Poetry poems
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At The Commencement Dinner
© James Russell Lowell
'Tis a dreadful oppression, this making men speak
What they're sure to be sorry for all the next week;
Some poor stick requesting, like Aaron's, to bud
Into eloquence, pathos, or wit in cold blood,
As if the dull brain that you vented your spite on
Could be got, like an ox, by mere poking, to Brighton.
Crowds
© Charles Baudelaire
It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude; enjoying a crowd is an art; and only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming.
Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet. The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd.
Rehab by Thomas Reiter : American Life in Poetry #277 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
Here’s hoping that very few of our readers have to go through cardiac rehab, which Thomas Reiter of New Jersey captures in this poem, but if they do, here’s hoping that they come through it feeling wildly alive and singing at the tops of their lungs.
Rehab
We wear harnesses like crossing guards.
At the Edge of Town by Don Welch: American Life in Poetry #56 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-20
© Ted Kooser
When I complained about some of the tedious jobs I had as a boy, my mother would tell me, Ted, all work is honorable. In this poem, Don Welch gives us a man who's been fixing barbed wire fences all his life.
At the Edge of Town
Hard to know which is more gnarled,
the posts he hammers staples into
or the blue hummocks which run
across his hands like molehills.
Ballade to the Forgotten Poets of the Ages
© Kostas Karyotakis
And off in some far future epoch:
"What forgotten poet" I should like it to be asked
"has written such a beggarly
ballade to the forgotten poets?"
Kindness
© Sylvia Plath
Kindness glides about my house.
Dame Kindness, she is so nice!
The blue and red jewels of her rings smoke
In the windows, the mirrors
Are filling with smiles.
Table Talk
© William Cowper
A. You told me, I remember, glory, built
On selfish principles, is shame and guilt;
Marmion: Introduction to Canto III.
© Sir Walter Scott
Like April morning clouds, that pass,
With varying shadow, o'er the grass,
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: A Romaunt. Canto IV.
© George Gordon Byron
I.
I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;
Purgatorio (English)
© Dante Alighieri
To run o'er better waters hoists its sail
The little vessel of my genius now,
That leaves behind itself a sea so cruel;
A Soft Susurrus
© Franklin Pierce Adams
A soft susurrus in the night,
A song whose singer is unseen--
Coins by Richard Newman: American Life in Poetry #57 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
What purses, piggy banks, and window sills
have these coins known, their presidential heads
pinched into what beggar's chalky palm--
they circulate like tarnished red blood cells,
all of us exchanging the merest film
of our lives, and the lives of those long dead.
Wind by Mike White: American Life in Poetry #121 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
A waiter in a clean apron
appeared, not quite
certain, shielding his eyes, wary
of our rumbling engines.
Sonnet LV. Music And Poetry. 1.
© Christopher Pearse Cranch
SING, poets, as ye list, of fields, of flowers,
Of changing seasons with their brilliant round
Of keen delights, or themes still more profound
Where soul through sense transmutes this world of ours.
Everybody by Marie Sheppard Williams : American Life in Poetry #243 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2
© Ted Kooser
Lots of contemporary poems are anecdotal, a brief narration of some event, and what can make them rise above anecdote is when they manage to convey significance, often as the poem closes. Here is an example of one like that, by Marie Sheppard Williams, who lives in Minneapolis.
Everybody
I stood at a bus corner
Glucose Self-Monitoring by Katy Giebenhain: American Life in Poetry #33 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laurea
© Ted Kooser
Katy Giebenhain, an American living in Berlin, Germany, depicts a ritual that many diabetics undergo several times per day: testing one’s blood sugar. The poet shows us new ways of looking at what can be an uncomfortable chore by comparing it to other things: tapping trees for syrup, checking oil levels in a car, milking a cow.
Message From Abroad
© Allen Tate
Paris, November 1929
Their faces are bony and sharp but very red, although
their ancestors nearly two hundred years have dwelt
by the miasmal banks of tidewaters where malarial fever
makes men gaunt and dosing with quinine shakes them
as with a palsy. Traveller to America (1799).
Editing Poetry
© Karl Shapiro
Next to my office where I edit poems ("Can poems be edited?") there is the Chicago Models club. All day the girls stroll past my door where I am editing poems, behind my head a signed photograph of Rupert Brooke, handsomer than any movie star. I edit, keeping one eye peeled for models, straining my ears to hear what they say. In there they photograph the girls on the bamboo furniture, glossies for the pulsing facades of night spots. One day the manager brings me flowers, a huge and damaged bouquet: hurt gladiolas, overly open roses, long-leaping ferns (least hurt), and bruised carnations. I accept the gift, remainder of last night's opening (where?), debut of lower-class blondes. I distribute the flowers in the other poetry rooms, too formal-looking for our disarray.
Now after every model's bow to the footlights the manager brings more flowers, hurt gladiolas, overly open roses, long-leaping ferns, and bruised carnations. I edit poems to the click of sharp high heels, flanked by the swords of lavendar debut, whiffing the cinnamon of crepe-paper-pink carnations of the bruised and lower-class blondes.
Behind me rears my wall of books, most formidable of himan barriers. No flower depresses me like the iris but these I have a fondness for. They bring stale memories ver the threshold of the street. They bring the night of cloth palm trees and soft plastic leopard charis, night of sticky drinks, the shining rhinestone hour in the dark-blue mirror, the peroxide chat of models and photogenic morn.
Today the manager brings all gladioli. A few rose petals lie in the corridor. The mail is heavy this morning.
The Name On The Tree
© Madison Julius Cawein
I saw a name carved on a tree
"Julia";
A simpler name there could not be
Julia:
