A Song in the Front Yard
The Boy Died in my Alley
Robert Lowell (1917 – 1977)
Reading Myself
Keith Douglas (1920 – 1944)
Vergissmeinnicht
Howard Nemerov (1920 – 1991)
Gyroscope
Money
Snowflakes
Hayden Carruth (b. 1921)
Little Citizen, Little Survivor
Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)
A Summer Morning
Philip Larkin (1922 – 1985)
An Arundel Tomb
Talking In Bed
This Be the Verse
James Dickey (1923 – 1997)
The Heaven of Animals
The Sheep Child
Alan Dugan (1923 – 2003)
How We Heard the Name
Love Song: I and Thou
Denise Levertov (1923 – 1997)
Consulting the Oracle
From a Plane
Lisel Mueller (b. 1924)
Imaginary Paintings
Reader
Silence and Dancing
The Story
Widow
Roberto Juarroz (1925 – 1995)
Any movement kills something
Donald Justice (1925 – 2004)
American Sketches
In Bertram’s Garden
Carolyn Kizer (b. 1925)
Bitch
The Ashes
Robert Creeley (1926 – 2005)
Heaven
I Know a Man
I’ll Win
Old Days
Place (“There’s a Way out”)
Thanksgiving’s Done
Galway Kinnell (b. 1927)
St. Francis and the Sow
James Wright (1927 – 1980)
A Blessing
Beginning
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
Irving Feldman (b. 1928)
The Dream
Donald Hall (b. 1928)
My mother said
Names of Horses
The Porcelain Couple
Philip Levine (b. 1928)
Belle Isle, 1949
Sweet Will
Anne Sexton (1928 – 1974)
Her Kind
from The Death of the Fathers: 2.How We Danced
With Mercy for the Greedy
Thom Gunn (1929 – 2004)
Still Life
The Reassurance
Dan Pagis (1930 – 1986)
Conversation
Izet Sarajlic (b. 1930)
Luck in Sarajevo
Gary Snyder (b. 1930)
Axe Handles
What you should know to be a poet
Derek Walcott (b. 1930)
Love after Love
Miller Williams (b. 1930)
Listen
Etheridge Knight (1931 – 1991)
The Idea of Ancestry
The Warden Said to Me the Other Day
Tanikawa Shuntaro (b. 1931)
A Rudimentary Explanation of an Ideal Poem
from With Silence My Companion
From My Father’s Death
The Naif
Adrian Mitchell (b. 1932)
A Puppy Called Puberty
Heberto Padilla (1932 – 2000)
Landscapes
Alden Nowlan (1933 – 1983)
An Exchange of Gifts
It’s Good To Be Here
Weakness
Richard Shelton (b. 1933)
The Bus to Veracruz
The Stones
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) (b. 1934)
“Wise I”
Rutger Kopland (b. 1934)
Natzweiler
Mark Strand (b. 1934)
Eating Poetry
Keeping Things Whole
Reading in Place
Paul Zimmer (b. 1934)
Zimmer’s Head Thudding Against the Blackboard
David R. Slavitt (b. 1935)
Titanic
C.K. Williams (b. 1936)
My Fly
The Dance
Gail Mazur (b. 1937)
In Houston
Diane Wakoski (b. 1937)
George Washington and the Loss of His Teeth
Robert Phillips (b. 1938)
Instrument of Choice
Charles Simic (b. 1938)
Country Fair
Fork
Northern Exposure
Prodigy
The Old World
Margaret Atwood (b. 1939)
Manet’s Olympia
Miss July Grows Older
Variations on the Word Sleep
You Fit Into Me
Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)
A Dream of Jealousy
Clearances
Punishment
ReQuiem for the Croppies
The Haw Lantern (Dedication)
Ted Kooser (b. 1939)
At the Office Early
Selecting a Reader
David Budbill (b. 1940)
Dilemma
The Three Goals
Thomas M. Disch (b. 1940)
The Cardinal Detoxes: A Play in One Act
Robert Pinsky (b. 1940)
Shirt
Billy Collins (b. 1941)
Budapest
Forgetfulness
Introduction to Poetry
Nightclub
Not Touching
Passengers
Purity
Questions About Angels
Toi Derricotte (b. 1941)
Allen Ginsberg
Stephen Dobyns (b. 1941)
Tomatoes
Eamon Grennan (b. 1941)
Detail
Gerald Locklin (b. 1941)
Late Registration
Jack Myers (b. 1941)
Jake Addresses the World from the Garden
Nancy Vieira Couto (b. 1942)
Living in the La Brea Tar Pits
Stuart Dybek (b. 1942)
Brass Knuckles
Maroon
B. H. Fairchild (b. 1942)
The Dumka
Tom Hennen (b. 1942)
Soaking Up Sun
The Life of a Day
David Huddle (b. 1942)
Holes Commence Falling
A Place for Everything
William Matthews (1942 – 1997)
A Poetry Reading at West Point
Onions
Sharon Olds (b. 1942)
I Go Back to May 1937
Once
Quake Theory
Satan Says
The Pope’s Penis
The Promise
The Space Heater
Dave Smith (b. 1942)
Pulling a Pig’s Tail
Wreck in the Woods
Sharon Bryan (b. 1943)
Beyond Recall
Philip Schultz ((b. 1945)
The Answering Machine
Ronald Wallace (b. 1945)
Thirteen
Tom Wayman (b. 1945)
Did I Miss Anything?
