diff --git "a/poetry-of-america.jsonl" "b/poetry-of-america.jsonl" new file mode 100644--- /dev/null +++ "b/poetry-of-america.jsonl" @@ -0,0 +1,44 @@ +{"instruction": "## Little Brown Baby\n\n \n \n Little brown baby wif spa'klin' eyes, \r\n Come to yo' pappy an' set on his knee. \r\n What you been doin', suh — makin' san' pies? \r\n Look at dat bib — you's es du'ty ez me. \r\n Look at dat mouf — dat's merlasses, I bet; \r\n Come hyeah, Maria, an' wipe off his han's. \r\n Bees gwine to ketch you an' eat you up yit, \r\n Bein' so sticky an sweet — goodness lan's! \r\n \r\n Little brown baby wif spa'klin' eyes, \r\n Who's pappy's darlin' an' who's pappy's chile? \r\n Who is it all de day nevah once tries \r\n Fu' to be cross, er once loses dat smile? \r\n Whah did you git dem teef? My, you's a scamp! \r\n Whah did dat dimple come f'om in yo' chin? \r\n Pappy do' know you — I b'lieves you's a tramp; \r\n Mammy, dis hyeah's some ol' straggler got in! \r\n \r\n Let's th'ow him outen de do' in de san', \r\n We do' want stragglers a-layin' 'roun' hyeah; \r\n Let's gin him 'way to de big buggah-man; \r\n I know he's hidin' erroun' hyeah right neah. \r\n Buggah-man, buggah-man, come in de do', \r\n Hyeah's a bad boy you kin have fu' to eat. \r\n Mammy an' pappy do' want him no mo', \r\n Swaller him down f'om his haid to his feet! \r\n \r\n Dah, now, I t'ought dat you'd hug me up close. \r\n Go back, ol' buggah, you sha'n't have dis boy. \r\n He ain't no tramp, ner no straggler, of co'se; \r\n He's pappy's pa'dner an' play-mate an' joy. \r\n Come to you' pallet now — go to yo' res'; \r\n Wisht you could allus know ease an' cleah skies; \r\n Wisht you could stay jes' a chile on my breas'— \r\n Little brown baby wif spa'klin' eyes!\n\n—Paul Laurence Dunbar\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\nThis poem is in the public domain.\n\n", "output": "My name is Afaa Michael Weaver, and I will be reading “Little Brown Baby” by\nPaul Laurence Dunbar.\n\nI am always inspired by Paul Laurence Dunbar’s work. He had such a struggle—he\nwrote under censorship and under the pressure of the popular tastes of the\nday—and when I think about the evolution of the identity of African Americans,\nI think about this poem in terms of the period in which it was written: the\nperiod of blackface minstrelsy, and how the American character was an\nimposition on the African American, but also in that interface between the two\nlarger cultures. It was much more than that, much more diverse, but there are\nthese central questions of self-representation. And in the need to write\naccording to plantation dialect—things that were really popular in that day—in\nthis particular poem, I find the treasure of the love of the father for the\nchild, and I think of African American men and their evolution as men in the\ncontext of the racial history of this country.\n\nSo it does, for me, deepen and complicate conventional notions of identity\ninasmuch as I’d say that we still have these issues happening. Is the struggle\nwith English—American English, as African Americans writing poetry—and the\nstruggle, in a very large way, with what we call hip hop culture and\nrepresentation, self-representation? Mimicry from the larger society on to the\nAfrican American, and in many ways exportation of African American culture?\nAnd the push and the drive for resilience that still comes from inside African\nAmerican culture—when we look at hip hop, we look at the interface between\nLatino/Latina American culture and African American, which makes it much more\ncomplex.\n\nI relate to the speaker in the poem as an African American father and someone\nwho comes from inside the poor working class structure inside African American\nculture (which is a very large piece of it historically), and what it means to\nrepresent myself to my son, and to my brother, and to also represent to my\nfather and my relationship with him. This evolution around language—my family\ncame from Virginia and North Carolina, and in my home, the ethos was Southern,\nand that is a complex issue and representation of poetry. I find inspiration\nin Paul Laurence Dunbar’s courage and his integrity.\n\nAnd so, he was a great poet, and I think we should revisit the pressures of\nthe time and understand that some of those pressures are still very much with\nus: self-representation, the ability to tell one’s story in one’s own way, and\nwhat that means for the larger evolution of American culture. Thank you, Paul\nLaurence Dunbar.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## The New Colossus\n\n \n \n Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame\r\n With conquering limbs astride from land to land;\r\n Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand\r\n A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame\r\n Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name\r\n Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand\r\n Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command \r\n The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,\r\n “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she\r\n With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,\r\n Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,\r\n The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,\r\n Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,\r\n I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”\n\n—Emma Lazarus\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\nThis poem is in the public domain.\n\n", "output": "“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,”\nproclaims the Mother of Exiles, in words that reverberate today as a\ndefinition of what America offers to the world. The poem was written by the\nAmerican-Jewish poet Emma Lazarus, as a donation to an auction of art and\nliterary works intended to raise money to build a pedestal for the colossal\nstatue just given by France to the United States—“Of Liberty Enlightening the\nWorld,” as the Statue of Liberty was originally named. Initially Lazarus was\nnot interested in contributing a poem, but a friend convinced her that the\nstatue would be of great significance to immigrants sailing into the harbor.\nThis was a crucial, new idea.\n\nThe statue was originally intended as a monument to international\nrepublicanism and friendship between the United States and France. But Emma\nLazarus, in the 1880s, was deeply engaged in advocating for the flood of\ndestitute Jewish immigrants fleeing anti-Semitic violence in Russia and\nthroughout Eastern Europe, and so she wrote a poem that succeeded, surely\nbeyond her wildest dreams, in changing the meaning of the statue and the\nmeaning of the United States of America.\n\n“The New Colossus” was the only entry read at the exhibits opening but was\nforgotten and played no role at the opening of the statue in 1886. Lazarus\ndied young, in 1887, of cancer. But in 1903, a plaque bearing the text of the\npoem was mounted on the inner wall of the statue’s pedestal. You can read it\nthere today.\n\nIt is an amazing poem. It claims that we represent not war and conquest but\nfreedom, enlightenment, and compassion. The brazen giant of Greek fame was the\nColossus of Rhodes, once one of the Seven Wonders of the World. A monument to\nmilitary might.\n\nInstead of warrior-like pride, here is a mighty woman whose torch is\nimprisoned lighting, a beautiful phrase implying technological innovation. I’m\nthinking of Benjamin Franklin’s experiments with electricity here. Naming this\nwoman “Mother of Exiles,” calling her eyes “mild yet commanding,” and\nannouncing that she stands for “worldwide welcome” is a stroke of radical\ninsight into what America was and could become. And the words Lazarus has this\nfigure cry “with silent lips” still bring tears to my own eyes, tears of\nadmiration and gratitude.\n\nFor me, this poem’s beauty cannot be separated from my family’s history. All\nmy grandparents came to this country in the 1880s, at just the moment that\ninspired the poem. They were escaping poverty and pogroms. To them as Jews,\nAmerica was the land of opportunity, of hope for the hopeless. None of them\never became rich, but they survived. For them the rejection of the old world\nof monarchy, aristocracy, tyranny, and the dream of a new world of freedom and\nsafety, came true. I was taught this dream by my parents, taught that I should\nbe proud of being American, not because we were “the greatest,” whatever that\nmeans, but because we were the melting pot. We were a democracy that gave hope\nto the little people. We were a land of refuge. We were the land where\nprejudice and hatred might one day be eliminated.\n\nMillions and millions of American families coming from every corner of the\nglobe have experienced that hope. Of course, there exist Americans whose own\nfamilies came here as immigrants and have reaped the benefit of that lamp\nlifted beside the golden door, who now wish to deny the chance of others to\nbreathe free. But we do have a choice. We can keep the gates open. We can\nchoose generosity, compassion, and openness to the strangers in our midst,\nrather than self-protection and fear.\n\nAs an American poet, I’ve written about my immigrant grandparents and second\ngeneration parents and their struggles. I belong to a tradition of openness\nthat includes Walt Whitman, who celebrated America’s variousness, and in my\nown time I have had the good fortune to be the countrywoman of William Carlos\nWilliams, Muriel Rukeyser, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Silvia Plath,\nGalway Kinnell, Paul Muldoon, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Li-\nYoung Lee, to name only a few. All deeply American. All immigrants or children\nof immigrants.\n\nI am proud that American poetry is becoming more open in our time to writers\nof every background and that American culture altogether is a hybrid\nphenomenon. For while we are remembering how much America has meant to its\nimmigrants, let’s remember also what the talent of its immigrants, the talent\nand energy of its immigrants, has done for America. Our art, our music, our\nfiction, our movies, our science and technology, our leadership is a\nmagnificent mix of ethnicities. Native-born and immigrants breathing free,\nbouncing off each other, making America the cultural wonder of the world. May\nwe remain so. May the mean spirited among us slink back to their corners. May\nthe Mother of Exiles prevail.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## WILD BEASTS\n\n \n \n In the front all the weapons were\r\n loaded. We sat there in the dark with \r\n not so much as a whisper. We could hear\r\n sounds outside—skirrs, rasps, the occasional \r\n yap, ting. We were alert, perhaps, too\r\n alert. Ready to shoot a fly for just \r\n being a fly. When you don’t sleep you\r\n start to hallucinate and that’s not good.\r\n One night this crazy notion started to \r\n possess me: I said, “Who are our enemies \r\n anyhow? We don’t have any enemies. What\r\n are we doing here? We should be with our\r\n families doing what families do. I’m laying\r\n down this gun and I’m leaving right now.”\r\n I knew there was a chance that one of them\r\n might shoot me. Instead they all laid down \r\n their guns and we walked right out into the moon-\r\n lit night, frightened, now, only of ourselves.\n\n—James Tate\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\n“Wild Beasts” James Tate from _State of the Union: 50 Political Poems_.\n\nWave Books, 2008.\n\nBy permission of the author.\n\n", "output": "This is a poem by James Tate, entitled “Wild Beasts”. I found it in an\nanthology called _State of The Union: 50 Political Poems_ , which was\npublished by Wave Books. The reader is Amy Gerstler.\n\nSo that’s the poem. We’ve been asked to contribute a little commentary. I know\nthis project is related to the fluctuating idea of an American identity. One\nof the many things that moves me about this poem is it does not limit the idea\nof American identity to being American. America is, as we were all taught in\nelementary school, a melting pot. There are no countries named in this poem,\nthere are no religious groups named in this poem. The speaker is a kind of\neveryman, every-citizen, who’s suffering for being a soldier and eventually\nlays down his weapon, and—in a kind of domino effect—everyone lays down their\nweapons. He’s thinking about the value of individual life and about the\ndifferent kinds of fears we have and how it’s scary enough to be a human and\nto try and live and survive and lead a decent life. We don’t need to construct\nthe added fears of trying to kill each other. So that’s _my_ commentary.\nThat’s the great James Tate poem “Wild Beasts.”\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## Crossing Brooklyn Ferry\n\n \n \n 1\r\n Flood-tide below me! I watch you face to face; \r\n Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face. \r\n \r\n Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you\r\n are to me! \r\n On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home,\r\n are more curious to me than you suppose; \r\n And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me,\r\n and more in my meditations, than you might suppose. \r\n \r\n \r\n 2\r\n The impalpable sustenance of me from all things, at all hours of the day; \r\n The simple, compact, well-join'd scheme—myself disintegrated,\r\n every one disintegrated, yet part of the scheme: \r\n The similitudes of the past, and those of the future; \r\n The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings—\r\n on the walk in the street, and the passage over the river; \r\n The current rushing so swiftly, and swimming with me far away;\r\n The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them; \r\n The certainty of others—the life, love, sight, hearing of others. \r\n \r\n Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore; \r\n Others will watch the run of the flood-tide; \r\n Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights\r\n of Brooklyn to the south and east;\r\n Others will see the islands large and small; \r\n Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an\r\n hour high; \r\n A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will\r\n see them, \r\n Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the falling back\r\n to the sea of the ebb-tide. \r\n \r\n \r\n 3\r\n \r\n It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not;\r\n I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so\r\n many generations hence; \r\n I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how\r\n it is. \r\n \r\n Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt; \r\n Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd; \r\n Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the bright flow,\r\n I was refresh'd;\r\n Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current,\r\n I stood, yet was hurried; \r\n Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stem'd\r\n pipes of steamboats, I look'd. \r\n \r\n I too many and many a time cross'd the river, the sun half an hour high; \r\n I watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls—I saw them high in the air,\r\n floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies, \r\n I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies, and left the rest\r\n in strong shadow,\r\n I saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the gradual edging toward the south. \r\n \r\n I too saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water, \r\n Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams, \r\n Look'd at the fine centrifugal spokes of light around the shape of my head\r\n in the sun-lit water, \r\n Look'd on the haze on the hills southward and southwestward,\r\n Look'd on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet, \r\n Look'd toward the lower bay to notice the arriving ships, \r\n Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me, \r\n Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops—saw the ships at anchor, \r\n The sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars,\r\n The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender serpentine\r\n pennants, \r\n The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilot-houses, \r\n The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels, \r\n The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sun-set, \r\n The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolicsome crests\r\n and glistening,\r\n The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the granite\r\n store-houses by the docks, \r\n On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank'd on each\r\n side by the barges—the hay-boat, the belated lighter, \r\n On the neighboring shore, the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high\r\n and glaringly into the night, \r\n Casting their flicker of black, contrasted with wild red and yellow light, over\r\n the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets. \r\n \n\n—Walt Whitman\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\nThis poem is in the public domain.