little Marvel Stove, reading the jokes from the almanac, laughing and talking to hide her tears. She thinks that her equinoctial tears and the rain that beats on the roof of the house were both foretold by the almanac, but only known to a grandmother. The iron kettle sings on the stove. She cuts some bread and says to the child, It's time for tea now; but the child is watching the teakettle's small hard tears dance like mad on the hot black stove, the way the rain must dance on the house. Tidying up, the old grandmother hangs up the clever almanac on its string. Birdlike, the almanac hovers half open above the child, hovers above the old grandmother and her teacup full of dark brown tears. She shivers and says she thinks the house feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove. It was to be, says the Marvel Stove. I know what I know, says the almanac. With crayons the child draws a rigid house and a winding pathway. Then the child puts in a man with buttons like tears and shows it proudly to the grandmother. But secretly, while the grandmother busies herself about the stove, the little moons fall down like tears from between the pages of the almanac into the flower bed the child has carefully placed in the front of the house. Time to plant tears, says the almanac. The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove and the child draws another inscrutable house.
For Robert Lowell This is the time of year when almost every night the frail, illegal fire balloons appear. Climbing the mountain height, rising toward a saint still honored in these parts, the paper chambers flush and fill with light that comes and goes, like hearts. Once up against the sky it's hard to tell them from the stars-- planets, that is--the tinted ones: Venus going down, or Mars, or the pale green one. With a wind, they flare and falter, wobble and toss; but if it's still they steer between the kite sticks of the Southern Cross, receding, dwindling, solemnly and steadily forsaking us, or, in the downdraft from a peak, suddenly turning dangerous. Last night another big one fell. It splattered like an egg of fire against the cliff behind the house. The flame ran down. We saw the pair of owls who nest there flying up and up, their whirling black-and-white stained bright pink underneath, until they shrieked up out of sight. The ancient owls' nest must have burned. Hastily, all alone, a glistening armadillo left the scene, rose-flecked, head down, tail down, and then a baby rabbit jumped out, short-eared, to our surprise. So soft!--a handful of intangible ash with fixed, ignited eyes. Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry! O falling fire and piercing cry and panic, and a weak mailed fist clenched ignorant against the sky!
In Worcester, Massachusetts, I went with Aunt Consuelo to keep her dentist's appointment and sat and waited for her in the dentist's waiting room. It was winter. It got dark early. The waiting room was full of grown-up people, arctics and overcoats, lamps and magazines. My aunt was inside what seemed like a long time and while I waited and read the National Geographic (I could read) and carefully studied the photographs: the inside of a volcano, black, and full of ashes; then it was spilling over in rivulets of fire. Osa and Martin Johnson dressed in riding breeches, laced boots, and pith helmets. A dead man slung on a pole "Long Pig," the caption said. Babies with pointed heads wound round and round with string; black, naked women with necks wound round and round with wire like the necks of light bulbs. Their breasts were horrifying. I read it right straight through. I was too shy to stop. And then I looked at the cover: the yellow margins, the date. Suddenly, from inside, came an oh! of pain
not very loud or long. I wasn't at all surprised; even then I knew she was a foolish, timid woman. I might have been embarrassed, but wasn't. What took me completely by surprise was that it was me: my voice, in my mouth. Without thinking at all I was my foolish aunt, I--we--were falling, falling, our eyes glued to the cover of the National Geographic, February, 1918. I said to myself: three days and you'll be seven years old. I was saying it to stop the sensation of falling off the round, turning world. into cold, blue-black space. But I felt: you are an I, you are an Elizabeth, you are one of them. Why should you be one, too? I scarcely dared to look to see what it was I was. I gave a sidelong glance
About the size of an old-style dollar bill, American or Canadian, mostly the same whites, gray greens, and steel grays -this little painting (a sketch for a larger one?) has never earned any money in its life. Useless and free., it has spent seventy years as a minor family relic handed along collaterally to owners who looked at it sometimes, or didn't bother to. It must be Nova Scotia; only there does one see abled wooden houses painted that awful shade of brown. The other houses, the bits that show, are white. Elm trees., low hills, a thin church steeple -that gray-blue wisp-or is it? In the foreground a water meadow with some tiny cows, two brushstrokes each, but confidently cows; two minuscule white geese in the blue water, back-to-back,, feeding, and a slanting stick. Up closer, a wild iris, white and yellow, fresh-squiggled from the tube. The air is fresh and cold; cold early spring clear as gray glass; a half inch of blue sky below the steel-gray storm clouds. (They were the artist's specialty.) A specklike bird is flying to the left. Or is it a flyspeck looking like a bird? Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it! It's behind-I can almost remember the farmer's name. His barn backed on that meadow. There it is, titanium white, one dab. The hint of steeple, filaments of brush-hairs, barely there, must be the Presbyterian church. Would that be Miss Gillespie's house? Those particular geese and cows are naturally before my time. A sketch done in an hour, "in one breath," once taken from a trunk and handed over. Would you like this? I'll Probably never have room to hang these things again. Your Uncle George, no, mine, my Uncle George, he'd be your great-uncle, left them all with Mother when he went back to England. You know, he was quite famous, an R.A.... I never knew him. We both knew this place, apparently, this literal small backwater, looked at it long enough to memorize it, our years apart. How strange. And it's still loved, or its memory is (it must have changed a lot). Our visions coincided-"visions" is too serious a word-our looks, two looks: art "copying from life" and life itself, life and the memory of it so compressed they've turned into each other. Which is which? Life and the memory of it cramped, dim, on a piece of Bristol board, dim, but how live, how touching in detail -the little that we get for free, the little of our earthly trust. Not much. About the size of our abidance along with theirs: the munching cows, the iris, crisp and shivering, the water still standing from spring freshets, the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.
For John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read: Duxbury It was cold and windy, scarcely the day to take a walk on that long beach Everything was withdrawn as far as possible, indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken, seabirds in ones or twos. The rackety, icy, offshore wind numbed our faces on one side; disrupted the formation of a lone flight of Canada geese; and blew back the low, inaudible rollers in upright, steely mist. The sky was darker than the water --it was the color of mutton-fat jade. Along the wet sand, in rubber boots, we followed a track of big dog-prints (so big they were more like lion-prints). Then we came on lengths and lengths, endless, of wet white string, looping up to the tide-line, down to the water, over and over. Finally, they did end: a thick white snarl, man-size, awash, rising on every wave, a sodden ghost, falling back, sodden, giving up the ghost... A kite string?--But no kite. I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house, my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box set up on pilings, shingled green, a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener (boiled with bicarbonate of soda?), protected from spring tides by a palisade of--are they railroad ties? (Many things about this place are dubious.) I'd like to retire there and do nothing, or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms: look through binoculars, read boring books, old, long, long books, and write down useless notes, talk to myself, and, foggy days, watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light. At night, a grog a l'américaine. I'd blaze it with a kitchen match and lovely diaphanous blue flame would waver, doubled in the window. There must be a stove; there is a chimney, askew, but braced with wires, and electricity, possibly --at least, at the back another wire limply leashes the whole affair to something off behind the dunes. A light to read by--perfect! But--impossible. And that day the wind was much too cold even to get that far, and of course the house was boarded up. On the way back our faces froze on the other side. The sun came out for just a minute. For just a minute, set in their bezels of sand, the drab, damp, scattered stones were multi-colored, and all those high enough threw out long shadows, individual shadows, then pulled them in again. They could have been teasing the lion sun, except that now he was behind them --a sun who'd walked the beach the last low tide, making those big, majestic paw-prints, who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with.
Unconscious
came a Beauty to my U
wrist n
and stopped my pencil, c
merged its shadow profile with o
my hand's ghost n
on the page: s
Red Spotted Purple or else Mourning c
Cloak, i
paired thin-as-paper wings, near black, o
were edged on the seam side poppy orange, u
as were its spots. s C a m e a B e a u t y
I sat arrested, for its soot-haired
body's worm
shone in the sun.
It bent its tongue long as
a leg
black on my skin
and clung without my
feeling.
while its tomb-stained
duplicate parts of
a window opened.
And then I
moved.
[from May Swenson's "Iconographs". iconograph: poem shaped like its
subject. see http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/Tr.html#anchor967204 ]
"Unconscious Came a Beauty," Swenson's finest iconograph at once shows and tells something vital. Simply hearing this poem, with slight pauses at each line break, would alter us for the good, and seeing makes it new. Our mind takes the nameless reality of something alighting while our eye senses what "it" must be. Why "arrested," at the poem's fulcrum? Fear of dislodging, awe at the shining? Thanks to Swenson's title splayed like antennae, this moment of arrest hinges two stanzas to shape a coming of consciousness, of beauty. Between "stopped my pencil" and "then I moved" a long stillness occurs, though the creature is bending its tongue, clinging weightlessly, spreading window-wings. Was this poem the one being written, when the pencil stopped, or was she writing something else? Can a human stillness, sensuously eyeing thin spotted wings, soot-tinted hairs, long black tongue, yield full consciousness? The speaker-poet is holding a pencil, which the butterfly stops when it lands on her wrist. The speaker was in the initial act of writing a poem, but the butterfly stops her, as though to say that what she was going to write on her own would not be nearly as great as what they can write together.
It's no surprise these poets were friends, exchanging over 250 letters during thirty years. Their suggestions to each other about unpublished poems are advanced firmly, gratefully acknowledged, and seldom taken. ... Enthusiasm for the makings of poetry kept them close, and for vivid flora and fauna. The blue-footed booby also signals their love of Marianne Moore's odd creatures and "audacious, hypnotic peacock display of language" (Swenson). Professional candor marks these letters too. Swenson says about Bishop's recording of "The Fish," "You couldn’t ruin it, even with that awful reading that sounded like a stock market report" (which is a fair description). Bishop cautions her against unorthodox punctuation and "low-brow" grammar. Their suggestions about unpublished poems are advanced firmly, gratefully acknowledged, and seldom taken.
[first-generation african american poet. Parents' marriage dissolved in childhood, raised by foster family next door in Detroit ghetto. As a child, teased for his nearsightedness, but read widely, and with some difficulty, managed to go to college (Detroit City College, now Wayne State U). Converted to Bahai after marrying a Bahai woman 1940, and joined U. Michigan for an M.A. 1941 (age 28). Here he met W.H. Auden, whose influence may be seen in the "technical pith of Hayden's verse". ] Quote: He hawks and spits / fevered as by groinfire. --Night, Death, Mississippi 1966-- 62 from http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/Forum3/HTML/000457.html [written after the murder of civil rights activists (Freedom Riders protesting segrationist laws of inter-state trasportation) - who were killed by Klansmen and police deputies in Philadelphia, Mississippi, 1964] I A quavering cry. Screech-owl? Or one of them? The old man in his reek and gauntness laughs - One of them, I bet - and turns out the kitchen lamp, limping to the porch to listen in the windowless night. Be there with Boy and the rest if I was well again. Time was. Time was. White robes like moonlight In the sweetgum dark. Unbucked that one then and him squealing bloody Jesus as we cut it off. Time was. A cry? A cry all right. He hawks and spits, fevered as by groinfire. Have us a bottle, Boy and me - he's earned him a bottle - when he gets home. II Then we beat them, he said, beat them till our arms were tired and the big, old chains messy and red. O Jesus burning on the lily cross Christ, it was better than hunting bear which don't know why you want him dead. O night, rawhead and bloodybones night You kids fetch Paw some water now so's he can wash that blood off him, she said. O night betrayed by darkness not its own
from kirjasto: Welsh poet and prose writer whose works are known for musical quality of the language, comic or visionary scenes and sensual images. Dylan Thomas died in the United States on a tour on November 9, 1953. His death resulted much from his alcoholism, which have gained mythic proportions. The Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea even serves pints of Dylan's smooth ale. It has been claimed that the famous American famous songwriter and musician Bob Dylan, who was born Robert Allen Zimmerman, named himself after the Welsh poet, but Dylan himself had denied it. --
Dylan Thomas The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever. The force that drives the water through the rocks Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams Turns mine to wax. And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks. The hand that whirls the water in the pool Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind Hauls my shroud sail. And I am dumb to tell the hanging man How of my clay is made the hangman's lime. The lips of time leech to the fountain head; Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood Shall calm her sores. And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind How time has ticked a heaven round the stars. And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
And death shall have no dominion. Dead men naked they shall be one With the man in the wind and the west moon; When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone, They shall have stars at elbow and foot; Though they go mad they shall be sane, Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; Though lovers be lost love shall not; And death shall have no dominion. And death shall have no dominion. Under the windings of the sea They lying long shall not die windily; Twisting on racks when sinews give way, Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break; Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through; Split all ends up they shan't crack; And death shall have no dominion. And death shall have no dominion. No more may gulls cry at their ears Or waves break loud on the seashores; Where blew a flower may a flower no more Lift its head to the blows of the rain; Though they be mad and dead as nails, Heads of the characters hammer through daisies; Break in the sun till the sun breaks down, And death shall have no dominion.