Adam Zagajewski (b. 1945)
Electric Elegy
Moment
Andrei Codrescu (b. 1946)
Defense of the meek
Two fragments from Three Types of Loss, Part 3
Larry Levis (1946 – 1996)
The Poem You Asked For
Brian Patten (b. 1946)
Party Piece
Maura Stanton (b. 1946)
Living Apart
Lorna Goodison (b. 1947)
Birth Stone
Kaylin Haught (b. 1947)
God Says Yes to Me
Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1947)
Blackberries
Camouflaging the Chimera
Facing It
Ode to the Maggot
Heather McHugh (b. 1948)
What He thought
Agha Shahid Ali (1949 – 2001)
; The Dacca Gauzes
Mark Halliday (b. 1949)
Get It Again
Population
Robert Hedin (b. 1949)
The Old Liberators
Joyce Sutphen (b. 1949)
Living in the Body
Bruce Weigl (b. 1949)
What Saves Us
Claribel Alegria (b. 1950)
Documentary
Charles Bernstein (b. 1950)
Of Time and the Line
Jorie Graham (b. 1950)
Salmon
Michael Pettit (b. 1950)
Driving Lesson
Brigit Pegeen Kelly (b. 1951)
The White Pilgrim: Old Christian Cemetery
Timothy Russell (b. 1951)
In Simili Materia
Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill (b. 1952)
Ceist na Teangan (The Language Issue)
Sean O’Brien (b. 1952)
Rain
Shu Ting (b. 1952)
Assembly Line
Mark Irwin (b. 1953)
Woolworth’s
Richard Jones (b. 1953)
Certain People
Leaving Town after the Funeral
The Bell
Wan Chu’s Wife in Bed
Robert Kinsley (b. 1953)
A Walk Along the Old Tracks
Mark Turpin (b. 1953)
Before Groundbreak
Don Fargo & Sons
Jobsite Wind
Poem
Waiting for Lumber
Kevin Hart (b. 1954)
The Room
Molly Fisk (b. 1955)
Intrigue
On the Disinclination to Scream
The Dry Tortugas
William Roetzheim (b. 1955)
Response to Emily Dickinson’s “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!”
Fading into Background
Stretch Marks
Opera Season
Shadow Friends
Dean Young (b. 1955)
Only One of My Deaths
Mark Cox (b. 1956)
Geese
Style
Jim Daniels (b. 1956)
Wheels
Gu Gheng (1956 – 1993)
Ark
Li-Young Lee (b. 1957)
Eating Together
Persimmons
Julia Kasdorf (b. 1962)
What I Learned from My Mother
Ruth L. Schwartz (b. 1962)
The Swan at Edgewater Park
Patience Agbabi (b. 1965)
Transformatrix
Kate Clanchy (b. 1965)
War Poetry
David Berman (b. 1967)
Snow
Jackleen Holton (b. 1969)
American History
Free
Jane Flanders (b. 1984)
The House that Fear Built: Warsaw, 1943
Appendix A Notes on Meter
Index by Author
Index by Title
Index by Subject
Index to Translations
Index of First Lines
Index Pointing To Audio CD
Index Pointing From Audio CD
Acknowledgements
Introduction
This book started out as a flurry of yellow sticky notes. I was new to poetry and as I devoured hundreds of books of poetry over a four year period, I pasted yellow sticky notes on those poems I especially liked, along with jotted notes about my reaction to the poem. Eventually I decided to organize these into a single document to make it easier for me to find a particular poem I was interested in. It was a very small step from that document to this book.
A poetry book is commercially not the most practical book to write, and a broad based anthology such as this one is, perhaps, the least practical of the poetry books. So why do I think there’s a place for this book in the market? I see two primary readers for this book. I believe that for a reader relatively new to poetry (as I was a few short years ago), this is a great first book of poetry. It includes a broad cross section of poetry in terms of time written (classic versus modern versus contemporary), poetic form, and author nationality (although there is an emphasis on authors writing in English). In addition, because this book collects together many of the best loved poems of all time I view it as a good bedside companion for all poetry lovers.