\n\n", "output": "Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” was published in 1856 as the “Sun-\nDown Poem” in the second edition of _Leaves of Grass_ and had its present\ntitle in 1860. The poem relates to the theme of migration but cannot be\ncontained by it. In nine sections, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” enacts Whitman’s\nchallenge to and unification with, the reader. Just as the ferry travels from\nManhattan to Brooklyn and closes the gap, Whitman’s poem closes the gap\nbetween poet and reader. The poet’s speaker asserts his identity through\nphysicality. I too received identity by my body and the crowd on the ferry\nsoon becomes everyone who has ever traveled, anyone who has ever gone home,\nanyone who will ever go home.\n\nWalt Whitman is a quintessential American poet—but the speaker reaches out,\nnot just to all Americans, but to all people across the globe as he observes\nthe flags of all nations. And in ferrying across water, one inevitably thins\nof Kharon transporting souls across the river Styx after death. In the rocking\nmotion of the lines which mimic, the flood tide and ebb tide, the speaker\nunites all people in their common experience of life. The speaker’s intimate\nyet insistent form of address for the reader dissolves boundaries and\neventually individual parts dissolve into a whole. The simple, compact, well-\njoined esteem, myself disintegrated—everyone disintegrated, yet part of the\nscheme.\n\nIn the eighth section, the speaker brings back the river and sunset and\nscalloped edge waves of flood tide, accomplishes his union with the reader,\nand the identities of “I” and “you” flow into “we”.\n\nNow that union is accomplished and the tensions of the poem, light and dark,\nspeaker and reader, life and death, past and future, are resolved.\n\nThe speaker, in the final section, in a catalogue of exuberant exhortations\ncalls on time and life. “Flow on river,” he says and brings back, yet again\nthe tide, waves, clouds, seagulls, and other key images as appearances\nenvelope the soul.\n\nWalt Whitman’s poetry has been important to my evolution as a poet. In my late\nthirties, I reached a stage where I wanted to break apart the conception of a\npoem as a well-wrought urn, so that more of the world could enter into my\npoetry. I was interested in developing complex sequences where several\nnarratives could be spun together. For awhile, juxtapositions could create\ndramatic tensions and also explore the relation between part and whole, where\nthe poem’s unfolding, was not linear but involved succession and simultaneity,\nand where Asian as well as Western aesthetics could be forged into something\nnew.\n\nIn American Literature, I read and reread Whitman’s great sequences. “Crossing\nBrooklyn Ferry” was, and continues to be, a source of inspiration and these\nbrief comments cannot do justice to the magnificence of this poem. It needs to\nbe read again and again.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## Heaved from the Earth\n\n \n \n after the tornado, a dead moccasin\r\n nailed to the pole\r\n boards scattered across a pasture\r\n \r\n lying fierce crosses\r\n jagged in mud\r\n \r\n had flung itself\r\n nail and wood\r\n the square-head animal\r\n hurled also in air\r\n \r\n or as it raced in weeds\r\n water flowing, water falling\r\n impaled\r\n both the snake and timber\r\n \r\n went flying through with wind\r\n \r\n coiled, made a coil ( they do\r\n immediately from danger or when hurt\r\n and died in a coil\r\n bit itself\r\n in pain of its own defense the poison\r\n \r\n \t\tbirds\r\n \t\t hurled into yard\r\n \t\tfences\r\n \t\t one with feet tangled gripping\r\n \t\tthe open wire, a big Jay\r\n \r\n struggling from the water\r\n throwing its fanged head\r\n \r\n high at the lightning, silent\r\n in all that thunder\r\n \r\n to die by its own mouth\r\n pushing the fire thorns in\n\n—Besmilr Brigham\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\n“Heaved from the Earth” Besmilr Brigham from _Run Through Rock: Selected Short\nPoems of Besmilr Brigham_. Lost Roads Press, 2000.\n\nReprinted by permission of Heloise Brigham Wilson.\n\n", "output": "Besmilr Brigham was born in Mississippi in 1913 and died in New Mexico in\n2000. She lived most of her life, when she was not roaming and camping, with\nher husband Roy and her daughter Heloise in Southwestern Arkansas, outside the\nsmall town of Horatio.\n\nBesmilr Brigham was a writer from childhood, and her writing is an\nidiosyncratic record of her life as an inevitable cause for singular\nexpression. Her strongest affinity is with the creature-world. Her attention\nto the peopled-world is likewise profound, though with the tensions of a\nstrong willed individual laid in and confined mostly to immediate family.\nPoems in series were a common part of her practice but the solitary poem was a\nway of tuning to her daily environment. She was an acquaintance and\ncorrespondent with other writers, including Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan,\nJohn Gould Fletcher, and her son-in-law, Keith Wilson, but she was a confirmed\nloner.\n\nThough she received one of the early grants for the National Endowment for the\nArts, published in premier commercial and literary magazines, and published a\nfull-length collection with Random House, she remained an obscure poet, un-\npin-down-able in every sense of the word. In fact, just to find her house, our\nsmall team working on the Lost Roads Project: A Walk-In Book of Arkansas, in\n1994, had to meet the mail carrier at a filling station on a Sunday to be led\nto the Brigham’s homestead.\n\nBrigham was a fearless, unsentimental writer. This poem, in sentence\nfragments, and terse strophes, chronicles the aftermath of a tornado. She was\nthe exact right person to testify to a moccasin suicide. Brigham insistently\nused a closing parenthesis with no opening parenthesis. She drives into her\npoem at an unexpected angle—exits without explanation. She gives the reader\nample space to expand and elaborate on her intentions. This is stubborn,\nbackcountry matter—predators and prey. The sky above and the ground into which\nthe house is sinking, the black snake sleeping under the porch step, the books\nkept dry in a decommissioned freezer are enough to secure her place in the\nAmerican rural South and her poems inscribed, each and every one, along their\nown edge, are enough to secure her increased and enduring visibility in the\nyears to come.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## Sexton Texts Tituba from a Bird Conservatory\n\n \n \n — _for Margaret Walker and Molly Means_\r\n \r\n Fri., July 2, 7:07 PM\r\n “Eat, the stones a poor man breaks,”\r\n \r\n Fri., July 2, 7:18 PM\r\n Still stale as they were\r\n when Memaw died\r\n Half-mad on working-class\r\n hunger; plumpness thinned\r\n to a chip of lamb’s bone,\r\n legs decayed, necrotic.\r\n \r\n Fri., July 2, 7:26 PM\r\n Running is a game\r\n for the young. Women\r\n of a certain age, root.\r\n \r\n Fri., July 2, 9:09 PM\r\n Some rot gashing cane\r\n with dull machetes. Sinking in\r\n clay around 10-foot stalks when\r\n all the while they could have been\r\n coal-eyed peacocks, lean deep-water\r\n ghosts, spunforce bladefeathers,\r\n fear itself.\r\n \r\n Fri., July 2, 9:11 PM\r\n Can you believe I still carry\r\n the knife my husband gave me?\r\n I gut, hollow and scrape\r\n soft spoil from cavities, but\r\n what’s dead is pretty well empty.\r\n \r\n Fri., July 2, 9:21 PM\r\n Good on you. Makes for easy work.\r\n My people are steel-clad nomads\r\n at the full-metal brink. None\r\n know what’s in the chamber,\r\n staring down our barrels.\r\n \r\n Fri., July 2, 9:32 PM\r\n There’s 2 ways to terrify men:\r\n tell them what’s coming,\r\n don’t tell them what’s next . . .\r\n \r\n Fri., July 2, 9:55 PM\r\n (2/2) deathbed—herons,\r\n black merlins, white-necked\r\n ravens, mute Cygnus, Impundulu—\r\n \r\n Fri., July 2, 9:54 PM\r\n (1/2) Pales lower as light approaches.\r\n Memaw felt all kinds of birds\r\n hovering near her\r\n \r\n Fri., July 2, 10:07 PM\r\n What did Impundulu want?\r\n \r\n Fri., July 2, 10:10 PM\r\n Wondered myself. She named\r\n ancestors and gods I’d never\r\n met—\r\n limbs of Osiris in Brooks Brothers,\r\n Isis in Fredrick’s of Hollywood,\r\n Jesus in torn polyester.\r\n \r\n Fri., July 2, 10:12 PM\r\n Ah, the birds wanted them then.\r\n \r\n Fri., July 2, 10:17 PM\r\n No. She said: _They waitin’ . . .\r\n for you._\r\n Then she died,\r\n eyes wide,\r\n fixed on me.\r\n \r\n Fri., July 2, 10:28 PM\r\n Dinn, dinn, dinn—\r\n Dying’s last words\r\n mean nothing. What wants you\r\n dead would have your head.\r\n \r\n Fri., July 2, 10:29 PM\r\n LOL! But I’m not dead, huh?\r\n \r\n Fri., July 2, 11:21 PM\r\n I’m not dead, right?\r\n \r\n Sat., July 3, 3:00 AM\r\n Anne? I’m not, right?\n\n—Airea D. Matthews\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\n“Sexton Texts Tituba from a Bird Conservatory” from _Simulacra_.\n\n© 2017 by Airea D. Matthews.\n\nPublished by Yale University Press. Used by permission.\n\n", "output": "My name is Camille T. Dungy, and I am going to read a poem by Airea D.\nMatthews from her new book, _Simulacra_. The poem is called “Sexton Texts\nTituba from a Bird Conservatory.”\n\nThere’s so much about this poem that just delights and astounds me, and truly\nmakes me believe in the possibility of what American poetry can be, and who an\nAmerican poet can be.\n\nTo begin with, I’m fascinated by the fact that Airea D. Matthews decided to\nset the poem as a text conversation, so that we’re moving back and forth\nbetween Anne Sexton and Tituba on separate columns, as they speak back and\nforth out of . . . _what_ world? And the poem speaks into the future in this\nway, using the text message form, which just seems like such an American thing\nto do, to kind of think forward into the future, but also into the\npast—speaking through Tituba, who happened to be the first person who died in\nthe Salem Witch Trials. She was a West Indian woman who was accused of\nwitchcraft, for her practice, her use of her own cultural practices in that\nvery puritanical space. Tituba—this kind of first black American victim of\nintolerant violence, essentially—having a conversation with Anne Sexton, who,\nherself, as an American woman poet, suffered from a lack of understanding of\nwho she was and what her potential could be. And in some ways, we could think\nthat her potential as a poet was _clipped_ , in a sense, because it was too\nmuch about something that was not necessarily fully understood.\n\nAnother thing that’s interesting to me about this poem is how compelling it is\nas a textual object, as something that you read on the page. And so looking at\nthe poem on the page gives me layers of meaning and potential and possibility\nthat are different than the layers of potential that just come sonically when\nI’m hearing the poem out loud, or speaking the poem out loud. So that’s\nanother gift that the poem gives to me, is potential for extra layers of\nexperience with it. And the line breaks: they’re amazing; there are these\nwonderful spaces; like, she named ancestors and gods I’d never met, so we just\nhave these moments where the language of these two word-women _pops_ forward\nand becomes magical and full of multiple possibilities, also through time and\nspace and potential, so that’s pretty great.\n\nAnd then, the poem doesn’t even stop there; it communicates with Margaret\nWalker, and her own characters out of the book that won Margaret Walker the\nYale Younger Prize. Molly Means is the character who I’m speaking of. Margaret\nWalker is the only other black woman to have won the Yale Younger Prize for\nPoetry before Airea Matthews won it, and so that communication through time\nand over poetry . . . and we can’t forget the fact that the poem ties in\nmultiple times Arthur Rimbaud who, writing out of a different country, has fed\nwhat American poetry can be. And so, the kind of multiplicity of identities\nwithin the poem, right, of bodies and people and voices and dreams and\nvisions. . . .\n\nWith humor, with joy, the birds that are mentioned, right, are birds in\nthemselves, but all also carry with them these other potentials of thoughts\nand ideas; the Impundulu being a South African bird that has within all kinds\nof omens of death and future prognoses and things like this. The Cygnus, the\nswan, and all our ideas of what the swan could be in poetry, right? It’s just,\nthe poem just keeps giving and giving, in just this kind of rich, exciting,\nfun, but haunting, (and haunted) way. I just can’t imagine a poem that could\ngive me such a robust representation of multiplicity and possibility and\npotential. And so: yay for this poem, is what I have to say.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing\n\n \n \n I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing, \r\n All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches, \r\n Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green, \r\n And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself, \r\n But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there \r\n without its friend near, for I knew I could not, \r\n And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined \r\n around it a little moss, \r\n And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room, \r\n It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends, \r\n (For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,) \r\n Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love; \r\n For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary \r\n in a wide flat space, \r\n Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near, \r\n I know very well I could not.\n\n—Walt Whitman\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\nThis poem is in the public domain.\n\n", "output": "I chose that poem because of how striking it was for me, as a gay writer, to\nfind that in the 19th century a poet like Walt Whitman was already\ncelebrating, not only love and the need for it, but same-sex love in\nparticular—what he calls manly love, which I think of as same-sex love, but\nalso of camaraderie among men. And what I am particularly struck by is how, so\nearly in our country’s history, he is making, or trying to make, a space for\ndifference by showing how much we have in common, mainly, the need for love,\nthe need for company and companionship, whoever we are. And by that image of\ntwining the twig with the moss, taking that image of the natural world as a\nway of representing what he’s talking about, this manly love, Whitman seems to\nbe suggesting that that kind of love is as instinctive and natural as what\nhappens in the vegetal world and, if that’s the case, how can any of it be\nwrong?\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## Rosebud\n\n \n \n There is a place in Montana where the grass stands up two feet,\r\n Yellow grass, white grass, the wind\r\n On it like locust wings & the same shine.\r\n Facing what I think was south, I could see a broad valley\r\n & river, miles into the valley, that looked black & then trees.\r\n To the west was more prairie, darker\r\n Than where we stood, because the clouds\r\n Covered it; a long shadow, like the edge of rain, racing towards us.\r\n We had been driving all day, & the day before through South Dakota\r\n Along the Rosebud, where the Sioux\r\n Are now farmers, & go to school, & look like everyone.\r\n In the reservation town there was a Sioux museum\r\n & 'trading post', some implements inside: a longbow\r\n Of shined wood that lay in its glass case, reflecting light.\r\n The walls were covered with framed photographs.\r\n The Oglala posed in fine dress in front of a few huts,\r\n Some horses nearby: a feeling, even in those photographs\r\n The size of a book, of spaciousness.\r\n I wanted to ask about a Sioux holy man, whose life\r\n I had recently read, & whose vision had gone on hopelessly\r\n Past its time: I believed then that only a great loss\r\n Could make us feel small enough to begin again.\r\n The woman behind the counter\r\n Talked endlessly on; there was no difference I could see\r\n Between us, so I never asked.\r\n \r\n The place in Montana\r\n Was the _Greasy Grass_ where Custer & the Seventh Cavalry fell,\r\n A last important victory for the tribes. We had been driving\r\n All day, hypnotized, & when we got out to enter\r\n The small, flat American tourist center we began to argue.\r\n And later, walking between the dry grass & reading plaques,\r\n My wife made an ironic comment: I believe it hurt the land, not\r\n Intentionally; it was only meant to hold us apart.\r\n Later I read of Benteen & Ross & those who escaped,\r\n But what I felt then was final: lying down, face\r\n Against the warm side of a horse & feeling the lulls endlessly,\r\n The silences just before death. The place might stand for death,\r\n Every loss rejoined in a wide place;\r\n Or it is rest, as it was after the long drive,\r\n Nothing for miles but grass, a long valley to the south\r\n & living in history. Or it is just a way of living\r\n Gone, like our own, every moment.\r\n Because what I have to do daily & what is done to me\r\n Are a number of small indignities, I have to trust that\r\n Many things we say to each other are not intentional,\r\n That every indirect word will accumulate\r\n Over the earth, & now, when we may be approaching\r\n Something final, it seems important not to hurt the land.\n\n—Jon Anderson\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\n“Rosebud” from _In Sepia_ , by Jon Anderson. University of Pittsburgh Press.\n\nCopyright © 1974 by Jon Anderson.\n\nUsed by permission of Bodi Orlen Anderson.\n\n", "output": "This is Carol Muske-Dukes reading “Rosebud” by Jon Anderson.\n\nThe poem “Rosebud” by the late poet Jon Anderson seems both filled with hurt\nand despair at the same time as it seems wide in scope; a hymn to history. It\nseems he is speaking to the land: in this case, one place in Montana. But this\nis not just any place in Montana—this is the site of the Battle of Little\nBighorn, where on June 26th, 1876 General Custer and the 7th Cavalry were\noutnumbered and vanquished by Sitting Bull and the Sioux warriors.\n\nThis poem is about history and identity in that it is about, as Jon Anderson\nsays, the “last important victory” of the tribes, for the tribes, and also\nabout living in history. Or just about living, he says, how our own lives are\ngone, disappearing minute by minute. This poem lives in—as the poet says—two\nlandscapes at once; or he implies that it is interior, the exterior, and he\nseeks to understand each one.\n\nHe longs to enter what he calls the “difference”—all difference, but can find\nno evidence of such, as the Sioux now seem entirely assimilated. The speaker\nis a white man, but he wants to feel the identity of the Sioux warrior as well\nas Custer. But he’s—more than anything, he wants to grasp the intent of the\nland itself as a vision: the vision of the holy man, whose life he’d been\nreading as he traveled, a holy man whose vision went on hopelessly past its\ntime. The holy man may be Sitting Bull, who saw two great visions prior to the\nvictory at Greasy Grass, as the Sioux called Little Bighorn. Sitting Bull and\nthe Native Americans honored the land and the sky; revered them as the\nembodiments of the Great Spirit. The speaker of the poem feels this is forever\nand still alive as he and his wife walk in the grass and read plaques outside\nthe Flag American Tour Center.\n\nBut she says something ironic to him, something that separates them in\nargument. And he says it hurts the land. The vision enters the poet again; he\ngrasps at last that the Native American sense of oneness, of the holiness of\nthe one, connects human nature to Earth, and is final as death. He does not\ndwell on his wife’s alienation from him, but rather imagines how each soldier\nand warrior died: their, in a sense, comforting last moments lying against the\nwarm side of fallen horses as it breathes its last in the lulls, the silences\nbefore death. But the breathing before death, in a sense, is like our daily\nrespiration. And the identity here is the history we share, and living\ntogether. Not an alienation. But thus, in his last lines, it now seems so\nimportant for us all not to hurt the land.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## II. _ \n_ from _Amelia_\n\n \n \n Amelia was just fourteen and out of the orphan asylum; at her first job—\r\n \t in the bindery, and yes sir, yes ma’am, oh, so anxious to please. \r\n She stood at the table, her blonde hair hanging about her shoulders, \r\n \t “knocking up” for Mary and Sadie, the stitchers\r\n (“knocking up” is counting books and stacking them in piles to be \r\n \t taken away). \r\n There were twenty wire-stitching machines on the floor, worked by a \r\n \t shaft that ran under the table; \r\n as each stitcher put her work through the machine, \r\n she threw it on the table. The books were piling up fast\r\n and some slid to the floor\r\n (the forelady had said, Keep the work off the floor!); \r\n and Amelia stooped to pick up the books—\r\n three or four had fallen under the table\r\n between the boards nailed against the legs. \r\n She felt her hair caught gently; \r\n put her hand up and felt the shaft going round and round\r\n and her hair caught on it, wound and winding around it, \r\n until the scalp was jerked from her head, \r\n and the blood was coming down all over her face and waist.\n\n—Charles Reznikoff\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\n“Amelia” from _The Poems of Charles Reznikoff, 1918–1975_ , edited by Seamus\nCooney\n\nReprinted by permission of Black Sparrow Books, an imprint of David R. Godine,\nPublisher, Inc.\n\nCopyright © 2005 by the Estate of Charles Reznikoff\n\n", "output": "Charles Reznikoff was born in New York City in 1894. He lived there all of his\nlife and died in 1976. He’s often associated with the American Objectivist\npoets, including his friend from New York, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen,\nLorine Niedecker.\n\nOne of Reznikoff’s great works is called _Testimony_ , one of the great epic\npoems of the 1930s. It’s taken entirely from legal documents of the last part\nof the 19th century. He takes these legal documents and he turns them into\nshort events and stories that put us in direct touch with the violence that is\nperhaps the essential fabric that holds Americans together. His attention to\nthe disregarded and the overlooked, the dispossessed, those unprotected by\nlabor laws, those subjected to capricious violence by authorities, by people\nin their community.\n\nThis particular poem looks at a common factory, a scene with workers in a\nsweatshop, probably unprotected by labor laws. He took the legal story of\nAmelia, which no doubt went on for pages and pages and pages, and he\neliminated anything that was not necessary to experience the event. One of the\nmain stylistic and formal concerns of Reznikoff was to do away with symbolism,\nliterary ornamentation, literary diction. He follows in this, Williams Carlos\nWilliams. In some ways the poems seem almost anti-poetic, until you see how\nthey transform the relation of you when you’re reading or hearing the poem to\nwhat it is that is being enacted. There’s a kind of next-ness or closeness as\nyou hear Amelia’s story, in which you feel adjacent to the poem, next to the\npoem, so that when her hair gets caught into the machine, it almost feels as\nif your own body is being jerked and pulled through that sudden violence.\n\nReznikoff would say that he wanted poems that had the same constraint that a\nwitness in court had: that you would tell what happened but you wouldn’t\ncomment or editorialize on it. So one of the most striking things about all\nthe poems in _Testimony_ as well as this poem, “Amelia,” is that he doesn’t\nhave a moral lesson, its not didactic. He doesn’t tell you what to think, he\ndoesn’t condemn or praise, but rather lets you experience the stark, harsh\nfact of this event.\n\nThe theme for these set of poems is labor and industry and labor and industry\nhas always been a struggle in the United States. Reznikoff documents that\nstruggle—not by giving policy advice, not by propagandizing, but by\narticulating the human circumstances of everyday people living through the\nforging of this great country. When you read Reznikoff’s work, you never\nforget the price that was paid and who paid that price.\n\nHe charts a kind of poetry that’s quite different than the mainstream\npoetry—both on the left, with its moralizing, and traditional literary poetry,\nwith its greater concern for images, ornamentation, traditional form. It’s\nalso starkly different than contemporary post-war poetry that places its\nemphasis on personal storytelling, on lyric expression of the individual\npoet’s feeling, because this work of Reznikoff (as so many of his works) is\nentirely taken from found and received sources. But Reznikoff believed that by\nsearching our history, looking at the documents of American history—especially\nthe documents of violence against the people with the least power—that we\nwould found ourselves and in this founding, we will find who we are as a\npeople.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## El Zapato\n\n \n \n Not the wooden spoon, \r\n primordial source\r\n of sweetness and pain, \r\n flying across the kitchen—\r\n I barely bothered to duck. \r\n Not my father undoing his belt—\r\n I would be gone before he’d whack \r\n the tabletop in a sample _nalgada_ , \r\n but my mother’s shoe, El Zapato: \r\n its black leather soft as the mouth\r\n of an old, toothless dog, black laces\r\n crisscrossing its long tongue\r\n all the way up, heavy sole and thick\r\n square high heel. Shoe from a special\r\n old lady store, shoe from olden days, \r\n puritanical shoe, _bruja_ shoe, peasant\r\n shoe, Gypsy shoe, shoe for _zapateo_\r\n on the grave of your enemy, shoe\r\n for dance the twisted, bent\r\n over dance of _los viejitos_. \r\n Not the pain, humiliating clunk\r\n of leather striking upside my head, \r\n but her aim, the way I knew that even\r\n if I ran out the kitchen door, \r\n down the back stairs and leapt \r\n the fence, when I glanced over my\r\n shoulder El Zapato, prototype\r\n of the smart bomb, would be there, \r\n its primitive but infallible radar\r\n honed in on my back. Not the shoe\r\n for suicidal anger of come out of hiding\r\n or I’ll throw myself out the window. \r\n Not the shoe for carpet-chewing\r\n Hitler anger—the throwing herself\r\n down, taking an edge of rug\r\n between her teeth anger. But the shoe\r\n for everyday justice she could unlace, \r\n whip off and throw faster than Paladin\r\n draws his gun, shoe that could hunt\r\n me down like the Texas Rangers, \r\n even if it took years, even if she died\r\n while she was throwing her shoe, \r\n even if she managed to throw it\r\n from the ramparts of heaven, the way\r\n she threw it from a third story window\r\n while I stood half a block away, laughing \r\n at her with my friends, thinking, \r\n it could never hit me from this far, \r\n until I stood suddenly alone, \r\n abandoned by my cowardly friends, \r\n alone in the frozen cross-eyed knowledge\r\n that El Zapato, black, smoking with righteousness,\r\n was slowly, inevitably spinning toward my forehead.\n\n—Richard Garcia\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\n“El Zapato,” by Richard Garcia, _Rancho Notorious_.\n\nBOA Editions, Ltd., 2001.\n\nBy permission of the author.\n\n", "output": "Richard Garcia’s “El Zapato” speaks eloquently about immigration into the US\nwhile never mentioning the subject, let alone the word. I love the casual way\nin which Garcia uses Spanish, as if—though he was born in San Francisco and\ngrew up speaking English—it’s the most natural thing in the world. To him, of\ncourse, with a Mexican mother and Puerto Rican father, it is. With its\n_nalgada_ , _bruja_ , _zapateo_ , and dance of _los viajitos_ , “El Zapato”\nreminds me of how my own father echoed his parents’ working-class Yorkshire\nvernacular. When I was slovenly he would call me a buck-navvy; when I was\ndirty he’d command, “Draw that bath.” Yet, “El Zapato” never preens over its\nLatino-ness, it doesn’t divide the world into _us_ and _them_. It shows the\nspeaker to be 100% human, 100% American, although his forbearers came—as even\nNative Americans did—from somewhere else.\n\nThe poem invites me, and anyone of any ethnicity, to enter the world of the\nfearsome shoe. Just because my mother didn’t throw shoes at me—her weapon of\nchoice was the hairbrush—and wouldn’t have called them _zapatos_ if she had,\ndoesn’t mean I can’t relate. I love the comedy of this poem, a comedy that\nrises out of the mother’s very real, intense, and probably justified anger—not\njust at her son, and also out of the grim truth that conflict between\ngenerations and individuals seems an unavoidable part of the human condition.\nYet I love, too, the child’s sense of his parents’ omnipotence. “How did she\nknow?” I used to think when my own mother caught me in same kind of\nmisbehavior I’d taken pains to hide. “El Zapato” makes me yearn for that time\nwhen I was watched over by seemingly all-powerful adults who punished but also\ncould protect, and did both out of what I knew even then was their sense of\nduty, care, and love.\n\n“El Zapato” brims full of energy and humanity. It inspires me to mine my own\ncultural background for poems. It reinforces my belief in the effectiveness of\nnarrative and humor in poetry, as well as my belief in the importance of a\nstrong central image. Richard Garcia has made “El Zapato” live as vividly in\nmy mind as if it had been hurled at me. I see it now, the black, old lady’s\nshoe, launched by my own inequity, spinning through the air unerringly,\nhunting me down.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## Bury Me in a Free Land\n\n \n \n Make me a grave where'er you will,\r\n In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill; \r\n Make it among earth's humblest graves,\r\n But not in a land where men are slaves.\r\n \r\n I could not rest if around my grave\r\n I heard the steps of a trembling slave;\r\n His shadow above my silent tomb\r\n Would make it a place of fearful gloom.\r\n \r\n I could not rest if I heard the tread\r\n Of a coffle gang to the shambles led,\r\n And the mother's shriek of wild despair\r\n Rise like a curse on the trembling air.\r\n \r\n I could not sleep if I saw the lash\r\n Drinking her blood at each fearful gash,\r\n And I saw her babes torn from her breast,\r\n Like trembling doves from their parent nest.\r\n \r\n I'd shudder and start if I heard the bay\r\n Of bloodhounds seizing their human prey,\r\n And I heard the captive plead in vain\r\n As they bound afresh his galling chain.\r\n \r\n If I saw young girls from their mother's arms\r\n Bartered and sold for their youthful charms,\r\n My eye would flash with a mournful flame,\r\n My death-paled cheek grow red with shame.\r\n \r\n I would sleep, dear friends, where bloated might\r\n Can rob no man of his dearest right;\r\n My rest shall be calm in any grave\r\n Where none can call his brother a slave.\r\n \r\n I ask no monument, proud and high,\r\n To arrest the gaze of the passers-by;\r\n All that my yearning spirit craves,\r\n Is bury me not in a land of slaves.\n\n—Frances E. W. Harper\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\nThis poem is in the public domain.\n\n", "output": "Hi. This is D. A. Powell. And this is The Poetry of America. Today is the 15th\nday of January, 2013, anniversary of the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,\nvisionary American, spiritual leader, and civil rights advocate and organizer.\nIf Dr. King had lived in continued good health he would be 84 years old today.\nHis courageous campaign for political and social justice is part of the legacy\nof American identity—our continued journey toward liberty, equality, and\nfreedom in all its noblest articulations. Not only did the United States have\nto win its independence from the British crown, but it has had to continue\nthat fight internally and externally to protect the rights of all its citizens\nand to enact laws to preserve those ideals. Dr. King is perhaps the most\nnotable example of moral courage in the face of adversity and the struggle to\ngain and defend those rights. In his speeches, King recalled the figure of\nMoses: “I just want to do God’s will,” King says, “and he has allowed me to go\nup to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I have seen the Promised Land.”\n\nKing wasn’t the first advocate of freedom and equality to invoke the leader\nwho brought the slaved Israelites out of captivity in Egypt. The song “Go Down\nMoses” attributed to Nat Turner was in all likelihood composed by a black\nslave and its popularity among abolitionists and captives bound in servitude\nattest to the spiritual power of Moses’ story. Underground Railroad conductor\nHarriett Tubman was nicknamed Moses and the tale of Moses delivering his\npeople from captivity appeared in numerous African American stories and poems.\nIt is this emancipating Moses whose voice Frances E. W. Harper summons in her\npoem “Bury Me in a Free Land.”\n\nBorn Frances Watkins, Frances was the child of free black parents living in\nBaltimore. Following the death of her mother, Harper lived with her maternal\naunt and uncle. The uncle, a clergyman, ran a school for black children and it\nwas there that Harper learned to read, write, and sew. But more importantly,\nshe learned the importance of civil rights and she became a life-long advocate\nand worker for social reforms. After moving to Ohio, she became the first\nwoman teacher at the Union Seminary and she joined the American Anti-Slavery\nSociety for whom she became a popular orator. Frances Harper’s first book of\npoems was published at the age of 20, but it is her later poems on\nmiscellaneous subjects that enjoyed wide-spread popularity, going through 20\nprintings, and included the popular poem “Bury Me in a Free Land.” After her\ndeath in 1911, Harper herself was buried in the Eden Cemetery in Collingdale,\noutside Philadelphia. The cemetery was originally a potters’ field, but it was\nconverted to a burial place for African Americans who wanted a space where\nthey could honor their dead with funerals that incorporated customs and\ntraditions brought from Africa. A place where markers could be placed in\nrespect of their generations who came here in chains and who fought for the\nrights and freedoms of their descendants, and indeed of all Americans. A\ntireless suffragist and abolitionist, Harper saw the transformation of this\ncountry from a land of inequality to a place of promise and hope. “Bury Me in\na Free Land” reminds us that America includes many kinds of journeys out of\noppression, captivity, exploitation, and tyranny. And that we still have so\nvery far to go to protect our rights and freedoms for all.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## The Jewish Cemetery at Newport\n\n \n \n How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,\r\n Close by the street of this fair seaport town,\r\n Silent beside the never-silent waves,\r\n At rest in all this moving up and down!\r\n \r\n The trees are white with dust, that o'er their sleep \r\n Wave their broad curtains in the south-wind's breath,\r\n While underneath these leafy tents they keep\r\n The long, mysterious Exodus of Death.\r\n \r\n And these sepulchral stones, so old and brown,\r\n That pave with level flags their burial-place,\r\n Seem like the tablets of the Law, thrown down\r\n And broken by Moses at the mountain's base.\r\n \r\n The very names recorded here are strange,\r\n Of foreign accent, and of different climes;\r\n Alvares and Rivera interchange\r\n With Abraham and Jacob of old times.\r\n \r\n “Blessed be God! for he created Death!”\r\n The mourners said, “and Death is rest and peace;”\r\n Then added, in the certainty of faith,\r\n “And giveth Life that nevermore shall cease.”\r\n \r\n Closed are the portals of their Synagogue,\r\n No Psalms of David now the silence break,\r\n No Rabbi reads the ancient Decalogue\r\n In the grand dialect the Prophets spake.\r\n \r\n Gone are the living, but the dead remain,\r\n And not neglected; for a hand unseen,\r\n Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain,\r\n Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green.\r\n \r\n How came they here? What burst of Christian hate,\r\n What persecution, merciless and blind,\r\n Drove o'er the sea—that desert desolate—\r\n These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind?\r\n \r\n They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure,\r\n Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk and mire;\r\n Taught in the school of patience to endure\r\n The life of anguish and the death of fire.\r\n \r\n All their lives long, with the unleavened bread\r\n And bitter herbs of exile and its fears,\r\n The wasting famine of the heart they fed,\r\n And slaked its thirst with marah of their tears.\r\n \r\n Anathema maranatha! was the cry\r\n That rang from town to town, from street to street;\r\n At every gate the accursed Mordecai\r\n Was mocked and jeered, and spurned by Christian feet.\r\n \r\n Pride and humiliation hand in hand\r\n Walked with them through the world where’er they went;\r\n Trampled and beaten were they as the sand,\r\n And yet unshaken as the continent.\r\n \r\n For in the background figures vague and vast\r\n Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime,\r\n And all the great traditions of the Past\r\n They saw reflected in the coming time.\r\n \r\n And thus forever with reverted look\r\n The mystic volume of the world they read,\r\n Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book,\r\n Till life became a Legend of the Dead.\r\n \r\n But ah! what once has been shall be no more!\r\n The groaning earth in travail and in pain\r\n Brings forth its races, but does not restore,\r\n And the dead nations never rise again.\r\n \n\n—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\nThis poem is in the public domain.\n\n", "output": "This is Dana Gioia. The poem I would like to read is “The Jewish Cemetery at\nNew Port” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This is not a very well-known poem\nthese days, but I consider it one of the great elegies in American literature\nand also one of the few great 19th century poems that’s really about the\nburden of immigration.\n\nThis is, I think, an extraordinary poem. When Longfellow visited New Port,\nRhode Island in 1852, the seaport town was already on its way to becoming a\nsort of fancy summer resort. But during this visit, he discovered an old\nJewish cemetery that dated back to pre-revolutionary days for the city’s\nsmall, and already long vanished, Sephardic Jewish community. The cemetery was\nassociated with the nearby Touro Synagogue, the oldest surviving Jewish\nsynagogue in the United States—and, in fact, all of North America. Longfellow\nuses this experience of seeing the cemetery and seeing the gravestones for a\nlong, historic elegy, a meditation on the history of the Jews.\n\nThis is an unusual poem for Longfellow. The language is more dense than his\ntypical poem. It is also studded with allusions to Jewish history and\nreligion. The elegiac tone, though, is actually quite characteristic for\nLongfellow. It is the same tone we hear in many poems such as the gorgeous\nopening lines of “Evangeline”: “This is the forest primeval. The murmuring\npines and the hemlocks, / Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct\nin the twilight.” It’s this kind of lyric sad music that he had a particular\ngenius for. But in the Jewish cemetery at New Port, Longfellow uses this\nelegiac music to articulate a tragic vision of Jewish history: a history of\npersecution, expulsion, and Diaspora. Longfellow’s humane and sympathetic\nmeditation on this Jewish cemetery—which is has been oddly preserved in a\nProtestant New England seaport, which no longer has a Jewish\ncommunity—reflects a remarkably open and inclusive vision of America for the\n19th century, full of compassion for the oppressed and marginalized. And this\nis at least one reason to admire this fine poem. You know, Longfellow uses\nthese Sephardic family names on the tombstones—Avares, Rivera, names that\nreflect the Portuguese and Spanish origins of these Sephardic immigrants as a\ntiny gesture to suggest centuries of Jewish Diaspora as well as a history of\npersecution, expulsion, and immigration. And the sheer compassion of\nLongfellow’s vision suffuses the poem with an emotion, an emotional music that\nis quite powerful. And that is what makes this poem matter most to me\npersonally: the strange beauty and evocative power of its language and its\nimagery that draw a special resonance from Jewish cultural history. Let me\ngive you one example toward the end of the poem: Longfellow imagines the dead\nin their graves literally trapped in history, and he uses the fact that\nHebrew, unlike English, is written from right to left and that Hebrew books\nadvance from back to front as a metaphor for Jewish historical consciousness\nthat never forgets its ancient Biblical origins:\n\n \n \n And thus forever with reverted look\r\n The mystic volume of the world they read,\r\n Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book,\r\n Till life became a Legend of the Dead.\n\nThere is of course an irony in Longfellow’s powerful lines. It must have\nseemed impossible even to a progressive idealist such as Longfellow that the\nJewish people would ever again have a homeland. That the very backward gaze on\nancient history that he celebrates that categorizes race and its long Diaspora\nalso proved to be the political passion that led to the recreation of Israel—a\nfuture that Longfellow could not foretell as one of the many dead nations that\nin modern history rose again.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## Autumn Ritual with Hate Turned Sideways\n\n \n \n —i pull the hate\r\n on a rope ladder to the resting zone…\r\n H\r\n H\r\n H\r\n pull the A on down.\r\n A\r\n A\r\n A\r\n Put that sick A to bed. Get well, A. Pinched\r\n fire. Bring the T down now \r\n T\r\n T\r\n T\r\n Roman cross before the Christian thing.\r\n Bump bump. Put that T to bed. Put\r\n that Garamond T\r\n to bed before we kill someone with it. Such as:\r\n Whack-whack. Weapon contractors in Virginia.\r\n Whack. Get well T. Won’t kill with you.\r\n Now. Being\r\n able to breathe for the E,\r\n breathe into the prongs. Slide on its back.\r\n E \n E \n E\r\n Put the E to bed. Get well, E.\r\n Weird shapes around campfires\r\n below the mind.\r\n Tiny fires with hurt earth spirits\r\n as in Aeschylus. Resting letters now\r\n so they can live—\n\n—Brenda Hillman\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\n“Autumn Ritual with Hate Turned Sideways” from _Seasonal Works with Letters on\nFire_ © 2013 by Brenda Hillman.\n\nPublished by Wesleyan University Press.\n\nUsed by permission.\n\n", "output": "Brenda Hillman is one of America’s crucial contemporary poets, a braider of\ndiverse strands of the American literary tradition. Firstly, there is her\nfiery spiritual engagement, a trait we find initially in the passionate\nsermons of early American religious writers and then in the work of her fellow\neccentric seeker Emily Dickinson. “Autumn Ritual with Hate Turned Sideways”\nalso aligns with American Modernist E. E. Cummings, who winks behind “Autumn\nRitual”’s exuberant typographical play. Indeed, such play is natural to a book\ncalled _Seasonal Work with Letters on Fire_ , from which “Autumn Ritual”\ncomes. In this poem, Hillman draws on the linguistic mysticism of Kabbalah,\nfrom the mystic branch of Judaism, where letters and words have agency in and\nof themselves because they are made of God’s holy fire. In “Autumn Ritual with\nHate Turned Sideways,” the letter-play is the thing, with Hillman dismantling\nthe word “hate” and putting each letter, one by one, to bed. She sends each\noff with a heartfelt “Get well” and nudges them to get some rest “so they can\nlive” beyond the hate they once composed.