The hunchback in the park A solitary mister Propped between trees and water From the opening of the garden lock That let the trees and water enter Until the Sunday sombre bell at dark Eating bread from a newspaper Drinking water from the chained cup That the children filled with gravel In the fountain basin where I sailed my ship Slept at night in a dog kennel But nobody chained him up. Like the park birds he came early Like the water he sat down And Mister they called Hey mister The truant boys from the town Running when he had heard them clearly On out of sound Past lake and rockery Laughing when he shook his paper Through the loud zoo of the willow groves Hunchbacked in mockery Dodging the park-keeper With his stick that picked up leaves. And the old dog sleeper Alone between nurses and swans While the boys among willows Made the tigers jump out of their eyes To roar on the rockery stones And the groves were blue with sailors Made all day until bell-time A woman's figure without fault Straight as a young elm Straight and tall from his crooked bones That she might stand in the night After the locks and the chains All night in the unmade park After the railings and shrubberies The birds the grass the trees and the lake And the wild boys innocent as strawberries Had followed the hunchback To his kennel in the dark.
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.
My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In the rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.
A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.
Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.
It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels
And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.
And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.
Never until the mankind making Bird beast and flower Fathering and all humbling darkness Tells with silence the last light breaking And the still hour Is come of the sea tumbling in harness And I must enter again the round Zion of the water bead And the synagogue of the ear of corn Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound Or sow my salt seed In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn The majesty and burning of the child's death. I shall not murder The mankind of her going with a grave truth Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath With any further Elegy of innocence and youth. Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter, Robed in the long friends, The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother, Secret by the unmourning water Of the riding Thames. After the first death, there is no other.
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry, [dingle = small wooded valley]
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars [nocturnal burd]
Flying with the ricks, and the horses [ricks = stacks of hay]
Flashing into the dark.
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
---
Fern Hill: country home where his aunt lived, where he would spend summer
holidays as a boy
Perhaps Dylan Thomas' best known poem, a nostalgic and melancholic look back
at times gone by
Fern Hill was completed in 1945, and was the last poem to be included
in Deaths And Entrances, published the following year. Placed at the
end of the collection, it appears to move away from the war-induced
darkness of tone which characterises many of its other poems.
In my craft or sullen art Exercised in the still night When only the moon rages And the lovers lie abed With all their griefs in their arms, I labour by singing light Not for ambition or bread Or the strut and trade of charms On the ivory stages But for the common wages Of their most secret heart. Not for the proud man apart From the raging moon I write On these spindrift pages [driven like sea spray, by the wind] Nor for the towering dead With their nightingales and psalms But for the lovers, their arms Round the griefs of the ages, Who pay no praise or wages Nor heed my craft or art.
Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying the light. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night, Rage, rage, against the dying of the light. [villanelle; though last stanza is non-bconformal]
[Thomas wrote at the time: "The only person I can't show the little enclosed poem to is, of course, my father, who doesn't know he's dying." Quoted by Jones, [The poems of DT] who goes on to say that Thomas's father "lingered for more than a year after this, and died on 15 Dec 1952...]
Do not go gentle is a villanelle, considered to be among the finest works by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953). Originally published in 1952, as part of the collection "In Country Sleep". A villanelle has two refrains repeated throughout - A1 and A2: A1bA2 abA1 abA2 abA1 abA2 abA1A2. Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night was completed in 1951, late in Thomas' career. It is one of his most popular and easily accessible poems. Written about his dying father, the poem explores the personal experience of grief and death, and places it within a wider context. Like Fern Hill before it, the poem reflects Thomas' developed, more simple style. Perhaps the most striking thing about Do Not Go Gentle is the contrast between its form, which is strict, regular and controlled, and its message, which incites the man to "rage against the dying of the light". The form itself is a villanelle which includes a series of repetitions, and maintains just two rhymes throughout. It enables Thomas to build his poem in gradual stages while keeping the focus on his most important message. Also a villanelle: Sylvia Plath's Mad Girl's Love Song
[Australian poet, grew up in rural New South Wales, studied upto 12 by correspondence.]
The song is gone; the dance is secret with the dancers in the earth, the ritual useless, and the tribal story lost in an alien tale. Only the grass stands up to mark the dancing-ring: the apple-gums posture and mime a past corroboree, murmur a broken chant. The hunter is gone: the spear is splintered underground; the painted bodies a dream the world breathed sleeping and forgot. The nomad feet are still. Only the rider's heart halts at a sightless shadow, an unsaid word that fastens in the blood the ancient curse, the fear as old as Cain.
When I first saw a woman after childbirth the room was full of your glance who had just gone away. And when the mare was bearing her foal you were with her but I did not see your face. When in fear I became a woman I first felt your hand When the shadow of the future first fell across me it was your shadow, my grave and hooded attendant. It is all one whether I deny or affirm you; it is not my mind you are concerned with, It is no matter whether I submit or rebel; the event will happen. You neither know nor care for the truth of my heart; but the truth of my body has all to do with you. You have no need of my thoughts or my hopes, living in the realm of the absolute event. Then why is it that when I at last see your face under that hood of slate-blue, so calm and dark, so worn with the burden of an inexpressible knowledge— why is that I begin to worship you with tears?
... Bells ring and they go and the voice draws their pencil like a sled across snow; when its runners are frozen rope snaps and the voice then is pulling no burden but runs like a dog on the winter of paper.
leading African American poet
I've stayed in the front yard all my life. I want a peek at the back Where it's rough and untended and hungry weed grows. A girl gets sick of a rose. I want to go in the back yard now And maybe down the alley, To where the charity children play. I want a good time today. They do some wonderful things. They have some wonderful fun. My mother sneers, but I say it's fine How they don’t have to go in at quarter to nine. My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae Will grow up to be a bad woman. That George’ll be taken to Jail soon or late (On account of last winter he sold our back gate). But I say it's fine. Honest, I do. And I'd like to be a bad woman, too, And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace And strut down the streets with paint on my face.
He was born in Alabama. He was bred in Illinois. He was nothing but a Plain black boy. Swing low swing low sweet sweet chariot. [line from a spiritual] Nothing but a plain black boy. Drive him past the Pool Hall. Drive him past the Show. Blind within his casket, But maybe he will know. Down through Forty-seventh Street: [main street in Bronzeville, Chicago ghetto] Underneath the L, [elevated railway] And Northwest Corner, Prairie, That he loved so well. Don’t forget the Dance Halls— Warwick and Savoy, Where he picked his women, where He drank his liquid joy. Born in Alabama. Bred in Illinois. He was nothing but a Plain black boy. Swing low swing low sweet sweet chariot. Nothing but a plain black boy.
Maud went to college. Sadie stayed at home. Sadie scraped life With a fine-tooth comb. She didn’t leave a tangle in. Her comb found every strand. Sadie was one of the livingest chits In all the land. Sadie bore two babies Under her maiden name. Maud and Ma and Papa Nearly died of shame. When Sadie said her last so-long Her girls struck out from home. (Sadie had left as heritage Her fine-tooth comb.) Maud, who went to college, Is a thin brown mouse. She is living all alone In this old house.
Mrs. Coley's three-flat brick Isn’t here any more. All done with seeing her fat little form Burst out of the basement door; And with seeing her African son-in-law (Rightful heir to the throne) With his great white strong cold squares of teeth And his little eyes of stone; And with seeing the squat fat daughter Letting in the men When majesty has gone for the day— And letting them out again. Gwendolyn Brooks, "the vacant lot" from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1963 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=172083
They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair. Dinner is a casual affair. Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood, Tin flatware. Two who are Mostly Good. Two who have lived their day, But keep on putting on their clothes And putting things away. And remembering ... Remembering, with twinklings and twinges, As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths, tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.
THE POOL PLAYERS. SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL. We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon. [This short poem, with its rich rhythm is one of the most popular poems by Gwendolyn Brooks.]
(last quatrain) AFTER THE MURDER AFTER THE BURIAL Emmett's mother is a pretty-faced thing; the tint of pulled taffy. She sits in a red room, drinking black coffee. She kisses her killed boy. And she is sorry. Chaos in windy grays through a red prairie. 1960 From Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems Copyright © 1963 [Emmett Till: 14 year old black boy murdered for whistling at a white woman. Mississippi 1955. Killers were set free by court.]
To Marc Crawford [writer/editor] from whom the commission
Whose broken window is a cry of art (success, that winks aware as elegance, as a treasonable faith) is raw: is sonic: is old-eyed première. Our beautiful flaw and terrible ornament. Our barbarous and metal little man. "I shall create! If not a note, a hole. If not an overture, a desecration." Full of pepper and light and Salt and night and cargoes. "Don’t go down the plank if you see there's no extension. Each to his grief, each to his loneliness and fidgety revenge. Nobody knew where I was and now I am no longer there." The only sanity is a cup of tea. The music is in minors. Each one other is having different weather. "It was you, it was you who threw away my name! And this is everything I have for me." Who has not Congress, lobster, love, luau, the Regency Room, the Statue of Liberty, runs. A sloppy amalgamation. A mistake. A cliff. A hymn, a snare, and an exceeding sun.
from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=843 ... a highly regarded, much-honored poet, the first black author to win the Pulitzer Prize. also was poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Many of Brooks's works display a political consciousness, especially those from the 1960s and later, with several of her poems reflecting the civil rights activism of that period. Her body of work gave her, according to Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor George E. Kent, "a unique position in American letters. Not only has she combined a strong commitment to racial identity and equality with a mastery of poetic techniques, but she has also managed to bridge the gap between the academic poets of her generation in the 1940s and the young black militant writers of the 1960s." Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, but her family moved to Chicago when she was young. Her father was a janitor who had hoped to become a doctor; her mother was a schoolteacher and classically trained pianist. They were supportive of their daughter's passion for reading and writing. Brooks was thirteen when her first published poem, "Eventide," appeared in American Childhood; by the time she was seventeen she was publishing poems frequently in the Chicago Defender, a newspaper serving Chicago's black population. Her poems in A Street in Bronzeville and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Annie Allen were "devoted to small, carefully cerebrated, terse portraits of the Black urban poor," (Richard K. Barksdale in Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays). Brooks once described her style as "folksy narrative," but she varied her forms, using free verse, sonnets, and other models. ... In Annie Allen, which follows the experiences of a black girl as she grows into adulthood, Brooks deals further with social issues, especially the role of women, and experimented with her poetry, with one section of the book being an epic poem, "The Anniad"—a play on The Aeneid. Langston Hughes, in a review of Annie Allen for Voices, remarked that "the people and poems in Gwendolyn Brooks' book are alive, reaching, and very much of today." In the 1950s Brooks published her first and only novel, Maud Martha, which details a black woman's life in short vignettes. It is "a story of a woman with doubts about herself and where and how she fits into the world. Maud's concern is not so much that she is inferior but that she is perceived as being ugly," related Harry B. Shaw in Gwendolyn Brooks. Maud suffers prejudice not only from whites but also from blacks who have lighter skin than hers, something that mirrors Brooks's experience. Eventually, Maud takes a stand for her own dignity by turning her back on a patronizing, racist store clerk. Brooks's later work took a far more political stance. Toni Cade Bambara reported in the New York Times Book Review that at the age of fifty "something happened to Brooks, a something most certainly in evidence in In the Mecca and subsequent works — a new movement and energy, intensity, richness, power of statement and a new stripped lean, compressed style". "Though some of her work in the early 1960s had a terse, abbreviated style, her conversion to direct political expression happened rapidly after a gathering of black writers at Fisk University in 1967," Jacqueline Trescott reported in the Washington Post. Brooks herself noted that the poets there were committed to writing as blacks, about blacks, and for a black audience. If many of her earlier poems had fulfilled this aim, it was not due to conscious intent, she said; but from this time forward, Brooks thought of herself as an African determined not to compromise social comment for the sake of technical proficiency. Although In the Mecca and Brooks's subsequent works have been characterized as tougher and possessing what a Virginia Quarterly Review critic called "raw power and roughness," several commentators emphasized that these poems are neither bitter nor vengeful. Instead, according to Cook, they are more "about bitterness" than bitter in themselves. A mother has lost a small daughter in the block-long ghetto tenement, the Mecca; the long poem traces her steps through the building, revealing her neighbors to be indifferent or insulated by their own personal obsessions. The mother finds her little girl, who "never learned that black is not beloved," who "was royalty when poised, / sly, at the A and P's fly-open door," under a Jamaican resident's cot, murdered. Other poems in the book, occasioned by the death of Malcolm X or the dedication of a mural of black heroes painted on a Chicago slum building, express the poet's commitment to her people's awareness of themselves as a political as well as a cultural entity. Brooks's activism and her interest in nurturing black literature led her to leave major publisher Harper & Row in favor of fledgling black publishing companies. Later Brooks poems continue to deal with political subjects and figures, such as South African activist Winnie Mandela, the onetime wife of antiapartheid leader — and later president of the country — Nelson Mandela. Brooks once told Contemporary Literature interviewer George Stavros: "I want to write poems that will be non-compromising. I don't want to stop a concern with words doing good jobs, which has always been a concern of mine, but I want to write poems that will be meaningful . . . things that will touch them." Still, Brooks's work was objective about human nature, several reviewers observed. Proving the breadth of Brooks's appeal, poets representing a wide variety of "races and . . . poetic camps" gathered at the University of Chicago to celebrate the poet's seventieth birthday in 1987, Gibbons reported. Brooks brought them together, he said, "in . . . a moment of good will and cheer." In recognition of her service and achievements, a junior high school in Harvey, Illinois, was named for her, and she was similarly honored by Western Illinois University's Gwendolyn Brooks Center for African-American Literature.
[from Ramazani intro]
Once thought of as a mere entertainer, Jamaican writer Louise Bennett has
emerged as the preeminent West Indian poet of Creole verse. Varieties of
Creole, everyday speech in the WI, were forged by Caribbean slaves in the
17th and 18th c. from English dialects, other European lgs, and African lgs
such as Twi and Wwe. Early in life, Bennett chose to write and perform
poetry in Creole, even though both the British who colonized Jamaica from
1655 to 1962 and middle-class Jamaicans saw it as a corrupti0on of Standard
English.
Bennett was not recognised as a poet until the late 1960s because she worked
in Jamaican English. The Jamaican Poetry League excluded her from its
meetings, and editors failed to include her in anthologies. Now acknowledged
as a crucial precursor for a wide range of Caribbean poets - from "literary"
poets such as Kamau Braithwaite and Lorna Goodison to "dub," or performance,
poets - Bennett "persisted writing in dialect in spite of all the
opposition", as she told an interviewer, "because nobody else was doing so
and there was such rich material in the dialect that i felt I wanted to put
on paper some of the wonderful things that people say in dialect. You could
never say 'look here' as vividly as 'kuyah'." [AM: German 'kup mal'] Creole
allowed her to "express" herself "so much more strongly and vividly than in
Standard English"; it seemed "rich in wit an dhumour" because the "nature of
Jamaican dialect is the nature of comedy" ("Bennett on Bennett"). Since
Bennett's use of this oral lg can at first present foreign readers with
difficulties, she has been seen as a more "local" poet than, say, fellow
W Indian Derek Walcott. But her vital characters, humorous situations, and
robust imagination help overcome these barriers.
Bennett ... enriches English-lg poetry with the phonemic wit and play of
Creole words such as boonoonoonoos for "pretty" and boogooyagga for
"worthless". Some of her poems directly address problems of non-Standard lg
and status, as when the wry speaker of "Dry-Foot Bwoy" deflates the
pretensions of a Jamaican boy who tries to mimic British English. This
situation is reversed in the dramatic monologue "No Lickle Twang" which
directs irony towards the speaker; because she wishes he had returned from
his stay in the US with symbols of an improved status, including Standard
English, a mother absurdly asks her son to call his father by what she
imagines is a Standard English word, "Poo".
Bennett writes many poems from the perspective of the trickster - she likens
herself to a major trickster of the WI - the spider-hero Anancy, whose wily
ways in lg and deed often land him in trouble, but help him fool his
adversaries. Like the crafty "Jamaica Oman [woman]" and South Parade
Peddler, Bennett's typically female tricksters cunningly subvert the
hierarhies that would rob them of power. "Pass fi white", a poem built
around multiple puns on the word _pass, ridicules both imperialist racial
tendencies and a Jamaican's foolish entrapment in them. In "Colonizn in
reverse", B ironically inverts Britain's xenophobic apprehension at the
influx of Jamaican migrants... Independence: B pokes fun at the
commodification of nationalist symbols...
b. 1919 in Kingston, mother dressmaker, father, baker, died when she was 7.
While still in H.School began performing Creole poetry, making her debut
performance at 19. B brought out her first book of poetry, Dialect Verses,
in 1942, and next year, she started publishing poetry on a weekly basis in
the Jamaica national newspaper, the _Gleaner. 1945-47 attended Royal Academy
of Dramatic Art in London on a Brit Council fellowship. Returned homesick
to J to teach high school drama for two years. Returned to britain - worked
on Caribbean program for BBC, then lived in US 1953-55, in NY environs.
Married longtime associate Eric Coverley in 1954, returned to J next year.
Also created her own regular radio show, "Miss Lou's Views" 1966-82, and a
children's TV program, "Ring Ding" (1970-82). Performed dramatic renditions
of plays, folk songs, and pantomime, sometimes before tens of 1000s. In
early 1980s moved to N. Am, living in Toronto Canada. d.2006
Hairnet! Scissors! Fine-teet comb! - Whe de nice lady deh? Buy a scissors from me no, lady? Hair pin? Tootpase? Goh weh! Me say go-weh aready, ef Yuh doan like it, see me. Yuh dah swell like bombin plane fun - [Fund] Yuh soon bus up like Graf Spee. [German battleship blown up by own captain, 1939] Yuh favour - Shoeslace! Powder puff! Clothes hanger! Belt! Pen knife! Buy something no, nice young-man, Buy a hairnet fi yuh wife, Buy someting wid de change, no, sah An meck de Lawd bless yuh! Me no sell farden hair curler, sah! [farthing] Yuh fas and facety to! [fast and rude, too] Teck yuh han' outa me box! Pudung me razor blade! [Put down] Yuh no got no use fi it, for yuh Dah suffer from hair raid! [pun on "air raid"] Nice boonoonoonoos lady, come, [pretty (endearment)] Me precious, come dis way. Hair pin? yes mah, tank yuh, yuh is De bes one fi de day. Toot-brush? Ah beg yuh pardon sah - Me never see yuh mout: Dem torpedo yeh teet, sah, or Yuh female lick dem out? Noh bodder pick me up, yaw, sah! Yeh face look like a seh Yuh draw it outa lucky box. Noh bodder me - go weh! One police man dah come, but me Dah try get one more sale. Shoeslace! Tootpase! buy quick, no, sah! Yuh waan me go a jail? Ef dah police ever ketch we, Lize, We peddler career dun. Pick up yuh foot eena yuh han. Hair pin! Hair curler! Run!!
Miss Jane jus hear from Merica - Her daughter proudly write Fi seh she fail her exam, but She passin dere fi white! She seh fi tell de trute she know Her brain part not so bright - She couldn paa tru college So she try fi pass fi white. She passin wid her work-mate-dem, She passin wid her boss, An a nice white bwoy she love dah gwan Wid her like seh she pass! [She's passing with her coworkers, passing with her boss, and passing with a nice boy she loves who's going along with her as though she had passed.] But sometime she get fretful and Her heart start gallop fas An she bruck out eena cole-sweat Jussa wonder ef she pass! Jane get bex seh she sen de gal Fi learn bout edication. It look like seh de gal gawn weh Gawn work pon her complexion. She no haffi tan a foreign [she doesn't have to stay abroad] Under dat deh strain an fright For plenty copper-colour gal Deh home yah dah play white. [yah = here] Her fambily is nayga, but [nigger, pejorative in Jamaican] Dem pedigree is right - She hope de gal no gawn an tun No boogooyagga white. [low-class, worthless] De gal puppa dah laugh an seh It serve Merica right - Five year back dem Jim-Crow him, now [Five years ago they prosecuted him with Jim Crow laws, Dem pass him pickney white. now they pass his child (pickney) as white] Him dah boast all bout de distric How him daughter is fus-class, How she smarter dan American An over deh dah pass! Some people tink she pass B.A., Some tink she pass D.R. - Wait till dem fine out seh she ongle [only] Pass de colour bar.
