Art poems
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An Ode to Himself
© Benjamin Jonson
Where dost thou careless lie,
Buried in ease and sloth?
Knowledge that sleeps doth die;
And this security,
It is the common moth
That eats on wits and arts, and oft destroys them both.
To Sir George Howland Beaumont, Bart From the South-West Coast Or Cumberland 1811
© William Wordsworth
FAR from our home by Grasmere's quiet Lake,
From the Vale's peace which all her fields partake,
Here on the bleakest point of Cumbria's shore
We sojourn stunned by Ocean's ceaseless roar;
What Light Destroys
© Andrew Hudgins
Today I’m thinking of St. Paul—St. Paul,
who orders us, Be perfect. He could have said,
A Supermarket in California
© Allen Ginsberg
What thoughts I have of you tonight Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
Killing Him: A Radio Play
© John Wesley
LISTEN TO THE RADIO PLAY
JOE, a doctoral candidate in literature
RACHEL, his fiancée
POET/CRITIC
The Child Of The Islands - Autumn
© Caroline Norton
I.
BROWN Autumn cometh, with her liberal hand
Binding the Harvest in a thousand sheaves:
A yellow glory brightens o'er the land,
Imitations of Horace
© Alexander Pope
While you, great patron of mankind, sustain
The balanc'd world, and open all the main;
Your country, chief, in arms abroad defend,
At home, with morals, arts, and laws amend;
How shall the Muse, from such a monarch steal
An hour, and not defraud the public weal?
The Rest
© Ezra Pound
Artists broken against her,
A-stray, lost in the villages,
Mistrusted, spoken-against,
To Mrs. Strangeways Horner, With A Letter From My Son;
© Mary Barber
Methinks, I see your Friendship rise,
And sparkle in your lovely Eyes.
Your Heir! (I hear you now repeat)
I long to know of your Estate.
Say--Is it an Hibernian Bog,
Where Phoebus seldom shines for Fog?
The Abencerrage : Canto II.
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
"Hamet! oh, wrong me not! - too could speak
Of sorrows - trace them on my faded cheek,
In the sunk eye, and in the wasted form,
That tell the heart hath nursed a canker-worm!
But words were idle - read my sufferings there,
Where grief is stamped on all that once was fair.
The Rights of Women
© Bliss William Carman
Yes, injured Woman! rise, assert thy right!
Woman! too long degraded, scorned, opprest;
O born to rule in partial Law's despite,
Resume thy native empire o'er the breast!
Elegy with Surrealist Proverbs as Refrain
© Dana Gioia
“Poetry must lead somewhere,” declared Breton.
He carried a rose inside his coat each day
The Village: Book I
© George Crabbe
The village life, and every care that reigns
O'er youthful peasants and declining swains;
The Diplomatic Platypus
© Patrick Barrington
I had a duck-billed platypus when I was up at Trinity,
With whom I soon discovered a remarkable affinity.
Admonition
© Sylvia Plath
If you dissect a bird
To diagram the tongue
You'll cut the chord
Articulating song.
The Boy and the Mantle
© Thomas Percy
In the third day of May,
To Carleile did come
A kind curteous child,
That cold much of wisdome.
Blue Monday
© Diane Wakoski
Blue Monday. Monday at 3:00 and
Monday at 5. Monday at 7:30 and
Monday at 10:00. Monday passed under the rippling
California fountain. Monday alone
a shark in the cold blue waters.
Morte d'Arthur
© Alfred Tennyson
To him replied the bold Sir Bedivere:
"It is not meet, Sir King, to leave thee thus,
Aidless, alone, and smitten thro' the helm.
A little thing may harm a wounded man.
Yet I thy hest will all perform at full,
Watch what I see, and lightly bring thee word."
The Ghost
© Richard Harris Barham
There stands a City,- neither large nor small,
Its air and situation sweet and pretty;
Essay on Psychiatrists
© Robert Pinsky
It's crazy to think one could describe them—
Calling on reason, fantasy, memory, eyes and ears—
As though they were all alike any more