\n\nIt is old spell-magic, to dismantle a word in order to dismantle the thing it\nconjures into being. Spell-magic requires a mind geared toward the hidden and\nfantastical, and in this regard “Autumn Ritual” recalls the seventeenth-\ncentury British Metaphysical poets John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and especially\nGeorge Herbert, some of whose poems take the shape of altars and angel wings.\nPersonification, as we can also see in “Autumn Ritual,” is a significant tool\nin Hillman’s hands—whether engaging letters of the alphabet as beings worthy\nof empathy and rest, or asserting (as she does elsewhere in _Seasonal Works_ )\nthat vowels, panicles, and California grasses “are made of fire,” is to argue\nfor the inspiring spark in everything: Gaia sentience. Hillman, in addition to\nbeing one of America’s great spiritual poets, is one of our great writers\nabout the Environment, particularly chronicling our passage through the\nAnthropocene era. In her hands, personification does important animating (even\nanimistic) work for a book about a world going up in smoke.\n\nBrenda Hillman, as a poet-citizen of America’s “New World,” reminds us that\none of the functions of art is to disturb: to startle us out of the ossified,\ninflexible forms of the routine and conventional. In this, she has a\nparticularly American genius. She Barnums up the language, coaxing from it\nboggling feats. She tells tall tales about the alphabet and electrons and\nstars. She stanches our dark democracy-wound of Senate hearings and oil spills\nand drone strikes with eelgrass and original flame. Her generosity of spirit\nand capacious embrace of the things of this world make me think of American\npoet-fathers Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg: her work is large, and contains\nmultitudes.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## 508 (I’m ceded – I’ve stopped being Theirs –)\n\n \n \n I’m ceded – I’ve stopped being Theirs – \r\n The name They dropped upon my face \r\n With water, in the country church \r\n Is finished using, now, \r\n And They can put it with my Dolls, \r\n My childhood, and the string of spools, \r\n I’ve finished threading – too – \r\n \r\n Baptized, before, without the choice, \r\n But this time, consciously, Of Grace – \r\n Unto supremest name – \r\n Called to my Full – The Crescent dropped – \r\n Existence’s whole Arc, filled up, \r\n With one – small Diadem.\r\n \r\n My second Rank – too small the first – \r\n Crowned – Crowing – on my Father’s breast – \r\n A half unconscious Queen – \r\n But this time – Adequate – Erect, \r\n With Will to choose, or to reject, \r\n And I choose, just a Crown –\n\n— Emily Dickinson\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\nTHE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON: READING EDITION, edited by Ralph W. Franklin,\nCambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright ©\n1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.\n\nCopyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.\n\nCopyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard\nCollege.\n\nCopyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by\nMartha Dickinson Bianchi.\n\nCopyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson.\n\n", "output": "It’s said that many of Dickinson’s poems begin where most poems end, in the\n“white heat,” and that is the case here. Rather than finding her way to a\nradical lift-off at the poem’s conclusion, she _begins_ there—“I’m ceded—”—she\ndeclares—\"I’ve stopped being Theirs—.” She is ceded, as land is ceded, as\nproperty is ceded. In this poem the question of who owns this speaker is\nsuspended and then dramatically revealed in the final stanza.\n\n“I _am_ ceded”—the poem begins in that scorching present tense—and “I’ve\nstopped being Theirs.” _Who is this “They”?_ we wonder, and we are left to\nconsider Them as we move into the body of the poem. “The name they dropped\nupon my face with water, in the country church, is finished using now,” she\nwrites, and how nearly-violent, I think, to _drop_ a name upon a face,\nespecially, one imagines, on an infant’s face, and how clever to set this\nbaptism in a country church, an image of quaint innocence that will be\nsupported later by the dolls and string of spools and the conventionally-\ngendered childhood she is also leaving behind.\n\nThe name they dropped upon her face “Is finished using, now.” An odd\nsyntactical move. Is she finished with the name or is it finished using her?\nIs she booting the name or is the name booting her? Is she ceded by them, or\nseceding from them? Resonant questions in 1862 when this poem arrived, as\nAmerica itself was splitting in half, both ceding and seceding, and less than\none hundred years from when the nation’s origins were imagined within the very\nact of shoving off from one reality in order to create another. To self-name,\none must first peel oneself away from the given name and step, for a time,\ninto an existential void. That process is what revolution is all about.\n\nIn the middle stanza we learn that there has been a second baptism. The\nspeaker had no choice in the matter the first time, but this time she is\nconscious; she chooses. This is not the last time she will reference\nconsciousness in this short poem. She comes to her “supremest name” via\nchoice, consciousness, and Grace— _that_ holy trinity. Her name is not dropped\nupon her face by Grace but is _of_ Grace. I take this to mean that Grace is\nits origin. “Called to my Full,” she writes—full name? Full identity? Yes and\nyes, and Dickinson uses the metaphor of the moon, that most female of cosmic\nbodies, rather than the sun to expose that fullness. “The crescent dropped”\nlike a mask, a disguise of partiality lowered to reveal the wholeness that’s\nbeen there all along. Existence’s “whole arc” is filled with “one small\ndiadem”—and here I experience Dickinson’s use of smallness as a kind of\nwitticism. Here I am with my tiny diadem filling up the whole arc of\nExistence. I’m just a girl wearing just a crown.\n\nShe completes stanza two with that double-edged smallness, and begins the\nfinal stanza with smallness’s other dimension: “My second Rank—too small the\nfirst,” she writes, using what was then the male realm of the military to\ndescribe her rejection of ascribed identity, itscorseting—dolls, spools,\ngirlhood. In her first birth she was “crowned,” she “crowed” upon her Father’s\nbreast, she was a queen, but “half unconscious.” I don’t put it past her to be\nplaying with the double-meaning of “crowned”—the crowning of the infant in\nbirth—who is crowing, only half-conscious, on her _Father’s_ breast. God the\nFather? Patriarchal power? The power to baptize and name? Where, in this\nbirth, is Mother? The first birth seems akin to Athena’s, who emerges not from\nher mother’s body but from her father’s head.\n\nBut this time, in this second birth, in this new Rank, post-doll, post-spool,\nhaving rejected baptism by _Them,_ our speaker is not only Adequate but\n_Erect—_ no girliness there _—_ a soldier of selfhood, with “Will to choose,\nor to reject.” Free Will. A very American notion of self-rule. And what does\nshe choose? _“Just_ a crown,” she tells us. That’s all. This poem turns out to\nbe more psychological and political than theological; baptism is metaphor\nrather than the poem’s ultimate subject. Sylvia Plath, a hundred years later,\nwould write, similarly, in her poem “Stings” from her bee sequence, “I/Have a\nself to recover, a queen.” Both poets toss off patriarchal signifiers and land\nat a queendom of one, Plath from a cold, London flat, Dickinson from her\nfather’s house in Amherst. There is no mention, in Dickinson, of the war that\nraged around her, nor of the human beings whose enslavement distorts and\ncomplicates any statement of American self-ownership. If those subjects enter\nher work, they do so through slanted inference only. There is much unspoken in\nDickinson’s white space. Her poems, indeed, emerged from white spaces, from a\nsmall white woman wearing a white dress. If one could dissect those Dickinson\ndashes, what untouched subjects would we discover?\n\nStill, yet, for a woman writing from the middle of the 1800s, a woman who\nrarely ventured from her father’s house, the self-claiming in this and so many\nof her poems is extraordinary, and strikes me as quintessentially American, at\nleast as Americans dream themselves to be.\n\nWhen I was a child I sought salvation at every turn. I was saved in a range of\ncountry churches at least seven times. Whatever salvation I was seeking never\nseemed to take. Unlike Dickinson’s speaker, but like Dickinson herself, I was\nnever baptized. I was afraid to put my head underwater, and our churches\ndemanded full immersion. Like Dickinson’s speaker, at some point I stepped\naway from that path, and tossed away my dolls, too. The queendom I finally\ncame to was Poetry. That is the realm Emily found, too.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## We Are Not Responsible\n\n \n \n We are not responsible for your lost or stolen relatives. \r\n We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our instructions. \r\n We do not endorse the causes or claims of people begging for handouts. \r\n We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. \r\n \r\n Your ticket does not guarantee that we will honor your reservations. \r\n In order to facilitate our procedures, please limit your carrying on. \r\n Before taking off, please extinguish all smoldering resentments. \r\n \r\n If you cannot understand English, you will be moved out of the way. \r\n In the event of a loss, you’d better look out for yourself. \r\n Your insurance was cancelled because we can no longer handle\r\n your frightful claims. Our handlers lost your luggage and we\r\n are unable to find the key to your legal case. \r\n \r\n You were detained for interrogation because you fit the profile. \r\n You are not presumed to be innocent if the police \r\n have reason to suspect you are carrying a concealed wallet. \r\n It’s not our fault you were born wearing a gang color. \r\n It is not our obligation to inform you of your rights. \r\n \r\n Step aside, please, while our officer inspects your bad attitude. \r\n You have no rights we are bound to respect. \r\n Please remain calm, or we can’t be held responsible \r\n for what happens to you.\n\n—Harryette Mullen\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\nMullen, Harryette, “We Are Not Responsible,” _Sleeping with the Dictionary_. ©\n2002 by the Regents of the University of California.\n\nPublished by the University of California Press.\n\n", "output": "Hello there. This is Douglas Kearney, and I am reading Harryette Mullen’s “We\nAre Not Responsible.”\n\nWell, first of all, I love Harryette Mullen. Her work is oftentimes engaged in\nwhat I think of as like a super serious kind of play, whether she’s using tons\nof puns or a lot of signifying techniques. Harryette Mullen goes in and\naddresses language, as language is a tool for power, and because it’s a tool\nfor power it can be a tool for oppression. So Harryette Mullen oftentimes\nengages language as a kind of a plaything, but is always aware that it’s\nvolatile, like somebody juggling nitroglycerin.\n\nFor me, one of the things that I really love about this poem is how it takes\nofficial language, or officious language—you know, the first line, “We are not\nresponsible for your lost or stolen relatives,” riffs off of “We are not\nresponsible for your lost or stolen items.” Which is, when you think about it\nas a sign that might be placed in a place of business, or a parking lot or\nsomething like that, is kind of an audacious thing to say: that even though\nyou are here, under our auspices, it is not our responsibility if something\nbad happens to you. And there’s something about that that just strikes me, and\nit’s always stricken me as, well, a kind of passing on of the need to care for\neach other. “I am not responsible for what happens to you.” And, of course,\nHarryette Mullen amplifies that by overlapping that language that’s oftentimes\nabout property—you know, your lost and stolen items—with humans. Relatives.\nNow, of course, the history of the United States of America includes several\ndark centuries in which a number of people’s relatives _were_ someone else’s\nitems. And so, in that moment, we have this collision between these two\nlanguages: the language of a kind of passing off of responsibility and,\nsubtly, a language that is pointing at responsibility in that same line.\n\nFrom there, the poem moves from a more kind of passed off hostility to these\nconstant threats—“We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our\ninstructions” —all the way to “Please remain calm, or we can’t be held\nresponsible for what happens to you.” It reminds me about what happens when,\nsay, a person is shot by an officer, and that officer is not guilty of murder.\nIt’s sort of like, well, apparently this person didn’t die, or wasn’t killed?\nOr something happened…because a kind of official language, a state language,\nprotects itself. And because this is also the same language that creates laws\nand authorizes power, that protection is sort of self-circular, self-serving,\nor just a kind of a logic that is not airtight, but airless; it doesn’t allow\nfor certain life to happen. And seeing that move between the kind of\nhistorical language to the language of “Your insurance was cancelled because\nwe can no longer handle your frightful claims,” really just demonstrates how\nthis same speech in many ways is just extraordinarily banal; you know, it’s\nlike this sort of dull bureaucratic language. But what happens when dull,\nairless language takes charge of blood and bone, flesh, and peoples’ lives?\nWhat happens when, you know, a kind of antipathy, or an unnatural attempt at\nneutrality, is there to weigh in on actual human suffering?\n\nSo what the poem does, in my estimation, is sort of demonstrates how inhuman\nthat language is, which—when you think about how oftentimes power dehumanizes\nthose it oppresses—to think of that power as inhuman becomes, in that way, a\nreversal; a kind of radical reversal.\n\nAnd one of the ways that Harryette Mullen’s work influences me is in how it\nuses these different registers of language; how it can take language from\nsupermarket advertising (in the case of collections like _S*PeRM**K*T_ , or\neven _Trimmings_ , or in a collection like _Muse and Drudge_ , where it can\nrange from everything from TV theme song language to old folk songs), and\nblend them all together into this kind of volatile and oftentimes deeply\npleasurable, even, when sometimes it becomes deeply disturbing sort of play\nwith language. And in this way, I mean, in many ways it resembles, I guess we\ncould say, the diversity of American expression. It’s not that the writing is\nsubject to a kind of flow of pop culture that it’s not controlling; like,\nHarryette Mullen’s definitely holding the remote control and is definitely\nchanging the channels and lingering here and sticking here. She’s turning the\ndial on her radio station, and occasionally listening to a jingle, and maybe\noccasionally listening to a verse from an old song. But that kind of volatile\nmix that doesn’t hold together necessarily—but still, through just this kind\nof force of personality of it holds together, strikes me in some ways as a\nvery American way of working—a very _African_ American way of working—and, so,\na very American way of working in that regard.