Me glad fi see yuh come back, bwoy, But lawd, yuh let me dung [down] Me shame a yuh so till all a Me proudness drop a grung. [ground] Yuh mean yuh go dah Merica An spen six whole mont deh, An come back not a piece better Dan how yuh did go weh? Bwoy, yuh no shame? Is so yuh come? After yuh tan so lang! Not even lickle language, bwoy? Not even lickle twang? An yuh sister what work ongle [only] One week wid Merican She talk so nice now dat we have De jooce fi understan? [deuce] Bwoy, yuh couldn improve yuhself! An yuh get so much pay? Yuh spen six mont a foreign, an Come back ugly same way? Not even a drapes trousiz, or [trousers in style in 40s] A pass de riddim coat? [coat coming down past (pass) rhythm section (buttocks), popular with US returnees] Bwoy, not even a gole teet or [gold tooth] A gole chain roun yuh troat? Suppose me laas me pass go introjooce [laas me pass = lose my path] Yuh to a stranger As me lamented son what lately Come from Merica! Dem hooda laugh after me, bwoy! Me couldn tell dem so! Dem hooda seh me lie, yuh wasa Spen time back a Mocho! [Mocho: name, indicates place of extreme backwardness] No back-answer me, bwoy - yuh talk Too bad! Shet up yuh mout! Ah doan know how yuh an yuh puppa [Papa] Gwine to meck it out. Ef yuh waan please him, meck him tink Yuh bring back someting new. Yuh always call him 'Pa' - dis evenin When him comes seh 'Poo’. [Poo = a version of Papa; part of a street vendor's cry; baby word for feces. Since Jamaican creole often turns Std Engl o sounds into a sounds, the speaker is hyper-correcting. "Pa", she seems to think, must be a Creole usage (corruption) to be corrected]. source: http://louisebennett.com/newsdetails.asp?NewsCat=2&NewsID=5 see also : biography by Mervyn Morris
from http://louisebennett.com/bio.asp Louise Bennett was born on September 7, 1919. She was a Jamaican poet and activist. From Kingston, Jamaica Louise Bennett remains a household name in Jamaica, a "Living Legend" and a cultural icon. She received her education from Ebenezer and Calabar Elementary Schools, St. Simon's College, Excelsior College, Friends College (Highgate). Although she lived in Toronto, Canada for the last decade she still receives the homage of the expatriate West Indian community in the north as well as a large Canadian following. She was described as Jamaica's leading comedienne, as the "only poet who has really hit the truth about her society through its own language", and as an important contributor to her country of "valid social documents reflecting the way Jamaicans think and feel and live" Through her poems in Jamaican patois, she raised the dialect of the Jamaican folk to an art level which is acceptable to and appreciated by all in Jamaica. In her poems she was able to capture all the spontaneity of the expression of Jamaicans' joys and sorrows, their ready, poignant and even wicked wit, their religion and their philosophy of life. Her first dialect poem was written when she was fourteen years old. A British Council Scholarship took her to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art where she studied in the late 1940's. Bennett not only had a scholarship to attend the academy but she auditioned and won a scholarship. After graduation she worked with repertory companies in Coventry, Huddersfield and Amersham as well as in intimate revues all over England. On her return to Jamaica she taught drama to youth and adult groups both in social welfare agencies and for the University of the West Indies Extra Mural Department. She lectured extensively in the United States and the United Kingdom on Jamaican folklore and music and represented Jamaica all over the world. She married Eric Winston Coverley in 1954 (who died in 2002) and has one stepson and several adopted children. She enjoys Theatre, Movies and Auction sales. Her contribution to Jamaican cultural life was such that she was honored with the M.B.E., the Norman Manley Award for Excellence (in the field of Arts), the Order of Jamaica (1974) the Institute of Jamaica's Musgrave Silver and Gold Medals for distinguished eminence in the field of Arts and Culture, and in 1983 the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of the West Indies. In September 1988 her composition "You're going home now", won a nomination from the Academy of Canadian Cinema ad Television, for the best original song in the movie "Milk and Honey." In 1998 she received the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters from York University, Toronto, Canada. The Jamaica Government also appointed her Cultural Ambassador at Large for Jamaica. On Jamaica's independence day 2001, Bennett-Coverley was appointed as a Member of the Order of Merit for her distinguished contribution to the development of the Arts and Culture.
Unbridled licentiousness with no holds barred, Immediate and mutual lust, satisfiable In the heat, upon demand, aroused again And satisfied again, lechery unlimited. Till space runs out at the bottom of the page And another pair of lovers, forever young, Prepotent, endlessly receptive, renews The daylong, nightlong, interminable grind. How decent it is, and how unlike our lives Where "fuck you" is a term of vengeful scorn And the murmur of "sorry, partner" as often heard As ever in mixed doubles or at bridge. Though I suspect the stuff is written by Elderly homosexuals manacled to their Machines, it's mildly touching all the same, A reminiscence of the life that was in Eden Before the Fall, when we were beautiful And shameless, and untouched by memory: Before we were driven out to the laboring world Of the money and the garbage and the kids In which we read this nonsense and are moved At all that was always lost for good, in which We think about sex obsessively except During the act, when our minds tend to wander.
One by one they appear in the darkness: a few friends, and a few with historical names. How late they start to shine! but before they fade they stand perfectly embodied, all the past lapping them like a cloak of chaos. They were men who, I thought, lived only to renew the wasteful force they spent with each hot convulsion. They remind me, distant now. True, they are not at rest yet, but now they are indeed apart, winnowed from failures, they withdraw to an orbit and turn with disinterested hard energy, like the stars.
I shall not soon forget The greyish-yellow skin To which the face had set: Lids tights: nothing of his, No tremor from within, Played on the surfaces. He still found breath, and yet It was an obscure knack. I shall not soon forget The angle of his head, Arrested and reared back On the crisp field of bed, Back from what he could neither Accept, as one opposed, Nor, as a life-long breather, Consentingly let go, The tube his mouth enclosed In an astonished O.
English poet... long-time resident of California. ... While Gunn wrote most of his early verses in iambic pentameter — a phase when his ambition was "to be the John Donne of the twentieth century"—his more recent works assume a variety of forms, including syllabic stanzas and free verse. The course of Gunn's development is recorded in Selected Poems 1950-1975, in which "the language begins as English and progresses toward American," according to Nation reviewer Donald Hall. ... His father was a journalist and his mother was a writer with socialist sympathies. Gunn's early life was peripatetic; after his parents' divorce when he was nine, he traveled with his father to various assignments and, as a consequence, attended a number of different schools. After completing his initial schooling, he served in the British Army for two years; then he lived in Paris, where he read Proust and wrote fiction. At Trinity College, Cambridge he concentrated on writing poetry and published the collection Fighting Terms in 1954. His early poetry — with its unembarrassed presentations of love as interpersonal combat and its focus on the upheavals of war and the freedom of life on the road — was considered violent compared to the tradition of gentility that existed in the 1940s. The young Gunn felt more at home in California, where he studied poetry with Yvor Winters and lived with his homosexual lover. Village Voice contributor Mark Caldwell claimed that Gunn's experiences have been notably less tame than his poems might suggest. "If he belongs to a nation it is San Francisco; or perhaps homosexuality is his country — but I do not find him pledging allegiance to anything except his own alert, unforgiving, skeptical independence," Hall observed in a Los Angeles Times Book Review piece about Gunn. ... Gunn's masterful fusion of "modern" and "traditional" elements has brought him critical acclaim. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, M. L. Rosenthal praised Selected Poems 1950-1975, noting that "Gunn has developed his craft so that by now even his freest compositions have a disciplined music." Echoing this sentiment, New York Review of Books critic Stephen Spender suggested that the contradiction between the "conventional form" of Gunn's poems and their "often Californian 'with it' subject matter" is what distinguishes his work. Frank representations of violence, deviance, and the life of the counterculture based in San Francisco connect with "yesterday and tomorrow" in Gunn's art, remarked Charles Champlin in an article for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. "It is," Spender elaborated, "as though A. E. Housman were dealing with the subject matter of Howl, or Tennyson were on the side of the Lotus Eaters." In a Poetry article, Robert B. Shaw speculated that Gunn's fluctuation between metrical poems and free verse reflects an internal struggle: "On the one hand, the poet feels the attraction of a life ruled by traditional, even elitist values, and by purely individual preferences a private life in the classic sense, the pursuit of happiness. On the other hand, he feels a visionary impulse to shed his isolated individuality and merge with a larger whole." Commenting on the same tension in Gunn's work, Jay Parini noted in the Massachusetts Review that rule and energy, the two forces Winters once advised Gunn to keep in view, "potentially counterdestructive principles, exist everywhere in [Gunn's] work, not sapping the poems of their strength but creating a tensed climate of balanced opposition. Any poet worth thinking twice about possesses at least an energetic mind; but it is the harnessing of this energy which makes for excellence. In Gunn's work an apparently unlimited energy of vision finds, variously, the natural boundaries which make expression — and clarity — possible."
Ugandan poet. Anthropologist who studied at Oxford. (see http://www.geocities.com/africanwriters/AuthorsP.html]
On the surface, it is a poem where a wife is complaining about her husband having taken up another lover. But it is also a diatribe against the loss of identity in postcolonial Africa, where the elite is taking up the ways of the west. The poem refers to many traditional Acoli rituals and proverbs to keep a sense of tradition, which it sees as being endangered by the ways of the husband and her new lover. from http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2008/05/thursday-poem.html: In 1969, Song of Lawino was published. It is written in the style of a traditional Acholi song. It is an Acholi wife's lament about her college-educated husband, who has rejected Acholi traditions and ideas for Western ones. Much of Lawino's anger is directed at her husband's lover who embodies these Western values and customs, and who she contrasts with herself. In Song of Ocal, her husband responds to her, decrying what he perceives as Africa's backwardness, and extoling the virtues of European society and ideas. Lawino and Ocal's debate reflects the discourse taking place at the time in African societies about the implications of adopting Western culture and ideals. Other works, including Song of A Prisoner (1971) and Song of Malaya (1971) are written in the same poetic style. Okot p'Bitek has been criticized by other African writers, including Ngugi wa Thiong'o, for not adequately addressing the underlying causes of Africa's problems. Okot, however, believed that his work, like all good African literature, dealt honestly with the human condition and had "deep human roots." You kiss her open-sore lips As white people do, You suck slimy saliva From each other's mouths As white people do. [From the face of the insistent Western clock, dangles] a large single testicle [which] goes this way and that way like sausage fruit in a windy storm. in the excerpt below, I have used "**" instead of a black dot in the text.
1. My Husband's Tongue Is Bitter
Husband, now you despise me
Now you treat me with spite
And say I have inherited the stupidity of my aunt;
Son of the Chief,
Now you compare me
with the rubbish in the rubbish pit,
You say you no longer want me
Because I am like the things left behind
In the deserted homestead.
You insult me
You laugh at me
You say I do not know the letter A
Because I have not been to school
And I have not been baptized
You compare me with a little dog,
A puppy.
My friend, age-mate of my brother,
Take care,
Take care of your tongue,
Be careful what your lips say.
First take a deep look, brother,
You are now a man
You are not a dead fruit!
To behave like a child does not befit you!
Listen Ocol, you are the son of a Chief,
Leave foolish behavior to little children,
It is not right that you should be laughed at in a song!
Songs about you should be songs of praise!
Stop despising people
As if you were a little foolish man.
Stop treating me like salt-less ash,
Become barren of insults and stupidity;
Who has ever uprooted the pumpkin?
[salt-less ash, salt extracted from ash of certain plants or dung of
domestic animals. The ash is put in a container with holes, and
water pouered through. The salty water is collected, and the useless
saltless ash is then thrown on the pathway and people tread on it. -
- Okot p'Bitek's Note]
["pumpkin" : Acoli proverb - "Te okono pe kiputo", the roots of the
pumpkin is never uprooted. - pumpkin symbolizes household tradition
http://www.africanevents.com/AfricanQuotes1.htm ]
**
My clansmen, I cry
Listen to my voice:
The insults of my man
Are painful beyond bearing.
My husband abuses me together with my parents;
He says terrible things about my mother
And I am so ashamed!
He abuses me in English
And he is so arrogant.
He says I am rubbish,
He no longer wants me!
In cruel jokes he laughs at me,
He says I am primitive
Because I cannot play the guitar,
He says my eyes are dead
And I cannot read,
He says my ears are blocked
And cannot hear a single foreign word,
That I cannot count the coins.
He says I am like sheep,
The fool.
Ocol treats me
As if I am no longer a person,
He says I am silly
Like the ojuu insects that sit on the beer pot.
My husband treats me roughly.
The insults:
Words cut more painfully than sticks!
He says my mother is a witch,
That my clansmen are fools
Because they eat rats,
He says we are all Kaffirs.
We do not know the ways of God,
We sit in deep darkness
And do not know the Gospel,
He says my mother hides her charms
In her necklace
And that we are all sorcerers.