I’ve included brief notes on many poems in the footnotes on each page. Each footnote includes the form of the poem, defines any unusual words, and where helpful for understanding, includes a brief note on interpretation. Poetic meter is covered in an appendix to this book, and the notes on form use terminology from that appendix.
The criteria for being included in this book are three-fold. First, I must have been exposed to the poem somewhere. I’m certainly aware that there are a large number of wonderful poems, and poets, not represented here simply because I have not yet had the pleasure of discovering their work. In those cases, I can only beg forgiveness and hold out the promise of future editions. Second, I must have liked the poem. There were no committees here, just a single editor. This means that the book will be filled with a lot of poems that are the style of poetry that I as a reader enjoy. To the extent that your taste in poetry is like mine, you will agree with my decisions. To the extent that your taste in poetry is unlike mine, you will disagree. Fortunately, my personal taste tends to be relatively broad so you are likely to find a good selection of poetic styles and subjects. Finally, the owner of the rights in the poem must have been willing to grant me the right to reprint the poem.
To better understand what I feel makes a poem good, and thereby to better understand my criteria for inclusion in this book, we need to turn to a document I wrote called “The Level Four Poetry Manifesto.”
Level Four Poetry Manifesto
Poetry can be thought of as operating at four levels.
Level One: A poem should communicate clearly to the reader at the denotative level. In other words, with even a casual reading of the poem, a non-sophisticated reader should understand this surface message. The poem should offer something to the reader at level one in payment for their time reading the poem. For example, this might be an interesting story, a memorable image, a surprise ending, or a shared emotion. Multiple readers of the poem should agree on the Level One message of the poem. Level One deals with the concrete. Level One makes the poem successful for the non-skilled reader.
Level Two: A poem should communicate subtly to the reader at the connotative level, creating a desired mood within the reader. This is accomplished through poetic techniques such as word choice with attention to connotative meaning, imagery, and music. Music may include meter, rhyme, consonance, assonance, and attention to the emotional message of various consonants, vowels, and phonemes. Level Two is focused on the skilled reader of poetry, but adds to the enjoyment for non-skilled readers as well.
Level Three: A poem may offer a separate, “hidden” message to the reader through the use of metaphor or similar techniques. In other words, all or part of the poem may represent something deeper in meaning than the surface description. The Level Three message should be recognizable to the skilled reader, and should be obvious to the non-skilled reader when it is pointed out.
Level Four: Level Four poetry uses a symbol to offer a separate, “hidden” message to the reader. Metaphors may be symbols, but symbols are not necessarily metaphors. The use of symbols in Level Four poetry has both literal and representative meanings and the representative meaning is flexible with the reader able to fill in the specific meaning that applies most closely to their personal life.
Let’s look at an example of a successful Level Four poem, Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” Here’s the poem.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other
, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
On Level One, it’s a pleasant story about a walk through the woods. It’s an enjoyable poem without delving any deeper into it than this. On Level Two he uses very clear descriptions of the woods and the paths (imagery), meter (iambic tetrameter), and rhyme. On Level Three the path and woods are a metaphor for the narrator’s life. Finally, on Level Four the fork in the path is a symbol representing (quoting HowardM2 on the Poetry Free For All Bulletin Board): “a choice between two equally desirable alternatives one of which must be given up in order to have the other.” As a symbol, this would obviously apply to many readers and would be personalized to represent individual choices they have had to make during their lives.
Notice that the poem can be appreciated by a reader at any level without any awareness that it is operating at a higher level, but that the more carefully one studies the poem the more meaning is discovered. This is the mark of a successful poem within the Level Four manifesto. All of the poems in this book are successful at levels one and two, most go to level three, and many go to level four.
The heart of the Level Four Manifesto is that each level builds on the previous levels, and levels should not be skipped if a poem is to be successful. I say this fully recognizing that some very well known poets have intentionally skipped levels and that many well known poets and poetry journals gravitate toward poetry that skips Level One. For example, Gertrude Stein often skipped Level One and focused on Level Two. Many schools of poetry skipped Levels One and Two and jumped directly to Level Three. However, I would argue that this skipping of levels is exactly why the general readership of poetry shrank during most of the Twentieth Century. New readers of poetry need to begin reading and appreciating a poem at level one, then level two, then level three, and finally fully appreciating it at level four. I believe that all poems that last hundreds of years will operate on Levels One and Two, that most will also operate on Level Three, and that many will operate on Level Four. Similarly, I believe that poets should begin writing at Level One, then add level Two, then Level Three, then Level Four.
Meter is an important concept in fully enjoying poetry, whether you are reading it aloud or silently, but fully understanding and appreciating poetic meter can be somewhat intimidating to the new reader. I’ve included notes on meter in Appendix A for those readers that are ambitious.