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## To Elsie\n\n \n \n XVIII\r\n \r\n The pure products of America\r\n go crazy—\r\n mountain folk from Kentucky\r\n \r\n or the ribbed north end of \r\n Jersey\r\n with its isolate lakes and \r\n \r\n valleys, its deaf mutes, thieves\r\n old names\r\n and promiscuity between\r\n \r\n devil-may-care men who have taken \r\n to railroading \r\n out of sheer lust of adventure��\r\n \r\n and young slatterns, bathed \r\n in filth\r\n from Monday to Saturday\r\n \r\n to be tricked out that night\r\n with gauds \r\n from imaginations which have no\r\n \r\n peasant traditions to give them\r\n character\r\n but flutter and flaunt\r\n \r\n sheer rags—succumbing without \r\n emotion\r\n save numbed terror\r\n \r\n under some hedge of choke-cherry\r\n or viburnum—\r\n which they cannot express—\r\n \r\n Unless it be that marriage \r\n perhaps\r\n with a dash of Indian blood\r\n \r\n will throw up a girl so desolate\r\n so hemmed round \r\n with disease or murder\r\n \r\n that she’ll be rescued by an \r\n agent—\r\n reared by the state and\r\n \r\n sent out at fifteen to work in \r\n some hard-pressed\r\n house in the suburbs—\r\n \r\n some doctor’s family, some Elsie—\r\n voluptuous water\r\n expressing with broken\r\n \r\n brain the truth about us—\r\n her great\r\n ungainly hips and flopping breasts\r\n \r\n addressed to cheap \r\n jewelry \r\n and rich young men with fine eyes\r\n \r\n as if the earth under our feet \r\n were\r\n an excrement of some sky\r\n \r\n and we degraded prisoners\r\n destined\r\n to hunger until we eat filth\r\n \r\n while the imagination strains\r\n after deer \r\n going by fields of goldenrod in \r\n \r\n the stifling heat of September\r\n Somehow\r\n it seems to destroy us\r\n \r\n It is only in isolate flecks that \r\n something\r\n is given off\r\n \r\n No one \r\n to witness\r\n and adjust, no one to drive the car\n\n—William Carlos Williams\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\n“To Elsie” by William Carlos Williams, from _THE COLLECTED POEMS: VOLUME I,\n1909-1939_ , copyright ©1938\n\nNew Directions Publishing Corp.\n\nReprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.\n\n", "output": "My name is Edward Hirsch and I’m reading a poem by William Carlos Williams\ncalled “To Elsie”.\n\nThis poem was untitled when William Carlos Williams first published it. It was\n“Poem Number 18” in _Spring and All_ , which he published in 1923. It was only\nuntil when he published a later _Collected Poems_ that he gave the poem the\ntitle “To Elsie”. In its relationship it’s about (or uses) Elsie Borden, who\nwas a mentally handicapped nursemaid from the state orphanage who came to work\nfor the Williams family. And the odd thing about the poem, or one of the odd\nthings about the poem, is it’s called “To Elsie” but it doesn’t really . .\n.it’s not really addressed to Elsie, she isn’t spoken to. It’s really kind of\ntoward Elsie. And Elsie becomes both a particular person and an embodiment, a\nrepresentative of some kind of suffering in the culture. Because there is a\nmoment in the poem—it’s about a third of the way through the poem, almost\nhalfway—where she’s sent out. He’s describing her as someone who’s so\ndesolate, hemmed out, the kind of family she grew up in so surrounded by\ndisease and murder, that she was sent out to an agency at the age of fifteen\nand then farmed out to work for the Williamses, “some hard-pressed house in\nthe suburbs;” the Williams family, “some doctor’s family,” which Williams\nCarlos Williams was a doctor; “some Elsie.” So it’s not . . . she’s both a\nperson and she’s a representative who’s there to express the truth about us.\n\nAnd the poem becomes a kind of diagnosis of the American situation. And we’re\na new country, in this diagnosis, but the people have lost contact with\npeasant traditions, with European traditions, with something that’s come\nbefore. And this lack of continuity with anything that’s come before, with any\nfolk traditions from the old country, has left Americans lost. And it’s left\nthem in some kind of situation, from the mountain folk of Kentucky or in\nJersey, in New Jersey where William Carlos Williams lived, surrounded by these\nyoung guys who work and get drunk all of week and take out these girls who\nthen are in danger of getting pregnant and passing on disease and so forth.\nAnd Williams doesn’t exactly give us the solution, but it seems to be the\nimagination needs contact with earth under our feet. And there’s a beautiful\nline in this poem:\n\n \n \n and we degraded prisoners\r\n destined\r\n to hunger until we eat filth\r\n \r\n while the imagination strains\r\n after deer\r\n going by fields of goldenrod in\r\n \r\n the stifling heat of September\n\nContact was an important word for Williams, and so in place of these ancient\ntraditions what we have in America are people who need contact with the earth,\nwith the natural world, with a new culture that we can create. And “To\nElsie”—actually the whole book _Spring and All_ —is the about the difficult\nbirth, of the difficulty of birth, the struggle it is to be born, and here to\nmake a new culture. So Williams gives us a kind of diagnosis of a situation in\nAmerica in 1923 (and America afterwards as well), and a kind of solution: we\nneed contact with the earth.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## The Bridge\n\n \n \n That there are things that can never be the same about\r\n my face, the houses, or the sand, that I was born under the\r\n sign of the sheep, that like Abraham Lincoln I am serious\r\n but also lacking in courage,\r\n \r\n That from this yard I have been composing a great speech,\r\n that I write about myself, that it’s good to be a poet, that I look\r\n like the drawing of a house that was pencilled by a child,\r\n that curiously, I miss him and my mind is not upon the Pleaides,\r\n that I love the ocean and its foam against the sky,\r\n \r\n That I am sneezing like a lion in this garden that he knows\r\n the lilies of his Nile, distant image, breakfast, a flock of birds\r\n and sparrows from the sky,\r\n \r\n That I am not the husband of Cassiopeia, that I am not\r\n the southern fish, that I am not the last poet of civilization,\r\n that if I want to go out for a walk and then to find myself\r\n beneath a bank of trees, weary, that this is the life that I had,\r\n \r\n That curiously I miss the sound of the rain pounding\r\n on the roof and also all of Oakland, that I miss the sounds of\r\n sparrows dropping from the sky, that there are sparks behind\r\n my eyes, on the radio, and the distant sound of sand blasters,\r\n and breakfast, and every second of it, geometric, smoke\r\n from the chimney of the trees where I was small,\r\n \r\n That in January, I met him in a bar, we went\r\n home together, there was a lemon tree in the back yard,\r\n and a coffee house where we stood outside and kissed,\r\n \r\n That I have never been there, curiously, and that it never was\r\n the same, the whole of the island, or the paintings of the stars,\r\n fatherly, tied to sparrows as they drop down from the sky,\r\n \r\n O rattling frame where I am, I am where there are still\r\n these assignments in the night, to remember the texture\r\n of the leaves on the locust trees in August, under the\r\n moonlight, rounded, through a window in the hills,\r\n \r\n That if I stay beneath the pole star in this harmony of\r\n crickets that will sing, the bird sound on the screen,\r\n the wide eyes of the owl form of him still in the dark,\r\n blue, green, with shards of the Pacific,\r\n \r\n That I do not know the dreams from which I have come,\r\n sent into the world without the blessing of a kiss, behind the\r\n willow trees, beside the darkened pansies on the deck beside\r\n the ships, rocking, I have written this, across the back of the\r\n sky, wearing a small and yellow shirt, near the reptile house,\r\n mammalian, no bigger than the herd,\r\n \r\n That I wrote the history of the war waged between the\r\n Peloponnesians and the south, that I like to run through\r\n shopping malls, that I’ve also learned to draw, having been\r\n driven here, like the rain is driven into things, into the\r\n ground, beside the broken barns, by the railroad tracks,\r\n beside the sea, I, Thucydides, having written this, having\r\n grown up near the ocean.\n\n—Lisa Jarnot\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\nLisa Jarnot, \"The Bridge\" from _Ring of Fire_. Copyright © 2003 by Lisa\nJarnot. Reprinted by permission of Salt Publishing.\n\n", "output": "I love this poem. I love its curiousness: the things that it finds curious and\nthe fact that it moves with such curiosity through the world.\n\nIt seems to me a deeply American poem in a lot of ways, though what\nAmericanness is is not easy to say, and the instability of that meaning seems\nto me an important part of it.\n\nI think what’s American about the poem has to do with its stance, which\nincludes an almost overwhelming ambition for greatness, and a profound\nhumility and fear of not being up for the labors that the poet, like an\nancient hero, has been called to do. It’s the way the poem inhabits its\nvulnerability and still goes on to reach for something beyond it. The way it\nwants to feel something both intimate and collective, to belong to something\nand someone and at the same time to maintain the clarity and authority of\nself-determination.\n\nAll of this is happening in the context of these spectacularly commonplace\npoints of contact: someone sneezing in a garden, two people kissing on the\nstreet, a flock of birds, the zoo, things that are broken or falling or\ntrapped. It’s not an ideal world. But there’s an intimacy that’s shared with\nthe reader, that opens onto something marvelous about the experience of being\nhuman.\n\nThere’s an underlying imperative here to fulfill the immense potential of the\npoem. And the poet isn’t given the space to do this, she has to make the world\nof the poem, to say the thing that only she can say, to fulfill the assignment\nthat she has been given in the night, as if her life depends on it, as I think\nit does. And that assignment seems to touch on every aspect of relation, of\nsocial and domestic life, of the history of poetry and the history of this\ncountry, which is still being written, and which like that of the\nPeloponnesians who appear at the end of the poem, is at war, with the world\nand with itself.\n\nThe poem is considering what survives and what is momentary, what lasts and\nwhat the poem has the opportunity or responsibility to represent.\n\nThere are relational patterns that survive, there is poetry that survives, but\nalso a history of violence, which means, among other things, that the task of\nthe poet, to create something counter to that history, is undiminished.\n\nThe poem is looking at all these forms of relation, how we think of ourselves\namong others, or in relation to a significant other, within history, among\nother species, under the sky in which one person might see the kind of god\nthat counts the sparrows and others the seven sisters of the Pleiades.\n\nI think this is a poem about being in the middle of a larger narrative\naccount, including the fact that any understanding of our place comes from the\naccounts of others and that, in some sense, what we experience as reality is\nalways being bridged in this way. It’s as if we’ve arrived in the middle of an\nargument or treatise with all those “that…” clauses—but those clauses deliver\nis completely personal and non-legalistic and slippery and true… that there\nare things that can never be the same.\n\nWe begin in the middle of this human situation of living here in a body that’s\ntime-bound among materials that are time bound, with the knowledge that\neverything, even our selves, our domestic and biological environment is\nconstantly changing, mutable, unstable. And next to this is placed the fact\nthat there are things that don’t change and that we are powerless over,\nincluding the circumstances of birth, the imperfect and unfinished scrawl of\nour lives, all our capacities as well as our limits.\n\nI love the way Lincoln appears unexpectedly in a way that undoes the\noversimplified heroics of national history. What does it mean to look at the\nfear and failure that are obscured by mythology—and to do so without giving up\non the concept of a social good? What does it mean to look at all of history\npast and present as part of the same erroneous and flawed composition?\n\nI think “The Bridge” is saying something about American identity and what it\nmeans to be an individual within a work in progress, which is what any nation\nor coalition or relationship is, and what it means to be an artist in this\nculture, fully alive to the complexities and disappointments and possibilities\nof what that might mean.\n\nThe poet herself is a kind of bridge figure, mercurial, moving between visible\nand invisible realms, past and present, curious and elusive and alive, not the\nfirst or the last of her kind. She’s making a bridge of words that begins on\none shore and ends on another, from Oakland to ancient Greece, writing and\nrewriting these layered histories in a declaration of love and of allegiance,\nto something that is both smaller and larger than the national.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## The Acts of Youth\n\n \n \n And with great fear I inhabit the middle of the night\r\n What wrecks of the mind await me, what drugs\r\n to dull the senses, what little I have left,\r\n what more can be taken away?\r\n \r\n The fear of travelling, of the future without hope\r\n or buoy. I must get away from this place and see\r\n that there is no fear without me: that it is within\r\n unless it be some sudden act or calamity\r\n \r\n to land me in the hospital, a total wreck, without\r\n memory again; or worse still, behind bars. If\r\n I could just get out of the country. Some place\r\n where one can eat the lotus in peace.\r\n \r\n For in this country it is terror, poverty awaits; or\r\n am I a marked man, my life to be a lesson\r\n or experience to those young who would trod\r\n the same path, without God\r\n \r\n unless he be one of justice, to wreak vengeance\r\n on the acts committed while young under un-\r\n due influence or circumstance. Oh I have\r\n always seen my life as drama, patterned\r\n \r\n after those who met with disaster or doom.\r\n Is my mind being taken away me.\r\n I have been over the abyss before. What\r\n is that ringing in my ears that tells me\r\n \r\n all is nigh, is naught but the roaring of the winter wind.