My husband's tongue
Is bitter like the roots of the lyonno lily,
It is hot like the penis of the bee,
Like the sting of the kalang! [a large fruit bat]
Ocol's tongue is fierce like the arrow of the scorpion,
Deadly like the spear of the buffalo-hornet.
It is ferocious
Like the poison of a barren woman
And corrosive like the juice of the gourd.
**
My husband pours scorn
On Black People,
He behaves like a hen
That eats its own eggs
A hen that should be imprisoned under a basket.
His eyes grow large
Deep black eyes
Ocol's eyes resemble those of the Nile Perch!
He becomes fierce
Like a lioness with cubs,
He begins to behave like a mad hyena.
He says Black People are primitive
And their ways are utterly harmful,
Their dances are mortal sins
They are ignorant, poor and diseased!
Ocol says he is a modern man,
A progressive and civilized man,
He says he has read extensively and widely
And he can no longer live with a thing like me
Who cannot distinguish between good and bad,
He says I am just a village woman,
I am of the old type,
And no longer attractive.
He says I am blocking his progress,
My head, he says,
Is as big as that of an elephant
But it is only bones,
There is no brain in it,
He says I am only wasting his time.
Ocol rejects the old type.
He is in love with a modern woman,
He is in love with a beautiful girl
Who speaks English.
But only recently
We would sit close together, touching each other!
Only recently I would play
On my bow-harp
Singing praises to my beloved.
Only recently he promised
That he trusted me completely.
I used to admire him speaking in English.
**
Ocol is no longer in love with the old type.
He is in love with a modern girl;
The name of the beautiful one
Is Clementine.
Brother, when you see Clementine!
The beautiful one aspires
To look like a white woman;
Her lips are red-hot
Like glowing charcoal,
She resembles the wild cat
That has dipped its mouth in blood,
Her mouth is like raw yaws [yaws: infection with ulcerating lesions]
It looks like an open ulcer,
Like the mouth of a fiend!
Tina dusts powder on her face
And it looks so pale;
She resembles the wizard
Getting ready for the midnight dance;
She dusts the ash-dirt all over her face
And when little sweat
Begins to appear on her body
She looks like the guinea fowl!
The smell of carbolic soap
Makes me sick,
And the smell of powder
Provokes the ghosts in my head;
It is then necessary to fetch a goat
From my mother's brother.
The sacrifice over
The ghost-dance drum must sound
The ghost be laid
And my peace restored.
I do not like dusting myself with powder.
The thing is good on pink skin
Because it is already pale,
But when a black woman has used it
She looks as if she has dysentery;
Tina looks sickly
And she is slow moving,
She is a piteous sight.
Some medicine has eaten up Tina's face;
The skin on her face is gone
And it is all raw and red,
The face of the beautiful one
Is tender like the skin of a newly born baby!
And she believes
That this is beautiful
Because it resembles the face of a white woman!
Her body resembles
The ugly coat of the hyena;
Her neck and arms
Have real human skins!
She looks as if she has been struck
By lightning;
Or burnt like kongoni
In a fire hunt.
And her lips look like bleeding,
Her hair is long,
Her head is huge like that of the owl,
She looks like a witch,
Like someone who has lost her head
And should be taken
To the clan shrine!
Her neck is rope-like,
Thin, long and skinny
And her face sickly pale.
**
Forgive me, brother,
Do not think I am insulting
The woman with whom I share my husband!
Do not think my tongue
Is being sharpened by jealousy.
It is the sight of Tina
That provokes sympathy from my heart.
I do not deny
I am a little jealous.
It is no good lying,
We all suffer from a little jealousy.
It catches you unawares
Like the ghosts that bring fevers;
It surprises people
Like earth tremors;
But when you see the beautiful woman
With whom I share my husband
You feel a little pity for her!
Her breasts are completely shriveled up,
They are all folded dry skins,
They have made nests of cotton wool
And she folds the bits of cow-hide
In the nests
and calls them breasts!
O! my clansmen
How aged modern women
Pretend to be young girls!
They mold the tips of the cotton nests
So that they are sharp
And with these they prick
The chests of their men!
And the men believe
They are holding the waists
Of young girls that have just shot up!
The modern type sleeps with their nests
Tied firmly on their chests.
How many kids
Has this woman suckled?
The empty bags on her chest
Are completely flattened, dried.
Perhaps she has aborted many!
Perhaps she has thrown her twins
in the pit latrine!
Is it the vengeance ghosts
Of the many smashed eggs
That have captured her head?
How young is the age-mate of my mother?
**
The woman with whom I share my husband
Walks as if her shadow
Has been captured,
You can never hear
Her footsteps;
She looks as if
She has been ill for a long time!
Actually she is starving
She does not eat
She says she fears getting fat,
That the doctor has prevented her
From eating,
She says a beautiful woman
Must be slim like a white woman;
And when she walks
You hear her bones rattling,
Her waist resembles that of the hornet.
The beautiful one is dead dry
Like a stump,
She is meatless
Like a shell
On a dry riverbed.
**
But my husband despises me,
He laughs at me,
He says he is too good
To be my husband.
Ocol says he is not
The age-mate of my grandfather
To live with someone like me
Who has not been to school.
He speaks with arrogance,
Ocol is bold;
He says these things in broad daylight.
He says there is no difference
Between me and my grandmother
Who covers herself with animal skins.
**
I am not unfair to my husband,
I do not complain
Because he wants another woman
Whether she is young or aged!
Who has ever prevented men
From wanting women?
Who has discovered the medicine for thirst?
The medicines for hunger
And anger and enmity,
Who has discovered them?
In the dry season the sun shines
And rain falls in the wet season.
Women hunt for men
And men want women!
When I have another woman
With whom I share my husband,
I am glad
A woman who is jealous
Of another, with whom she shares a man,
Is jealous because she is slow,
Lazy and shy,
Because she is cold, weal, clumsy!
The competition for a man's love
Is fought at the cooking place
And when he returns from the field
Or from the hunt,
You win him with a hot bath
And sour porridge.
The wife who brings her meal first
Whose food is good to eat,
Whose dish is hot
Whose face is bright
And whose heart is clean
And whose eyes are not dark
Like the shadows,
The wife who jokes freely
Who eats in the open
Not in the bedroom,
One who is not dull
Like stale beer,
Such is the woman who becomes
The head dress-keeper.
I do not block my husband's path
From his new wife.
If he likes, let him build for her
An iron-roofed house on the hill!
I do not complain,
My grass-thatched house is enough for me.
I am not angry
With the woman with whom
I share my husband,
I do not fear to compete with her.
All I ask
Is that my husband should stop the insults,
My husband should refrain
From heaping abuses on my head.
He should stop being half-crazy,
And saying terrible things about my mother.
Listen Ocol, my old friend,
The ways of your ancestors
Are good,
Their customs are solid
And not hollow
They are not thin, not easily breakable
They cannot be blown away
By the winds
Because their roots reach deep into the soil.
I do not understand
The ways of foreigners
But I do not despise their customs.
Why should you despise yours?
Listen, my husband,
You are the son of a Chief.
The pumpkin in the old homestead
Must not be uprooted!
Song of Lawino: A Lament (1966) poem, translation of a Acoli / Luo original
Wer pa Lawino ("The Defence of Lawino"), which was actually published
later, in 1969).
Okot p'Bitek (1931-1982). Okot p'Bitek was born in Gulu, the largest town in Acholi town in Uganda in 1931. He began writing at an early age. Okot played for the Ugandan national soccer team, and in 1958, he remained in England after a soccer tour to continue his education. He received a certificate in education from Bristol University, and earned a law degree from University College of Wales at Aberystwyth. In the early 1960's he studied social anthropology at Oxford, and received a B.Litt. He returned to Uganda to teach at Makerere University in Kampala. In 1967, he went to teach at Nairobi University. He died of a liver infection in 1982. In 1953, he wrote his first novel, Lak Tar (White Teeth). It is the story of a young Acholi man who must work away from home to earn money for bridewealth, so that he may marry. After working in Kampala and on a sugar plantation, he returns home with only a small portion of the necessary sum. On his return trip, he is pick pocketed, and returns to Gulu with nothing. In 1969, Song of Lawino was published. It is written in the style of a traditional Acholi song. It is an Acholi wife's lament about her college-educated husband, who has rejected Acholi traditions and ideas for Western ones. Much of Lawino's anger is directed at her husband's lover who embodies these Western values and customs, and who she contrasts with herself. In Song of Ocal, her husband responds to her, decrying what he perceives as Africa's backwardness, and extoling the virtues of European society and ideas. Lawino and Ocal's debate reflects the discourse taking place at the time in African societies about the implications of adopting Western culture and ideals. Other works, including Song of A Prisoner (1971) and Song of Malaya (1971) are written in the same poetic style. Okot p'Bitek has been criticized by other African writers, including Ngugi wa Thiong'o, for not adequately addressing the underlying causes of Africa's problems. Okot, however, believed that his work, like all good African literature, dealt honestly with the human condition and had "deep human roots."
(Carol Ann Duffy is the UK Poet Laureate since may 09) I had grieved. I had wept for a night and a day over my loss, ripped the cloth I was married in from my breasts, howled, shrieked, clawed at the burial stones until my hands bled, retched his name over and over again, dead, dead. Gone home. Gutted the place. Slept in a single cot, widow, one empty glove, white femur in the dust, half. Stuffed dark suits into black bags, shuffled in a dead man's shoes, noosed the double knot of a tie around my bare neck, gaunt nun in the mirror, touching herself. I learnt the Stations of Bereavement, the icon of my face in each bleak frame; but all those months he was going away from me, dwindling to the shrunk size of a snapshot, going, going. Till his name was no longer a certain spell for his face. The last hair on his head floated out from a book. His scent went from the house. The will was read. See, he was vanishing to the small zero held by the gold of my ring. Then he was gone. Then he was legend, language; my arm on the arm of the schoolteacher-the shock of a man's strength under the sleeve of his coat- along the hedgerows. But I was faithful for as long as it took. Until he was memory. So I could stand that evening in the field in a shawl of fine air, healed, able to watch the edge of the moon occur to the sky and a hare thump from a hedge; then notice the village men running towards me, shouting, behind them the women and children, barking dogs, and I knew. I knew by the sly light on the blacksmith's face, the shrill eyes of the barmaid, the sudden hands bearing me into the hot tang of the crowd parting before me. He lived. I saw the horror on his face. I heard his mother's crazy song. I breathed his stench; my bridegroom in his rotting shroud, moist and dishevelled from the grave's slack chew, croaking his cuckold name, disinherited, out of his time.
