Introduction to Poetry

Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

they begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

Eating Poetry

Mark Strand

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.

There is no happiness like mine.

I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.

Her eyes are sad

and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.

The light is dim.

The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,

their blond legs burn like brush.

The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.

When I get down on my knees and lick her hand,

she screams.

I am a new man.

I snarl at her and bark.

I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

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Stephen Crane

In the desert

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

Who squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

I said: “Is it good, friend?”

“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it

Because it is bitter,

And because it is my heart.”

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Stephen Crane

I stood upon a high place,

And saw, below, many devils

Running, leaping,

And carousing in sin.

One looked up, grinning,

And said: “Comrade! Brother!”

The Guitarist Tunes Up

Frances Cornford

With what attentive courtesy he bent

Over his instrument;

Not as a lordly conqueror who could

Command both wire and wood,

But as a man with a loved woman might,

Inquiring with delight

What slight essential things she had to say

Before they started, he and she, to play.

Song of the Powers

David Mason

Mine, said the stone,

mine is the hour.

I crush the scissors,

such is my power.

stronger than wishes,

my power, alone.

Mine, said the paper,

mine are the words

that smother the stone

with imagined birds,

reams of them, flown

from the mind of the shaper.

Mine, said the scissors,

mine all the knives

gashing through paper’s

ethereal lives;

nothing’s so proper

as tattering wishes.

As stone crushes scissors,

as paper snuffs stone

and scissors cut paper,

all end alone.

So heap up your paper

and scissors your wishes

and uproot the stone

from the top of the hill.

They all end alone.

As you will, you will.

you fit into me

Margaret Atwood

you fit into me

like a hook into an eye

a fish hook

an open eye

Turning Pro

Ishmael Reed

There are just so many years

you can play amateur baseball

without turning pro

All of the sudden you realize

you’re ten years older than

everybody in the dugout

and that the shortstop could

be your son.

The front office complains

about your slowness in making

the line-up

They send down memos about

your faulty bunts and point out

how the runners are always faking

you out

“His ability to steal bases

has faded” they say

They say they can’t convince

the accountant that there’s such

a thing as “Old Time’s Sake”

But just as the scribes were

beginning to write you

off

as a has-been on his last leg

You pulled out that fateful

shut-out

and the whistles went off

and the fireworks scorched a

747

And your name lit up the scoreboard

and the fans carried you on their

shoulders right out of the stadium

and into the majors.

The Book

Miller Williams

I held it in my hands while he told the story.

He had found it in a fallen bunker,

a book for notes with all the pages blank.

He took it to keep for a sketchbook and diary.

He learned years later, when he showed the book

to an old bookbinder, who paled, and stepped back

a long step and told him what he held,

what he had laid the days of his life in.

It’s bound, the binder said, in human skin.

I stood turning it over in my hands,

turning it in my head. Human skin.

What child did this skin fit? What man, what woman?

Dragged still full of its flesh from what dream?

Who took it off the meat? Some other one

who stayed alive by knowing how to do this?

I stared at the changing book and a horror grew,

I stared and a horror grew, which was, which is,

how beautiful it was until I knew.

A Poison Tree

William Blake

I was angry with my friend:

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

I was angry with my foe:

I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears,

Night and morning with my tears;

And I sunned it with smiles,

And with soft, deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night

Till it bore an apple bright;

And my foe beheld it shine,

And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole

When the night had veiled the pole;

In the morning glad I see

My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

what the mirror said

Lucille Clifton

listen,

you a wonder.

you a city

of a woman.

you got a geography

of your own.

listen,

somebody need a map

to understand you.

somebody need directions

to move around you.

listen,

woman,

you not a noplace

anonymous

girl;

mister with his hands on you

he got his hands on

some

damn

body!

note, passed to superman

Lucille Clifton

sweet jesus, superman,

if i had seen you

dressed in your blue suit

i would have known you.

maybe that choirboy clark

can stand around

listening to stories

but not you, not with

metropolis to save

and every crook in town

filthy with kryptonite.

lord, man of steel,

i understand the cape,

the leggings, the whole

ball of wax.

you can trust me,

there is no planet stranger

than the one i’m from.

the lesson of the falling leaves

Lucille Clifton

the leaves believe

such letting go is love

such love is faith

such faith is grace

such grace is god

i agree with the leaves

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add,

divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wandered off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Looked up in perfect silence at the stars.

Many red devils . . .

Stephen Crane

Many red devils ran from my heart

And out upon the page.

They were so tiny

The pen could mash them.

And many struggled in the ink.

It was strange

To write in this red muck

Of things from my heart.

The Dance

William Carlos Williams

In Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess,

the dancers go round, they go round and

around, the squeal and the blare and the

tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles

tipping their bellies (round as the thick-

sided glasses whose wash they impound)

their hips and their bellies off balance

to turn them. Kicking and rolling about

the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those

shanks must be sound to bear up under such

rollicking measures, prance as they dance

in Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess.