\r\n Woe to those homeless who are out on this night.\r\n Woe to those crimes committed from which we\r\n can walk away unharmed.\r\n \r\n So I turn on the light\r\n And smoke rings rise in the air.\r\n Do not think of the future; there is none.\r\n But the formula all great art is made of.\r\n \r\n Pain and suffering. Give me the strength\r\n to bear it, to enter those places where the\r\n great animals are caged. And we can live\r\n at peace by their side. A bride to the burden\r\n \r\n that no god imposes but knows we have the means\r\n to sustain its force unto the end of our days.\r\n For that is what we are made for; for that \r\n we are created. Until the dark hours are done.\r\n \r\n And we rise again in the dawn.\r\n Infinite particles of the divine sun, now\r\n worshipped in the pitches of the night.\n\n—John Wieners\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\nFrom _Selected Poems, 1958-1984_ by John Weiners, edited by Raymond Foye.\n\nReprinted by permission of Black Sparrow Books, an imprint of David R. Godine,\nPublisher, Inc.\n\nCopyright © 1986 by John Weiners.\n\n", "output": "I don’t think this poet would mind having a woman read his work aloud anymore\nthan this woman would mind a man reading my poetry aloud. John Wieners’ poems\nare the means by which he rescues himself. The poems relieve his anguish as\nthey offer rhythm in the ritual of writing that echoes a lyrical way of\nthinking. His lines carry contradictions and loops, which he lets stand. The\npoem is the answer to the questions it asks, but has no resting place. The\npoem is homeless. There’s no expectation of a sympathetic reader out there to\nnod with him or of a room full of inquiring poets or critics who will sigh.\nWieners is entirely private, inward: a person whose loneliness amounts to the\nonly presence he can recognize. To delineate the outlines of this loneliness\nis to see it as something embodied in darkness, as itself shedding bits of\nlight. He lays himself bare in order to hear his own hearing clearly.\n\nWhat he hears is not just himself but those outside who are helpless and\ntossed. He speaks for the failures in this country, and out of a Catholic\nidentity that’s mysterious to people who don’t understand its codes. Out of\ninsomnia comes self-damnation and fear. What have I done to myself, and what\nwill be done to me? Because of the acts of his youth, the poet is damaged, but\nwill he also be punished for it? Will a hospital—or worse yet, prison—be his\ndestination? As he writes: “For in this country its terror, poverty awaits; or\n/ am I a marked man, my life to be a lesson / or experience to those young who\nwould trod / the same path, without God.” These questions consistently lead\nhim outward towards others, to the poor he prefers. “Woe to the homeless who\nare out on this night.” They are the ones who trigger the ontological\nquestions he carries with him from poem to poem. In America there is such a\nthing as a middle class that lasts like a thick glass, but he isn’t of it.\n\nWieners includes God in his poems as the knower, not the one who acts as\njudge, avenger, priest or helper. The knower is present and inactive, as is\nthe figure of loneliness, who is taking notes on the sidelines. God and\nloneliness are one form and one force. “God . . . knows we have the means to\nsustain its force unto the end of our days.” This force is always suffering\nand is also, thanks to the peculiarity of his sentencing, “a bride to the\nburden.” A Catholic’s final identity is the one writing the Wieners poems.\nIt’s an identity of mystics, accomplished through degradation and lowliness,\nand winding up as a “particle of the divine sun, now/ worshipped in the\npitches of the night.” It is blindingly material.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## _from_ The Sri Lankan Loxodrome\n\n \n \n in this fundamental sense\r\n I am Mahayana & of Africa\r\n both Sri Lankan & non-Sri Lankan \r\n in that\r\n I am of a newly elected “Radial” width\r\n comprehending my projection of rays\r\n like faceless chromium at twilight\r\n an absence\r\n like “intergalactic hydrogen”\r\n perhaps a complex of gravitons & lightning\r\n \r\n I learned to speak when my solar journal first commenced\r\n then I was magnetized at the age of 12 to a psychic form of fatherhood\r\n & now I sail\r\n never eating for days consumed by scalar neutrinos\r\n \r\n I’ve been reported as expired at Jaffna\r\n & have been burned in effigy for interminable wanderings\r\n for the crime of emitting vertigo by movement\r\n for inflicting the human spirit with a parallel genetic engenderment\r\n comparable to a sun which erupts from the voice of the afterlife\r\n \r\n a wanderer in a zone of fluctuating kelvins\r\n breathing unknown dice within my schisms\r\n \r\n ****\r\n perhaps for me\r\n a Nubian catacomb in the nameless\r\n a concealed adventure in the tourmaline\r\n a powerful spectra of intangible chondrites\r\n \r\n maybe as darkened transition\r\n I’ll speak an aqua-Chinese\r\n or as an Afro-Gujarati I’ll have a voice in Batticaloa\r\n alive in Madagascar\r\n as a combusted lemur sage\r\n \r\n I develop moment after moment\r\n with intensity as aloofness\r\n allowing each destroyed symmetry\r\n each ulterior symbology\r\n to ignite its hazeless unicorns\r\n to unbury spells amidst “black widow pulsars”\r\n wafting\r\n between equilibria & equilibria\r\n aleatoric & unblemished\r\n like a moonless endurance\r\n within a “grazing occultation”\r\n & each fire that I build\r\n vanishes\r\n each clause of interregnums\r\n detractable\r\n amidst the rural dominations\r\n of “Istar Terra”\r\n & the “anomaly over Beta Regio”\r\n like a brimstone fire\r\n at the source of the instantaneous\n\n—Will Alexander\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\n“The Sri Lankan Loxodrome” Will Alexander from _The Sri Lankan Loxodrome_. New\nDirections, 2009.\n\nReprinted by permission of the author.\n\n", "output": "Will Alexander’s “The Sri Lankan Loxodrome” imagines the journey of a Sri\nLankan sailor across the Indian Ocean. The sailor, making contact with various\ntransplanted African communities, is an immigrant from restrictive\nconstructions of nationality and certainty. For him, migration is a mode and\nmeans of identification with others, and so, of self-discovery. At the same\ntime, Alexander’s poem is about migration at a cellular level—the migration of\ncancer cells through a body. And it was written as the author struggled to\nsurvive his own life-threatening illness.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## The Tusks of Blood\n\n \n \n My chant must enclose hell\r\n And yet here leave behind\r\n Myself of touch and vow;\r\n My hour has come when gales—\r\n The brief song of Greek—\r\n Have found the inner teeth alone.\r\n Here listen, someone is calling—\r\n Why the ugly praise and fate?\r\n Shall I be a joiner to this\r\n And leave here the good hope?\r\n Not to prank the lucky star\r\n I’ll apologize, wait until\r\n The great way works for woe!\r\n Woe? never, you Parsifal;\r\n Never—and by the trait of love’s\r\n Light shell, sneering outpour.\r\n Not to blame—wait, a travel\r\n For an excuse; a good life lay\r\n In the real actions, the pomped\r\n Horn, and the pardons of a door.\r\n What interfering, cloaked love\r\n Rules my thoughts!\r\n Shall I write: O anger, hast thou\r\n Not treated thy refuging forbear?\r\n Perhaps I can walk a bit\r\n To my truthful veins and relate\r\n The sport of the steeds that trot\r\n The stirring muscles of an earthly\r\n Gait and my hearted glow.\r\n O worm, worm-heated soil,\r\n Peal sad mereing folds\r\n Where cometh a home afar;\r\n And again a slow fainting ghost\r\n Gliding over a path easily seen. . . \r\n God! some voices disturb me\r\n From the inner room;\r\n I catch the subject: Death!\r\n Death, what a careless value\r\n To such aged spirits. Again\r\n A sad remark. Life not valued\r\n By such retired souls, who\r\n Should be apart to believe\r\n Justice . . . Ah, man, not thy boast!\r\n He was a marked lad\r\n Who poorly helped himself.\r\n What should this mean?\r\n Fill your pockets—I’ll let \r\n You know the grass of a grave.\r\n O the pillars of silk and good tea,\r\n Confusion of women, the bare bust—\r\n Embarrassment, carnal filth\r\n Of its justice lacks environment;\r\n O creaking earth, necessity; hell,\r\n No more wise; then the next child—\r\n What can he give?\r\n You pallid stork, gazing—\r\n Who gazed before you, cooled\r\n The summer spray?\r\n Very bad for an apartment Jew to claim\r\n Everlasting renaissance.\r\n What a delivery was this,\r\n Sucked by secret gilded creatures\r\n Who slew gold for a membrane!\r\n O tear, sped into the basin\r\n Of sparkling night aghast in silence,\r\n And the pipes’ swift pain\r\n Of the boiling steam shocks uplifting\r\n You, endless wretch of silver!\r\n \n\n—Samuel Greenberg\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\nThis poem is in the public domain.\n\n", "output": "I’m going to read a poem today about a mostly unknown poet named Samuel\nGreenberg, who was born in Vienna in 1893 and died, twenty-three years later,\nin 1917. The poem—aside from being fascinating and brilliant, perhaps a great\npoem—is illustrative, also in its way, of the huge wave of immigration coming\nfrom southern and eastern Europe at the turn of the last century. And I’m\nusing it as an illustration of that—particularly of Jewish immigration in the\nLower East Side into America, but mostly Jews who settled in New York City in\nthe Lower East Side, which of course by this time was well-known for movies\nand stories and so on. There, of course, were Italian immigrants and Russian\nand Polish and Lithuanian and Hungarian, and so on—immigrants as well, and\ntheir experiences are not to be ignored. And I suspect—I know, in some\nrespects—almost identical to the Jewish experience.\n\nBetween 1881 and 1910, over a million and a half Jews came from Poland,\nRussia, and other areas in eastern Europe, and they settled in their ghetto in\nthe Lower East Side—it wasn’t defined by the government as a ghetto, but it\nwas a self-imposed ghetto—coming mostly out of limited opportunities and\npoverty. There in the ghetto they worked in sweatshops—as we all know,\npushcarts were in the street; as we all know, the streets themselves were\nswarming with people as we’ve seen in the movies. The flats they lived in have\nbeen somewhat romanticized because of very, very famous singers, actors,\nwriters, artists of various types—grew up in that ghetto. The rooms\nthemselves, the apartments, were dark, smelly coldwater flats, known by the\nfamous name of “tenement.” Ironically, in the last fifteen years, the Lower\nEast Side has been gentrified—even large buildings, small skyscrapers, are\nbeing built there. It’s ironic beyond belief.\n\nBut Samuel Greenberg was a genius of sorts and, strangely odd in his way, he\nboth painted and he wrote poetry. He would probably have died unknown, except\nthat Hart Crane—the great Hart Crane, the great American poet, born in\n1898—discovered his poetry somehow and was madly obsessed with it—by the\nlanguage, the imagination, the irrational images of Greenberg. And he went so\nfar as even to . . . well, I’ll use the word copy, I’ll use the word\nplagiarize, one poem from Greenberg. Greenberg’s poem is called “Conduct,” and\nCrane’s poem is called “Emblems of Conduct.” It is not a major poem of Hart\nCrane, and I’m not—how shall I say—putting him down or attacking him for this.\nHe was overwhelmingly inspired by Greenberg. Of course, Crane’s inspiration\nextended beyond Samuel Greenberg, I must say.\n\nAt any rate, to get back to him: he fell in love with America in his way, and\nhe lived in poverty in his early youth. His father was an embroidery worker in\ngold and silver and made a decent living, but somehow one of the panics—one of\nthe depressions or other—he lost everything, and so Samuel was on his own from\nthe age of sixteen or seventeen on. He got a job in a leather factory. He may\nhave gone to the seventh or eighth grade, I’m not sure exactly how long—fell\nin love with baseball. The family lived at the corner of Suffolk and Grand, a\nplace then that was . . . he described in one of his prose memoirs as “an\ninsult of poverty, an insult of life.” He developed, as many others did,\ntuberculosis at an early age; spent half of his life, really, in wards and\ntuberculosis sanatoriums. Indeed, his last two years he was helpless and died\nin such a sanatorium.\n\nAs far as poetry is concerned, his chief influences were Keats, Shelley,\nand—more than anybody else—Emerson. He did have access to Palgrave’s _Golden\nTreasury_ and somehow, as it does to original, isolated poets—like Dickinson,\nlike Blake, Chatterton—as they somehow get the information—mystically,\nmagically—it’s theirs. And there is, in his poetry, a rush of sound and image.\nHe filled seventeen notebooks with drawings and poems, mostly in pencil, and\nit took weeks and months, even years, to decipher some of these. Maybe twenty\nto thirty percent of the work has been published. And it was for the\nwork—through the praise and discovery of him—by the well-known poet and critic\nAllen Tate, that Greenberg’s work became available. Tate said, among other\nthings, that no history of the 20th century, of 20th century poetry, would be\ncomplete without reference to Greenberg.\n\nThere are so many things to say about him, but I’m going to read one poem and\nthen I’m going to say a few words about his strange and unique and beautiful\nautobiography that he wrote of about eighteen pages. I’m going to read a few\nwords from that. So we go to the poem itself, “Tusks of Blood.” As far as I\ncan decipher it, the poem, which is written in alternate three- and four-\nstressed lines, is an awareness—an experience—of a birth in one of those flats\nthat I discovered next door.\n\nAnd the ending, “endless wretch of silver,” probably refers to the steam\nradiators, though it may refer to the silver—the child may have been\nemblematic—or it may have been the symbol of the child or the silver nitrate\nthat was poured into his eyes, I don’t know. But I want to say that in the\nautobiography—I’m just sort of explaining it in his strange and innocent\nlanguage—I’m going to read one or two short passages.\n\n> We often found our father laboring over a frame of gold, a real axel easily\n> remembered, some working maidens at his side, and perhaps even our mother\n> took part in the exquisite handling of thread and stitch. Some pure, Hebrew\n> atmosphere gathered between our doors, rabbi and priest, Negro and Greek,\n> such fathoms of character sprang up between the embroidery tasks.\n\nAnd then his mother’s death—\n\n> Life was now a spongy condition. Our mother gradually became ill. Ear\n> trouble, germ trouble, nose trouble, skull trouble, death trouble, resulted\n> and the family buried her, somewhere on Long Island, where a cemetery called\n> Washington was the grave for many poor victims, as our un-praised love was\n> settled. We returned to a café near the dune place, where gathered a party\n> of thirty or more, ate cheese and eggs, with a schooner of beer and coffee.\n> The rituals of the Jewish religion demand that one remain seated for seven\n> days upon the floor. Well, we sat on soft cushions.