My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn't, dammit: No tears. I'm stone. I'm flesh. My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. I turn this way--the stone lets me go. I turn that way--I'm inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again, depending on the light to make a difference. I go down the 58,022 names, half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke. I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap's white flash. Names shimmer on a woman's blouse but when she walks away the names stay on the wall. Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's wings cutting across my stare. The sky. A plane in the sky. A white vet's image floats closer to me, then his pale eyes look through mine. I'm a window. He's lost his right arm inside the stone. In the black mirror a woman's trying to erase names: No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
On Fridays he'd open a can of Jax After coming home from the mill, & ask me to write a letter to my mother Who sent postcards of desert flowers Taller than men. He would beg, Promising to never beat her Again. Somehow I was happy She had gone, & sometimes wanted To slip in a reminder, how Mary Lou Williams' "Polka Dots & Moonbeams" Never made the swelling go down. His carpenter's apron always bulged With old nails, a claw hammer Looped at his side & extension cords Coiled around his feet. Words rolled from under the pressure Of my ballpoint: Love, Baby, Honey, Please. We sat in the quiet brutality Of voltage meters & pipe threaders, Lost between sentences . . . The gleam of a five-pound wedge On the concrete floor Pulled a sunset Through the doorway of his toolshed. I wondered if she laughed & held them over a gas burner. My father could only sign His name, but he'd look at blueprints & say how many bricks Formed each wall. This man, Who stole roses & hyacinth For his yard, would stand there With eyes closed & fists balled, Laboring over a simple word, almost Redeemed by what he tried to say. source: ibiblio
Preface to the Third Edition xxxiii
Acknowledgments xxxix
Introduction xliii
CHARLES OLSON (1910--1970) USA 1 (14)
Pacific Lament 3
The Thing Was Moving 4
The Maximus Poems 6
I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You 6
Maximus, to Himself 9
Maximus, to Gloucester, Letter 19 (A 11
Pastoral Letter
Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 12
[Withheld]
[Sun / Right in My Eye] 14
ELIZABETH BISHOP (1911--1979) USA 15 (16)
The Map 17
The Man-Moth 18
The Monument 19
The Fish 21
Roosters 23
At the Fishhouses 26
Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete 28
Concordance
Sestina 30
The Armadillo 31
Brazil, January 1, 1502 32
In the Waiting Room 34
Crusoe in England 36
Poem 40
The End of March 41
One Art 43
North Haven 44
MAY SWENSON (1913--1989) USA 45 (7)
Question 46
The Centaur 46
A Couple 48
Unconscious Came a Beauty 49
Staring at the Sea on the Day of the 49
Death of Another
Last Day 50
Strawberrying 50
In Love Made Visible 51
ROBERT HAYDEN (1913--1980) USA 52 (16)
Middle Passage 54
Homage to the Empress of the Blues 59
Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday 59
Witch Doctor 60
Those Winter Sundays 62
Night, Death, Mississippi 62
Elegies for Paradise Valley 64
Bone-Flower Elegy 67
KARL SHAPIRO (1913--2000) USA 68 (4)
The Fly 69
The First Time 70
Manhole Covers 71
The Piano Tuner's Wife 71
DELMORE SCHWARTZ (1913--1966) USA (NYC) 72 (3)
In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave 73
The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me 74
The Mind Is an Ancient and Famous Capital 74
MURIEL RUKEYSER (1913--1980) USA (NYC) 75 (8)
The Book of the Dead 76
Absolom 76
Alloy 78
Boy with His Hair Cut Short 79
Night Feeding 80
The Conjugation of the Paramecium 80
The Poem as Mask 82
Poem 82
WILLIAM STAFFORD (1914--1993) USA 83 (2)
Traveling through the Dark 83
At the Bomb Testing Site 84
For the Grave of Daniel Boone 84
RANDALL JARRELL (1914--1965) USA 85 (7)
90 North 86
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner 87
Eighth Air Force 87
Next Day 88
Thinking of the Lost World 90
JOHN BERRYMAN (1914--1972) USA 92 (9)
The Dream Songs 93
1 (``Huffy Henry hid the day'') 93
4 (``Filling her compact & delicious body'') 94
14 (``Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.'') 14
29 (``There sat down, once, a thing on 95
Henry's heart'')
37 Three around the Old Gentleman 95
76 Henry's Confession 96
145 (``Also I love him: me he's done no wrong'') 97
149 (``This world is gradually becoming a place'') 97
153 (``I'm cross with god who has 98
wrecked this generation.'')
219 So Long? Stevens 98
312 (``I have moved to Dublin to have 99
it out with you'')
384 (``The marker slants, flowerless, 100
day's almost done'')
Henry's Understanding 100
DYLAN THOMAS (1914--1953) UK (Wales) 101 (10)
The force that through the green fuse 102
Drives the Flower
And Death Shall Have No Dominion 103
The Hand That Signed the Paper 103
When All My Five and Country Senses See 104
Twenty-Four Years 104
The Hunchback in the Park 105
Poem in October 106
A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of 107
a Child in London
Fern Hill 108
In my craft or sullen art 110
Do not go gentle into that good night 110
JUDITH WRIGHT (1915--2000) Aus 111 (4)
Bora Ring 112
Drought Year 112
Flood Year 113
Ishtar 113
Request to a Year 114
``Dove--Love'' 114
P. K. PAGE (b. 1916) Canada 115 (4)
The Stenographers 116
Photos of a Salt Mine 117
Deaf-Mute in the Pear Tree 118
ROBERT LOWELL (1917--1977) USA 119 (21)
The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket 121
After the Surprising Conversions 125
Grandparents 126
Commander Lowell 127
Waking in the Blue 129
Memories of West Street and Lepke 130
``To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage'' 132
Skunk Hour 132
For the Union Dead 134
Waking Early Sunday Morning 136
Reading Myself 138
Dolphin 139
Epilogue 139
GWENDOLYN BROOKS (1917--2000) USA 140 (10)
A song in the front yard 141
Sadie and Maud 142
Of de Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln cemetery 143
The Vacant Lot 143
The Rites for Cousin Vit 144
The Bean Eaters 144
We Real Cool 145
The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett 145
Till
Boy Breaking Glass 145
The Blackstone Rangers 146
The Boy Died in My Alley 148
ROBERT DUNCAN (1919--1988) USA (SanFrisco) 150 (8)
Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow 151
Poetry, a Natural Thing 152
Passage over Water 153
What I Saw 153
Up Rising, Passages 25 154
Childhood's Retreat 156
Rites of Passage 156
II (``Something is taking place.'') 156
A Little Language 157
WILLIAM MEREDITH (b. 1919) USA 158 (4)
Last Things 159
Parents 160
Dying Away 161
LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI (b. 1919) USA NYC 162 (5)
[In Goya's Greatest Scenes We Seem to See] 163
Dog 164
Retired Ballerinas, Central Park West 166
LOUISE BENNETT (b. 1919) JAMAICA 167 (11)
South Parade Peddler 168
Pass fi White 169
No Lickle Twang 170
Dry-Foot Bwoy 172
Colonization in Reverse 173
Independance 174
Independence Dignity 175
Jamaica Oman 177
HOWARD NEMEROV (1920--1991) USA 178 (5)
The Goose Fish 179
The Icehouse in Summer 180
Snowflakes 181
Gyroscope 181
Reading pornography in old Age 182
AMY CLAMPITT (1920--1994) USA 183 (13)
Beach Glass 184
Meridian 185
A Procession at Candlemas 186
Beethoven, Opus 111 190
Hispaniola 193
Syrinx 194
RICHARD WILBUR (b. 1921) USA 196 (6)
The Death of a Toad 196
Ceremony 197
Boy at the Window 197
Love Calls Us to the Things of This World 198
Playboy 199
The Writer 200
A Finished Man 201
A Barred Owl 201
KINGSLEY AMIS (1922--1995) UK 202 (3)
Against Romanticism 202
An Ever-Fixed Mark 203
Science Fiction 204
DONALD DAVIE (1922--1995) UK 205 (5)
Remembering the Thirties 206
Across the Bay 207
In California 208
In the Stopping Train 209
(``The things he has been spared . . .'') 209
(``Time and again he gave battle'') 209
PHILIP LARKIN (1922--1985) UK 210 (17)
Reasons for Attendance 211
Water 212
Church Going 212
An Arundel Tomb 214
The Whitsun Weddings 215
Faith Healing 217
MCMXIV 218
Talking in Bed 218
Here 219
Sunny Prestatyn 220
Solar 220
High Windows 221
Sad Steps 221
Homage to a Government 222
The Explosion 223
This Be The Verse 223
Forget What Did 224
Going, Going 224
Aubade 226
ANTHONY HECHT (b. 1923) USA 227 (7)
Birdwatchers of America 228
A Hill 229
``It Out-Herods Herod. Pray You, Avoid It.'' 230
The Deodand 231
The Book of Yolek 233
JAMES DICKEY (1923--1997) USA 234 (6)
The Hospital Window 235
The Heaven of Animals 236
Buckdancer's Choice 237
The Sheep Child 238
ALAN DUGAN (b. 1923) USA 240 (3)
Love Song: I and Thou 240
Fabrication of Ancestors 241
On Being a Householder 242
Internal Migration: On Being on Tour 242
For Euthanasia and Pain-Killing Drugs 243
LOUIS SIMPSON (b. 1923) JAMAICA 243 (4)
The Battle 224
My Father in the Night Commanding No 245
American Poetry 246
White Oxen 246
DENISE LEVERTOV (1923--1997) UK/USA 247 (9)
Pleasures 248
The Dog of Art 249
Song for Ishtar 249
The Ache of Marriage 250
September 1961 250
Olga Poems
i (``By the gas-fire, kneeling'') 251
iv (``On your hospital bed you lay'') 252
vi (``Your eyes were the brown gold of 252
pebbles under water.'')