Terence, this is stupid stuff

A. E. Housman

“Terence, this is stupid stuff:

You eat your victuals fast enough;

There can’t be much amiss, ‘tis clear,

To see the rate you drink your beer.

But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,

It gives a chap the belly-ache.

The cow, the old cow, she is dead;

It sleeps well, the horned head:

We poor lads, ‘tis our turn now

To hear such tunes as killed the cow.

Pretty friendship, ‘tis to rhyme

Your friends to death before their time

Moping melancholy mad:

Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.”

Why, if ‘tis dancing you would be

There’s brisker pipes than poetry.

Say, for what were hop-yards meant,

Or why was Burton built on Trent?

Oh, many a peer of England brews

Livelier liquor than the Muse,

And malt does more than Milton can

To justify God’s ways to man.

Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink

For fellows whom it hurts to think:

Look into the pewter pot

To see the world as the world’s not.

And faith, ‘tis pleasant till ‘tis past:

The mischief is that ‘twill not last.

Oh I have been to Ludlow fair

And left my necktie God knows where,

And carried half-way home, or near,

Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:

Then the world seemed none so bad,

And I myself a sterling lad;

And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,

Happy till I woke again.

Then I saw the morning sky:

Heigho, the tale was all a lie;

The world, it was the old world yet,

I was I, my things were wet,

And nothing now remained to do

But begin the game anew.

Therefore, since the world has still

Much good, but much less good than ill,

And while the sun and moon endure

Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,

I’d face it as a wise man would,

And train for ill and not for good.

‘Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale

Is not so brisk a brew as ale:

Out of a stem that scored the hand

I wrung it in a weary land.

But take it: if the smack is sour,

The better for the embittered hour;

It should do good to heart and head

When your soul is in my soul’s stead;

And I will friend you, if I may,

In the dark and cloudy day.

There was a king reigned in the East:

There when kings will sit to feast,

They get their fill before they think

With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.

He gathered all that springs to birth

From the many-venomed earth;

First a little, thence to more,

He sampled all her killing store;

And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,

Sate the king when healths went round.

They put arsenic in his meat

And stared aghast to watch him eat;

They poured strychnine in his cup

And shook to see him drink it up:

They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:

Them it was their poison hurt.

--I tell the tale that I heard told.

Mithridates, he died old.

A man said . . .

Stephen Crane

A man said to the universe:

“Sir, I exist!”

“However,” replied the universe,

“The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation.”

When the prophet . . .

Stephen Crane

When the prophet, a complacent fat man,

Arrived at the mountain-top

He cried: “Woe to my knowledge!

I intended to see good white lands

And bad black lands—

But the scene is gray.”

Earth

John Hall Wheelock

“A planet doesn’t explode of itself,” said dryly

The Martian astronomer, gazing off into the air—

“That they were able to do it is proof that highly

Intelligent beings must have been living there.”

The trees in the garden . . .

Stephen Crane

The trees in the garden rained flowers.

Children ran there joyously.

They gathered the flowers

Each to himself.

Now there were some

Who gathered great heaps—

--Having opportunity and skill—

Until, behold, only chance blossoms

Remained for the feeble.

Then a little spindling tutor

Ran importantly to the father, crying:

“Pray, come hither!

See this unjust thing in your garden!”

But when the father had surveyed,

He admonished the tutor:

“Not so, small sage!

This thing is just.

For, look you,

Are not they who possess the flowers

Stronger, bolder, and shrewder

Than they who have none?

Why should the strong—

--the beautiful strong—

Why should they not have the flowers?”

Sindhi Woman

Jon Stallworthy

Barefoot through the bazaar,

and with the same undulant grace

as the cloth blown back from her face,

she glides with a stone jar

high on her head

and not a ripple in her tread.

Watching her cross erect

stones, garbage, excrement, and crumbs

of glass in the Karachi slums,

I, with my stoop, reflect

they stand most straight

who learn to walk beneath a weight.

The Golf Links

Sarah N. Cleghorn

The golf links lie so near the mill

That almost every day

The laboring children can look out

And see the men at play.

I Remember the Room was Filled with Light

Judith Hemschemeyer

They were still young, younger than I am now.

I remember the room was filled with light

And moving air. I was watching him

Pick brass slivers from his hands as he did each night

After work. Bits of brass gleamed on his brow.

She was making supper. I stood on the rim

Of a wound just healing; so when he looked up

And asked me when we were going to eat

I ran to her, though she could hear. She smiled

And said, ‘Tell him . . .’ Then ‘Tell her . . .’ on winged feet

I danced between them, forgiveness in my cup,

Wise messenger of the gods, their child.