A Time Past 253
Caedmon 254
Celebration 255
[Scraps of Moon] 255
Aware 255
RICHARD HUGO (1923--1982) USA 256 (5)
The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir 257
Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg 258
White Center 259
KENNETH KOCH (1925--2002) USA 261 (8)
Mending Sump 261
Geography 262
Variations on a Theme 264
by William Carlos Williams
Days and Nights 265
The Stones of Time 265
One Train May Hide Another 267
To the Roman Forum 268
Maxine Kumin (b. 1925) USA 269 (5)
How It Is 270
Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief 270
In the Absence of Bliss 271
The Bangkok Gong 273
Letters 274
(``Your laugh, your scarves, the gloss 274
of your makeup'')
DONALD JUSTICE (b. 1925) USA 274 (6)
On the Death of Friends in Childhood 275
The Grandfathers 275
After a Phrase Abandoned by Wallace Stevens 276
The Tourist from Syracuse 276
Men at Forty 277
Variations on a Text by Vallejo 278
In Memory of the Unknown Poet, Robert 279
Boardman Vaughn
Nostalgia and Complaint of the 279
Grandparents
W. D. SNODGRASS (b. 1926) USA 280 (8)
April Inventory 281
Heart's Needle 283
3 (``The child between them on the street'') 283
8 (``I thumped on you the best I could'') 284
A Flat One 285
A. R. AMMONS (1926--2001) USA 288 (17)
So I Said I Am Ezra 290
Corsons Inlet 290
Gravelly Run 293
Laser 294
Love Song 295
Small Song 295
The City Limits 295
Easter Morning 296
Motion's Holdings 298
Tombstones
1 (``the chisel, chipping in'') 299
11 (``the grooves fill with moss'') 299
19 (``the things of earth are not objects'') 299
27 (``a flock of'') 299
29 (``the letters'') 300
Garbage
2 (``garbage has to be the poem of our time because'') 300
Strip
43 (``sometimes I get the feeling I've never'') 304
JAMES MERRILL (1926--1995) USA 305 (20)
The Broken Home 307
Days of 1964 309
The Victor Dog 311
Lost in Translation 313
The Changing Light at Sandover
The Book of Ephraim 318
Z 318
b o d y 320
Self-Portrait in Tyvek(™) Windbreaker 320
An Upward Look 324
ROBERT CREELEY (b. 1926) 325 (9)
Naughty Boy 326
A Wicker Basket 327
The Door 327
I Know a Man 330
For Love 330
``I Keep to Myself Such Measures . . .'' 332
Again 333
Mother's Voice 333
Life & Death
[The Long Road of It All] 333
[When It Comes] 334
ALLEN GINSBERG (1926--1997) USA 334 (24)
Howl 337
A Supermarket in California 344
Sunflower Sutra 345
America 347
From Kaddish 349
To Aunt Rose 352
Last Night in Calcutta 353
Mugging 354
Sphincter 357
Personals Ad 357
DAVID WAGONER (b. 1926) USA 358 (3)
The Man of the House 358
Elegy for a Forest Clear-Cut by the 359
Weyerhaeuser Company
A Young Girl with a Pitcher Full of Water 360
By a Waterfall 360
FRANK O'HARA (1926-1966) USA 361 (9)
Poem (``The eager note on my door said 'Call me'') 362
Poem (``At night Chinamen jump'') 363
A Step Away from Them 363
The Day Lady Died 365
Rhapsody 366
A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island 367
Why I Am Not a Painter 369
Les Luths 370
ROBERT BLY (b. 1926) USA 370 (5)
Johnson's Cabinet Watched by Ants 371
The Great Society 372
My Father's Wedding 373
Kneeling Down to Peer into a Culvert 374
A Week after Your Death 375
CHARLES TOMLINSON (b. 1927) UK 375 (6)
Cezanne at Aix 376
Mr Brodsky 377
Two Views of Two Ghost Towns 378
Swimming Chenango Lake 379
Snapshot 380
GALWAY KINNELL (b. 1927) USA 381 (3)
First Song 382
After Making Love We Hear Footsteps 382
On the Oregon Coast 383
Sheffield Ghazal 4: Driving West 384
JOHN ASHBERY (b. 1927) USA 384 (24)
Some Trees 386
The Instruction Manual 387
The Tennis Court Oath 389
These Lacustrine Cities 390
Soonest Mended 391
Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a 393
Landscape
As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat 394
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror 395
Wet Casements 406
Paradoxes and Oxymorons 407
At North Farm 407
Of the Light 408
W. S. MERWIN (b. 1927) USA 408 (6)
The Drunk in the Furnace 410
The Hydra 411
Some Last Questions 411
For the Anniversary of My Death 412
The Asians Dying 412
For a Coming Extinction 413
A Given Day 414
JAMES WRIGHT (1927--1980) USA 414 (8)
Saint Judas 416
Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio 416
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's 417
Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
A Blessing 417
The Minneapolis Poem 418
In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest 420
Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia,
Has Been Condemned
Small Frogs Killed on the Highway 420
A Centenary Ode: Inscribed to Little 421
Crow, Leader of the Sioux Rebellion in
Minnesota, 1862
PHILIP LEVINE (b. 1928) USA 422 (5)
They Feed They Lion 423
Belle Isle, 1949 424
You Can Have It 424
Drum 426
THOMAS KINSELLA (b. 1928) 427 (4)
Baggot Street Deserta 427
Je t'adore 429
Mirror in February 429
Songs of the Psyche
1 (``A character, indistinct, entered'') 430
ANNE SEXTON (1928-1974) 431 (7)
Her Kind 432
The Truth the Dead Know 433
All My Pretty Ones 433
The Starry Night 435
The Death of the Fathers
How We Danced 435
The Death Baby
Dreams 436
The Room of My Life 437
A. K. RAMANUJAN (1929--1993) 438 (11)
Self-Portrait 439
Elements of Composition 440
Alien 442
Drafts 442
Extended Family 444
Chicago Zen 446
Foundlings in the Yukon 447
RICHARD HOWARD (b. 1929) 449 (7)
``Man Who Beat Up Homosexuals Reported to 449
Have AIDS Virus''
My Last Hustler 455
ADRIENNE RICH (b. 1929) 456 (28)
Aunt Jennifer's Tigers 459
Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law 459
Face to Face 463
Orion 464
Planetarium 465
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning 466
Diving into the Wreck 467
Power 469
Twenty-One Love Poems 470
Grandmothers 479
Seven Skins 481
Fox 483
THOM GUNN (b. 1929) 484 (6)
My Sad Captains 485
Moly 485
Still Life 486
The Missing 487
A Blank 488
The Problem 489
JOHN HOLLANDER (b. 1929) 490 (4)
Under Cancer 490
Adam's Task 491
Back to Town 492
Variations on a Fragment Trumbull Stickney 492
By Heart 493
DEREK WALCOTT (b. 1930) 494 (40)
A Far Cry from Africa 496
Laventille 497
The Sea Is History 500
The Schooner Flight 502
The Fortunate Traveller 514
The Season of Phantasmal Peace 519
Omeros 520
(`` 'This is how, one sunrise, we cut 520
down them canoes.''')
(`` 'Mais qui ca qui rivait-'ous, 522
Philoctete?''')
(``The Cyclone, howling because one of 523
the lances'')
(`` `Walk me down to the wharf.''') 526
(``He remembered this sunburnt river 528
with its spindly'')
(``She bathed him in the brew of the 531
root. The basin'')
(``I sang of quiet Achille, Afolabe's 533
son'')
GARY SNYDER (b. 1930) 534 (8)
Milton by Firelight 536
Above Pate Valley 537
Riprap 537
Burning the Small Dead 538
The Wild Edge 539
The Bath 539
Axe Handles 541
KAMAU BRATHWAITE (b. 1930) 542 (13)
The Arrivants 544
Wings of a Dove 544
Calypso 548
Ogun 549
Trane 551
Stone 551
Irae 554
CHRISTOPHER OKIGBO (1930?--1967) 555 (3)
Heavensgate 556
[Before You, Mother Idoto] 556
[Dark Waters of the Beginning.] 556
[Bright] 557
[I Am Standing above the Noontide] 557
Come Thunder 558
TED HUGHES (1930--1998) 558 (13)
The Horses 559
The Thought-Fox 561
An Otter 561
Pike 562
Thistles 564
Second Glance at a Jaguar 564
Gog 565
Out 566
Wodwo 567
Crow's First Lesson 568
Roe Deer 569
Orf 569
Orts
17. Buzz in the Window 570
OKOT P'BITEK (1931--1982) 571 (10)
From Song of Lawino
1. My Husband's Tongue Is Bitter 573
2. The Woman with Whom I Share My Husband 575
GEOFFREY HILL (b. 1932) 581 (12)
In Memory of Jane Fraser 582
Two Formal Elegies 583
Ovid in the Third Reich 584
September Song 584
Funeral Music 585
6 (``My little son, when you could command marvels'') 585
8 (``Not as we are but as we must appear'') 585
Mercian Hymns 586
I-II 586
IV-VII 587
X-XI 588
XVI 589
XXV 590
XXIX-XXX 590
The Mystery of the Charity of Charles 591
Peguy
1 (``Crack of a starting-pistol. Jean Jaures'') 591
To the High Court of Parliament 592
The Triumph of Love
CXXI (``So what is faith if it is not'') 592
SYLVIA PLATH (1932--1963) 593 (22)
The Disquieting Muses 595
Metaphors 597
The Colossus 597
Morning Song 598
In Plaster 599
Tulips 600
Blackberrying 602
Elm 602
The Arrival of the Bee Box 604
The Applicant 605
Daddy 606
Fever 103° 608
Cut 609
Poppies in October 611
Ariel 611
Lady Lazarus 612
Edge 614
AUDRE LORDE (1934--1992) 615 (5)
Coal 616
Now that I Am Forever with Child 617
Love Poem 617
From the House of Yemanja 618
Hanging Fire 619
A Question of Climate 620
MARK STRAND (b. 1934) 620 (6)
Keeping Things Whole 621
Eating Poetry 621
The Prediction 622
In Celebration 622
Elegy for My Father
6. The New Year 623
Poor North 624
The Idea 624
Dark Harbor
XX (``Is it you standing among the olive trees'') 625
XXX (``There is a road through the canyon'') 625
WOLE SOYINKA (b. 1934) 626 (6)
Telephone Conversation 627
Death in the Dawn 628
Around Us, Dawning 629
Massacre, October '66 630
Dragonfly at My Windowpane 631
AMIRI BARAKA (b. 1934) 632 (8)
An Agony. As Now 634
A Poem for Speculative Hipsters 635
A Poem for Black Hearts 635
Legacy 636
A New Reality Is Better Than a New Movie! 636
Wise, Why's, Y's 638
Wise I 638
Y The Link Will Not Always Be 638
``Missing'' #40
In the Funk World 639
Monk's World 639
CHARLES WRIGHT (b. 1935) 640 (12)
Blackwater Mountain 642
Stone Canyon Nocturne 643
Clear Night 643
Homage to Paul Cezanne 644
Laguna Blues 648
Apologia Pro Vita Sua 648
I (``How soon we come to road's end--'') 648
Stray Paragraphs in February, Year of the Rat 651
MARY OLIVER (b. 1935) 652 (3)
The Black Snake 653
August 653
Hawk 654
MARGE PIERCY (b. 1936) 655 (3)
The Cyclist 656
Learning Experience 656
The Cast Off 657
Moonburn 658
LUCILLE CLIFTON (b. 1936) 658 (6)
[still] 659
cutting greens 660
homage to my hips 660
[i am accused of tending to the past] 661
at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, 661
south carolina, 1989
poem to my uterus 662
to my last period 663
cain 663
leda 3 663
the mississippi river empties into the 664
gulf
JUNE JORDAN (1936-2002) 664 (5)
Notes on the Peanut 665
July 4, 1984: For Buck 666
DeLiza Spend the Day in the City 667
The Reception 668
TONY HARRISON (b. 1937) 669 (19)
The School of Eloquence 670
Heredity 671
On Not Being Milton 671
Book Ends 672
Turns 673
Marked with D. 674
Timer 674
Self Justification 675
History Classes 675
v. 676
SUSAN HOWE (b. 1937) 688 (10)
Thorow 689
[Elegiac Western Imagination] 689
[Cannot Be] 690
[Gabion] 691
Ruckenfigur 692
MICHAEL S. HARPER (b. 1938) 698 (7)
American History 699
We Assume: On the Death of Our Son, 699
Reuben Masai Harper
Reuben, Reuben 700
Deathwatch 700
Dear John, Dear Coltrane 702
Nightmare Begins Responsibility 703
Double Elegy 704
CHARLES SIMIC (b. 1938) 705 (7)
Fork 706
Watch Repair 706
A Wall 707
Prodigy 708
Classic Ballroom Dances 709
Spoons with Realistic Dead Flies on Them 709
Eastern European Cooking 710
Northern Exposure 710
Cameo Appearance 711
Head of a Doll 711
LES MURRAY (b. 1938) 712 (8)
The Powerline Incarnation 713
The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle
3 (``It is good to come out after 714
driving and walk on bare grass;'')
6 (``Barbecue smoke is rising at Legge's Camp; it is 715
steaming into the midday air'')
8 (``Forests and State Forests, all down off the 715
steeper country; mosquitoes are always living in
there:'')
12 (``Now the sun is an applegreen blindness 716
through the swells, a white blast on the sea
face, flaking and shoaling;'')
The Milk Lorry 717
On Removing Spiderweb 718
Mollusc 718
Corniche 718
Cotton Flannelette 719
SEAMUS HEANEY (b. 1939) 720 (30)
Digging 723
Death of a Naturalist 724
Requiem for the Croppies 725
Bogland 725
The Tollund Man 726
Bog Queen 728
The Grauballe Man 729
Punishment 731
The Strand at Lough Beg 732
Casualty 733
In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge 736
Station Island 738
VIII (``Black water. White waves. 738
Furrows snowcapped.'')