It was a dream

Lucille Clifton

in which my greater self

rose up before me

accusing me of my life

with her extra finger

whirling in a gyre of rage

at what my days had come to.

what,

i pleaded with her, could i do,

oh what could I have done?

and she twisted her wild hair

and sparked her wild eyes

and screamed as long as

i could hear her

This. This. This.

For a Lady I Know

Countee Cullen

She even thinks that up in heaven

Her class lies late and snores,

While poor black cherubs rise at seven

To do celestial chores.

Oh No

Robert Creeley

If you wander far enough

you will come to it

and when you get there

they will give you a place to sit

for yourself only, in a nice chair,

and all your friends will be there

with smiles on their faces

and they will likewise all have places.

at the cemetery,

walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989

Lucille Clifton

among the rocks

at walnut grove

your silence drumming

in my bones,

tell me your names.

nobody mentioned slaves

and yet the curious tools

shine with your fingerprints.

nobody mentioned slaves

but somebody did this work

who had no guide, no stone,

who moulders under rock.

tell me your names,

tell me your bashful names

and i will testify.

the inventory lists ten slaves

but only men were recognized.

among the rocks

at walnut grove

some of these honored dead

were dark

some of these dark

were slaves

some of these slaves

were women

some of them did this

honored work.

tell me your names

foremothers, brothers,

tell me your dishonored names.

here lies

here lies

here lies

here lies

hear

The Hat Lady

Linda Pastan

In a childhood of hats—

my uncles in homburgs and derbies,

Fred Astaire in high black silk,

the yarmulke my grandfather wore

like the palm of a hand

cradling the back of his head—

only my father went hatless,

even in winter.

And in the spring,

when a turban of leaves appeared

on every tree, the Hat Lady came

with a fan of pins in her mouth

and pins in her sleeves,

the Hat Lady came—

that Saint Sebastian of pins,

to measure my mother’s head.

I remember a hat of dove-gray felt

that settled like a bird

on the nest of my mother’s hair.

I remember a pillbox that tilted

over one eye—pure Myrna Loy,

and a navy straw with cherries caught

at the brim that seemed real enough

for a child to want to pick.

Last year when the chemicals

took my mother’s hair, she wrapped

a towel around her head. And the Hat Lady came,

a bracelet of needles on each arm,

and led her to a place

where my father and grandfather waited,

head to bare head, and Death

winked at her and tipped his cap.

Sign for my Father, Who Stressed the Bunt

David Bottoms

On the rough cut diamond,

the hand-cut field below the dog lot and barn,

we rehearsed the strict technique

of bunting. I watched from the infield,

the mound, the backstop

as your left hand climbed the bat, your legs

and shoulders squared toward the pitcher.

You could drop it like a seed

down either base line. I admired your style,

but not enough to take my eyes off the bank

that served as our center-field fence.

Years passed, three leagues of organized ball,

no few lives. I could homer

into the garden beyond the bank,

into the left-field lot of Carmichael Motors,

and still you stressed the same technique,

the crouch and spring, the lead arm absorbing

just enough impact. That whole tiresome pitch

about basics never changing,

and I never learned what you were laying down.

Like a hand brushed across the bill of a cap,

let this be the sign

I’m getting a grip on the sacrifice.

A Manifesto for the Faint-Hearted

Carole Oles

Don’t curse your hands,

the tangle of lines

there. Look how

in the deepening snow

your feet make blue fish

no one can catch.

Don’t take personally

the defection of leaves.

You can’t be abandoned

by what you never owned.

Spring will give back more

green than you can bear.

Don’t rest by the hearth

when all you’re worth

tells you Run!

If the fires within

strangle, not even suns

will comfort your bones.

You’re not so special.

The jungle’s full of animals

whose guts invert

when a stronger one parts

the camouflage, peers through

as they climb a tree.

Don’t think you’re different.

The world’s full of runts,

stutterers like yourself

who’d save all they have

not to lose it.

They lose it.

Leave trails, be separate,

dress warm, travel light.

Eat fear to grow muscle,

even Olympic champs fall.

Store advice

in a cool, dry place.

The Explosion

Philip Larkin

On the day of the explosion

Shadows pointed toward the pithead:

In the sun the slagheap slept.

Down the lane came men in pitboots

Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke,

Shouldering off the freshened silence.

One chased after rabbits; lost them;

Came back with a nest of lark’s eggs;

Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.

So they passed in beards and moleskins,

Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter,

Through the tall gates standing open.

At noon, there came a tremor; cows

Stopped chewing for a second; sun,

Scarfed as in a heat-daze, dimmed.

The dead go on before us, they

Are sitting in God’s house in comfort,

We shall see them face to face—

Plain as lettering in the chapels

It was said, and for a second

Wives saw men of the explosion

Larger than life they managed—

Gold as on a coin, or walking

Somehow from the sun towards them,

One showing the eggs unbroken.

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