XII (``Like a convalescent, I took the 739
hand'')
Alphabets 741
Terminus 743
The Stone Verdict 744
Clearances 745
At Toomebridge 748
Electric Light 748
FRANK BIDART (b. 1939) 750 (9)
Ellen West 750
If I Could Mourn Like a Mourning Dove 759
A Coin for Joe, with the Image of a 760
Horse; c. 350--325 BC
MICHAEL LONGLEY (b. 1939) 760 (5)
Casualty 761
Wounds 762
Detour 763
Ceasefire 763
The Comber 764
Death of a Horse 764
The Beech Tree 765
MARGARET ATWOOD (b. 1939) 765 (9)
This Is a Photograph of Me 766
[You Fit into Me] 767
They Eat Out 767
Circe / Mud Poems 768
[Men with the Heads of Eagles] 768
Footnote to the Amnesty Report on Torture 769
Miss July Grows Older 770
Manet's Olympia 772
Morning in the Burned House 773
EUNICE DE SOUZA (b. 1940) 774 (4)
Sweet Sixteen 775
De Souza Prabhu 775
Conversation Piece 776
Women in Dutch Painting 776
For Rita's Daughter, Just Born 776
Landscape 777
ROBERT PINSKY (b. 1940) 778 (7)
The Figured Wheel 779
The Questions 780
The Uncreation 782
ABC 783
The Haunted Ruin 784
ROBERT HASS (b. 1941) 785 (3)
Song 785
Meditation at Lagunitas 786
Privilege of Being 787
Forty Something 788
Sonnet 788
LYN HEJINIAN (b. 1941) 788 (10)
My Life
A pause, a rose, a something on paper 789
As for we who ``love to be astonished'' 790
It seemed that we had hardly begun and 791
we were already there
Oxota: A Short Russian Novel
Chapter Seven 793
Chapter 203 793
The Cell
[It Is the Writer's Object] 794
[Yesterday I Saw the Sun] 794
From Happily 795
DEREK MAHON (b. 1941) 798 (8)
Afterlives 799
The Snow Party 800
The Last of the Fire Kings 801
A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford 802
An Bonnan Bui 804
A Swim in Co. Wicklow 805
SHARON OLDS (b. 1942) 806 (5)
Photograph of the Girl 807
The Pope's Penis 807
The Moment the Two Worlds Meet 808
The Exact Moment of His Death 808
My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead 809
Once 810
MARILYN HACKER (b. 1942) 811 (4)
Rondeau after a Transatlantic Telephone 811
Call
Taking Notice 812
13 (``No better lost than any other 812
woman'')
Almost Aubade 812
Year's End 813
Twelfth Floor West 814
DAVE SMITH (b. 1942) 815 (3)
Leafless Trees, Chickahominy Swamp 815
Fiddlers 816
Wreck in the Woods 817
Blowfish and Mudtoad 817
Black Silhouettes of Shrimpers 817
LOUISE GLUCK (b. 1943) 818 (8)
The School Children 819
The Drowned Children 819
Descending Figure 820
Mock Orange 821
A Fantasy 822
The Wild Iris 823
Penelope's Song 823
Quiet Evening 824
Vita Nova 824
Earthly Love 825
MICHAEL PALMER (b. 1943) 826 (5)
Song of the Round Man 827
This Time 828
Sun (``Write this. We have burned all 829
their villages'')
MICHAEL ONDAATJE (b. 1943) 831 (6)
Biography 832
Letters & Other Worlds 832
(Inner Tube) 834
Driving with Dominic in the Southern 835
Province We See Hints of the Circus
Buried 835
(``To be buried in times of war'') 835
Buried 2 836
vii (``The heat of explosions'') 836
JAMES TATE (b. 1943) 837 (7)
Stray Animals 837
The Blue Booby 838
The Wheelchair Butterfly 839
The Lost Pilot 840
The Motorcyclists 841
Poem 842
Where Babies Come From 843
EAVAN BOLAND (b. 1944) 844 (8)
Anorexic 845
Domestic Interior 846
Night Feed 846
Mise Eire 847
Fever 848
The Women 849
Fond Memory 850
The Pomegranate 851
CRAIG RAINE (b. 1944) 852 (3)
The Onion, Memory 853
A Martian Sends a Postcard Home 854
NORMAN DUBIE (b. 1945) 855 (3)
Elizabeth's War with the Christmas Bear 856
The Funeral 857
Last Poem, Snow Tree 857
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA (b. 1947) 858 (6)
Starlight Scope Myopia 859
Tu Do Street 860
Facing It 861
February in Sydney 862
My Father's Love Letters 863
LORNA GOODISON (b. 1947) 864 (11)
On Becoming a Mermaid 865
Guinea Woman 866
Nanny 867
Annie Pengelly 868
Turn Thanks to Miss Mirry 871
Hungry Belly Kill Daley 873
Bam Chi Chi Lala 873
AI (b. 1947) 875 (4)
Twenty-Year Marriage 876
Killing Floor 876
Sleeping Beauty 878
LESLIE MARMON SILKO (b. 1948) 879 (8)
[Long Time Ago] 880
Prayer to the Pacific 884
Toe'osh: A Laguna Coyote Story 885
AGHA SHAHID ALI (1949--2001) 887 (7)
Postcard from Kashmir 889
The Dacca Gauzes 889
Leaving Sonora 890
I See Chile in My Rearview Mirror 891
Ghazal 893
The Country without a Post Office 894
Lenox Hill 896
JAMES FENTON (b. 1949) 898 (7)
A German Requiem 899
Dead Soldiers 901
God, a Poem 903
For Andrew Wood 904
GRACE NICHOLS (b. 1950) 905 (4)
Epilogue 906
Invitation 906
Tropical Death 907
Wherever I Hang 908
CHARLES BERNSTEIN (b. 1950) 909 (6)
Autonomy Is Jeopardy 910
The Kiwi Bird in the Kiwi Tree 910
From The Lives of the Toll Takers 911
Have Pen, Will Travel 914
CAROLYN FORCHE (b. 1950) 915 (4)
Taking Off My Clothes 916
The Memory of Elena 916
Reunion 917
The Colonel 918
JORIE GRAHAM (b. 1950) 919 (14)
At Luca Signorelli's Resurrection of the 920
Body
Fission 923
The Dream of the Unified Field 927
The Surface 931
The Swarm 932
ANNE CARSON (b. 1950) 933 (10)
From The Glass Essay 934
TV Men 939
XI (``TV is presocial, like Man.'') 939
Epitaph: Zion 940
Lazarus Standup: Shooting Script 940
Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions 942
MEDBH MCGUCKIAN (b. 1950) 943 (4)
Slips 944
The Dream-Language of Fergus 945
The War Ending 946
Captain Lavender 946
Mantilla 947
JOY HARJO (b. 1951) 947 (5)
Deer Dancer 948
Mourning Song 950
Insomnia and the Seven Steps to Grace 950
The Path to the Milky Way Leads through 951
Los Angeles
PAUL MULDOON (b. 1951) 952 (17)
Hedgehog 953
Lunch with Pancho Villa 954
Anseo 956
Why Brownlee Left 957
Quoof 957
Meeting the British 957
7, Middagh Street 958
Wystan 958
Salvador 962
The Briefcase 964
Cauliflowers 965
The Sonogram 966
Aftermath 967
The Grand Conversation 967
GARY SOTO (b. 1952) 969 (5)
After Tonight 969
The Drought 970
Graciela 971
Oranges 971
How Things Work 973
Practicing Eulogies 973
RITA DOVE (b. 1952) 974 (13)
Geometry 976
The House Slave 976
Adolescence---II 976
Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black 977
Dove
Parsley 979
Thomas and Beulah 981
The Event 981
Dusting 982
Weathering Out 983
The Great Palaces of Versailles 984
Wingfoot Lake 985
After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen 986
for the Third Time before Bed
Claudette Colvin Goes to Work 986
ALBERTO RIOS (b. 1952) 987 (6)
Madre Sofia 988
Mi Abuelo 990
A Man Then Suddenly Stops Moving 991
Anselmo's Moment with God 992
The Death of Anselmo Luna 992
MARK DOTY (b. 1953) 993 (6)
A Green Crab's Shell 994
Homo Will Not Inherit 995
The Embrace 998
THYLIAS MOSS (b. 1954) 999 (5)
Lunchcounter Freedom 1000
Interpretation of a Poem by Frost 1001
The Rapture of Dry Ice Burning off Skin 1001
as the Moment of the Soul's Apotheosis
Crystals 1003
LOUISE ERDRICH (b. 1954) 1004(5)
Family Reunion 1005
Captivity 1006
Windigo 1008
The Fence 1009
LORNA DEE CERVANTES (b. 1954) 1009(4)
Cannery Town in August 1010
The Body as Braille 1011
Refugee Ship 1011
Poema para los Californios Muertos 1012
MARILYN CHIN (b. 1955) 1013(5)
How I Got That Name 1013
Altar 1016
Autumn Leaves 1016
Chinese Quatrains (The Woman in Tomb 44) 1017
CATHY SONG (b. 1955) 1018(7)
Beauty and Sadness 1019
Lost Sister 1020
Sunworshippers 1022
Ghost 1023
CAROL ANN DUFFY (b. 1955) 1025(5)
Warming Her Pearls 1026
The Good Teachers 1027
Medusa 1028
Mrs Lazarus 1029
DIONISIO D. MARTINEZ (b. 1956) 1030(4)
Hysteria 1031
Temporary Losses 1032
Moto Perpetuo 1033
The Prodigal Son in His Own Words: Bees 1034
HENRI COLE (b. 1956) 1034(5)
Harvard Classics 1035
Buddha and the Seven Tiger Cubs 1036
White Spine 1037
Folly 1038
Childlessness 1039
LI-YOUNG LEE (b. 1957) 1039(6)
The Gift 1040
Persimmons 1041
Eating Alone 1043
Eating Together 1044
Pillow 1044
SHERMAN ALEXIE (b. 1966) 1045(8)
Evolution 1046
On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City 1046
Tourists 1047
How to Write the Great American Indian 1049
Novel
Crow Testament 1050
POETICS
CHARLES OLSON
Projective Verse (1950) 1053
DYLAN THOMAS
Poetic Manifesto (w. 1951) 1061
PHILIP LARKIN
The Pleasure Principle (1957) 1067
From Introduction to All What Jazz 1069
(1970)
FRANK O'HARA
Personism: A Manifesto (w. 1959) 1072
ALLEN GINSBERG
Notes Written on Finally Recording Howl 1074
(1959)
AMIRI BARAKA
From The Myth of a ``Negro Literature'' 1077
(1963)
DENISE LEVERTOV
Some Notes on Organic Form (1965) 1081
ADRIENNE RICH
When We Dead Awaken: Writing as 1086
Re-Vision (1971)
SEAMUS HEANEY
Feeling into Words (w. 1974) 1096
LOUISE BENNETT
Jamaica Language (w. 1979--81) 1109
CHARLES BERNSTEIN
Semblance (1980) 1111
A. K. RAMANUJAN
From Where Mirrors Are Windows: Toward 1115
an Anthology of Reflections (1989)
DEREK WALCOTT
The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory (1992) 1119
Selected Bibliographies 1133
Permissions Acknowledgments 1181
Index 1195
A new edition of the acclaimed anthology —- the most comprehensive collection of twentieth-century poetry in English available. "The most acute rendering of an era's sensibility is its poetry," wrote the editors in their preface to the first edition. Thirty years later, this thorough and sensitive revision freshly renders the remarkable range of styles, subjects, and voices in English-language poetry, from Walt Whitman and Thomas Hardy in the late nineteenth century to Carol Ann Duffy and Sherman Alexie in the twenty-first century. With 195 poets and 1,596 poems, The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry richly represents the major figures — Yeats, Frost, Stevens, Williams, Hughes, Olson, Bishop, Larkin, Plath, Rich, Heaney, and Walcott, among others. It also gives full voice to postcolonial and transnational poets, ethnic American poetries, experimental traditions, and the long poem. Each volume concludes with a Poetics section that provides essential contexts for reading the poems. With substantially new introductions, headnotes, annotations, and bibliographies by the award-winning scholar and teacher Jahan Ramazani, this anthology is indispensable for all who love poetry.
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