\n\nAnd finally, finally at the very end he says—\n\n> And it happened again that the old story of weakness [and he’s referring,\n> here, to tuberculosis] returned. I was taken to the hospital of descending\n> charity, where things became a careful selection through sanitation and\n> rest. Where was school? Oh, what I would give for the knowledge of\n> grammatical truth. But I saw that science is perfection, as long as the\n> world exists”\n\nAnd so, I’m going to end with that. Thank you. ****\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## Swedenborg (from “Tradition”)\n\n \n \n Well he saw man created according\r\n to the motion of the elements. He located\r\n the soul: in the blood. Retired\r\n at last––to a house where he paid\r\n window-tax (for increasing the light!).\r\n Lived simply. Gardened. Saw visions.\r\n \r\n Nothing for supper but tea.\r\n Now he saw the soul from his “Pray,\r\n what is matter” leave for the touchy\r\n ––heavens!––blue rose kind of thing.\r\n Strange––he did grow a blue rose,\r\n you know.\r\n \r\n *\r\n \r\n I lost you to water, summer\r\n when the young girls swim,\r\n to the hot shore\r\n to little peet-tweet-\r\n pert girls.\r\n \r\n Now it’s cold your bright knock\r\n ––Orion’s with his dog after him––\r\n at my door, boy\r\n on a winter\r\n wave ride.\r\n \r\n *\r\n \r\n I married\r\n \r\n in the world’s black night\r\n for warmth\r\n if not repose.\r\n At the close––\r\n \r\n someone.\r\n \r\n I hid with him\r\n from the long range guns.\r\n We lay leg\r\n in the cupboard, head\r\n \r\n in closet.\r\n \r\n A slit of light\r\n at no bird dawn––\r\n Untaught\r\n I thought\r\n he drank\r\n \r\n too much.\r\n I say\r\n \r\n I married\r\n and lived unburied.\r\n \r\n I thought––\r\n \r\n *\r\n \r\n You see here \r\n the influence\r\n of inference\r\n \r\n Moon on rippled \r\n stream\r\n \r\n “Except as\r\n and unless”\r\n \r\n *\r\n \r\n Your erudition\r\n the elegant flower\r\n of which\r\n \r\n my blue chicory\r\n at scrub end\r\n \r\n of ditch\r\n \r\n illuminates\r\n \r\n *\r\n \r\n Alone\r\n \r\n a still state hard\r\n as sard\r\n \r\n then again whisper-talk\r\n preserved in chalk\r\n \r\n At last no (TV) gun\r\n no more coats than one\r\n \r\n no hair lightener\r\n Sweethearts of the whiter\r\n \r\n walls\r\n \r\n * \r\n \r\n Why can’t I be happy\r\n in my sorrow\r\n \r\n my drinking man\r\n today\r\n \r\n my quiet\r\n tomorrow\r\n \r\n *\r\n \r\n And what you liked\r\n or did––\r\n no matter\r\n once the moon\r\n dipped down\r\n and fish rose\r\n from under\r\n \r\n *\r\n \r\n Cleaned all surfaces\r\n and behind all solids\r\n and righted leaning things\r\n \r\n Considered then, becurtained\r\n the metaphysics\r\n of flight from housecleanings\r\n \r\n *\r\n \r\n Young in Fall I said: the birds\r\n are at their highest thoughts\r\n of leaving\r\n \r\n Middle life said nothing––\r\n grounded\r\n to a livelihood\r\n \r\n Old age––a high gabbling gathering\r\n before goodbye\r\n of all we know\n\n—Lorine Niedecker\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\nLorine Niedecker, “Swedenborg (from “Tradition”)” from Collected Works.\nCopyright © 2004 by Lorine Niedecker. University of California Press.\n\nReprinted by permission of Bob Arnold, literary executor.\n\n", "output": "Lorine Niedecker was born on May 12, 1903, and died on December 31, 1970. She\nlived most of her life in a rural landscape on Black Hawk Island near Fort\nAtkinson, Wisconsin. It wouldn’t be out of line to say that she had two homes\nin her life: the one by water (“The Brontës had their moors, I have my\nmarshes,” she once wrote), and the avant-garde poetry scene birthed in 1931 in\nthe Objectivist issue of _Poetry_ magazine, which she read. Almost immediately\nthereafter Niedecker began a correspondence with Louis Zukofsky that was to\nlast the rest of her life. At this point in her writing she veered away from\nearlier influences of the Imagists and Surrealists. She began sending her work\nto _Poetry_ , where it was accepted. Eventually she became a central member of\nthe Objectivists, the only female poet in the group.\n\nLetters were a crucial companion, and no doubt sustaining to her art, and to\nthe art of those she wrote. Among her epistolary friends were Marianne Moore,\nWilliam Carlos Williams, Cid Corman, and Clayton Eshelman.\n\nShe wrote ground-breaking work, addressing subject matters of gender, work,\nsexual politics, social politics, marriage, and domesticity long before\nothers. She developed a lyric that was both clear and complicated, ever-alive\nto eccentricities and shifts of American vernacular, sounding vowels and\nconsonants alongside the intricate movements of the natural world. She never\nquite left Surrealism in that there was an ever-abiding interest in the\nsubconscious. While her experimentation was cosmopolitan, and her range of\nreference global and century-spanning, her idiom was of the folk.\n\nI’ll read an excerpt from her poem “Tradition,” written in 1965. This section\nof the poem is subtitled “Swedenborg,” referring to the 18th century Swedish\nscientist, philosopher and mystic.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## Drum-Taps\n\n \n \n **Beat! Beat! Drums!**\r\n Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!\r\n Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,\r\n Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,\r\n Into the school where the scholar is studying,\r\n Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride,\r\n Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,\r\n So fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.\r\n \r\n Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!\r\n Over the traffic of cities—over the rumble of wheels in the streets;\r\n Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? no sleepers must sleep\r\n in those beds,\r\n No bargainers’ bargains by day—no brokers or speculators—would they continue?\r\n Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?\r\n Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge?\r\n Then rattle quicker, heavier drums—you bugles wilder blow.\r\n \r\n Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow!\r\n Make no parley—stop for no expostulation,\r\n Mind not the timid—mind not the weeper or prayer,\r\n Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,\r\n Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties,\r\n Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses,\r\n So strong you thump O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow.\r\n \r\n **Cavalry Crossing a Ford**\r\n A line in long array where they wind betwixt green islands,\r\n They take a serpentine course, their arms flash in the sun—hark to the musical \r\n clank,\r\n Behold the silvery river, in it the splashing horses loitering stop to drink,\r\n Behold the brown-faced men, each group, each person a picture, the negligent\r\n rest on the saddles,\r\n Some emerge on the opposite bank, others are just entering the ford—while,\r\n Scarlet and blue and snowy white,\r\n The guidon flags flutter gayly in the wind.\r\n \r\n **Bivouac on a Mountain Side**\r\n I see before me now a traveling army halting,\r\n Below a fertile valley spread, with barns and the orchards of summer,\r\n Behind, the terraced sides of a mountain, abrupt, in places rising high,\r\n Broken, with rocks, with clinging cedars, with tall shapes dingily seen,\r\n The numerous camp-fires scatter'd near and far, some away up on the mountain,\r\n The shadowy forms of men and horses, looming, large-sized, flickering,\r\n And over all the sky—the sky! far, far out of reach, Studded, breaking out, the \r\n eternal stars.\r\n \r\n **Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field one Night**\r\n When you my son and my comrade dropt at my side that day,\r\n One look I but gave which your dear eyes return’d with a look I shall never forget,\r\n One touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach’d up as you lay on the ground,\r\n Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle,\r\n Till late in the night reliev’d to the place at last again I made my way,\r\n Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of responding \r\n kisses, (never again on earth responding,)\r\n Bared your face in the starlight, curious the scene, cool blew the moderate night-\r\n wind,\r\n Long there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the battle-field spreading,\r\n Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet there in the fragrant silent night,\r\n But not a tear fell, not even a long-drawn sigh, long, long I gazed,\r\n Then on the earth partially reclining sat by your side leaning my chin in my hands,\r\n Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you dearest comrade—not a \r\n tear, not a word,\r\n Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier,\r\n As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole,\r\n Vigil final for you brave boy, (I could not save you, swift was your death,\r\n Faithfully loved you and cared for you living, I think we shall surely meet again,)\r\n Till at latest lingering of the night, indeed just as the dawn appear’d,\r\n My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop’d well his form,\r\n Folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully over head and carefully under feet,\r\n And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude-\r\n dug grave I deposited,\r\n Ending my vigil strange with that, vigil of night and battle-field dim,\r\n Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)\r\n Vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never forget, how as day brighten’d,\r\n I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket,\r\n And buried him where he fell.\r\n \r\n **Look Down, Fair Moon**\r\n Look down, fair moon and bathe this scene,\r\n Pour softly down night's nimbus floods, on faces ghastly, swollen, purple;\r\n On the dead, on their backs, with their arms toss'd wide,\r\n Pour down your unstinted nimbus, sacred moon.\n\n—Walt Whitman\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\nThese poems are in the public domain.\n\n", "output": "This is J. D. McClatchy, and I’m recording this on June the 11th, 2012, in the\nmidst of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. These four years the country\nis commemorating the terrible events of those days so long ago, and on June\nthe 11th, 1862, the South was enjoying a series of stinging victories. And I\nhave in front of me a copy of a letter that General Lee wrote to Stonewall\nJackson saying,\n\n> General, your recent successes have been the cause of the liveliest joy in\n> this army as well as in the country. The admiration excited by your skill\n> and boldness has been constantly mingled with solicitude for your situation.\n> The practicality of reinforcing you has been the subject of earnest\n> consideration. It has been determined to do so at the expense of weakening\n> this army.\n\nAnd so on and so forth, as General Lee planned his great campaign.\n\nThe Civil War remains the most cataclysmic and tragic event in our history.\nBehind the struggle, driving its purpose and passions, loomed the greatest of\nissues: the fate of a country and the rights of its people. Hateful decisions\nwere at the heart of the conflict. A Northern sense of justice and a Southern\nsense of honor, moral principle and emotional pride, drove men to their deaths\namid the terrors of war—the deafening noise, the blinding smoke, the ground\nslick with blood, the cries of the fallen. Over 620,000 soldiers died during\nthose four years, nearly as many as in all of America’s other wars combined.\nProud cities were put to the torch, civilian populations were brutalized,\nfertile countryside was reduced to wasteland, brother fought against brother,\nand there was not a household in the land that did not have a loss to mourn.\nThe very names of the fearsome battles and valiant commanders ring in people’s\nmemories with the force of myth. The grandeur and pathos of the two shredded\narmies never failed to thrill. In the end, slavery would be abolished,\nsuccession defeated, and a new nation born in fire, blood, and sorrow. And\neach side in the conflict would discover its tragic hero: for the South,\nRobert E. Lee, whom I just quoted—the model Virginia gentlemen who fought for\nthe lost cause with audacious skill and relentless determination; for the\nNorth, Abraham Lincoln, the martyred redeemer president who spoke for American\ndemocracy with an eloquence unmatched in our history. It is such stuff as\nepics are made on. And yet, it seems strange that no one great sweeping poem,\nno American Iliad, ever emerged from this most momentous event in the lives\nand imaginations of Americans.\n\nIndividual poets did write, of course, and we have as our substitute for an\nepic poem marvelous lyric takes and moral meditations by Herman Melville and,\nabove all, Walt Whitman, whose collection in 1867 called _Drum Taps_ brought\ntogether the poems he had written, both in the field and back in Washington,\nabout episodes in the Civil War, in which he worked tirelessly as a nurse in\nthe field hospitals.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## The Other Side of the River\n\n \n \n Easter again, and a small rain falls\r\n On the mockingbird and the housefly,\r\n \t\t\t\t\ton the Chevrolet\r\n \r\n In its purple joy\r\n And the TV antennas huddled across the hillside—\r\n \r\n Easter again, and the palm trees hunch\r\n Deeper beneath their burden,\r\n \t\t\t\tThe dark puddles take in\r\n \r\n Whatever is given them,\r\n And nothing rises more than halfway out of itself—\r\n \r\n Easter with all its little mouths open in the rain.\r\n \t\t\t_____________\r\n \r\n There is no metaphor for the spring’s disgrace,\r\n No matter how much the rose leaves look like bronze dove\r\n hearts,\r\n No matter how much the plum trees preen in the wind.\r\n \r\n For weeks I’ve thought about the Savannah River,\r\n For no reason,\r\n \t and the winter fields around Garnett, South Carolina\r\n My brother and I used to hunt\r\n At Christmas,\r\n \t\tPrincess and Buddy working the millet stands\r\n And the vine-lipped face of the pine woods\r\n In their languorous zig-zags,\r\n The quail, when they flushed, bursting like shrapnel points\r\n Between the trees and the leggy shrubs\r\n \t\t\t\t\t into the undergrowth,\r\n Everything else in motion as though under water,\r\n My brother and I, the guns, their reports tolling from far away\r\n Through the aqueous, limb-filtered light,\r\n December sun like a single tropical fish\r\n Uninterested anyway,\r\n \t\t\tSuspended and holding still\r\n In the coral stems of the pearl-dusked and distant trees . . . \r\n \r\n There is no metaphor for any of this,\r\n Or the meta-weather of April,\r\n The vinca blossoms like deep bruises among the green.\r\n \t\t\t_____________\r\n It’s linkage I’m talking about, \r\n \t\t and harmonies and structures\r\n And all the various things that lock our wrists to the past.\r\n \r\n Something infinite behind everything appears,\r\n \t\t\t\t\t and then disappears.\r\n \r\n It’s all a matter of how \r\n you narrow the surfaces.\r\n It’s all a matter of how you fit in the sky.\r\n _____________\r\n \r\n Often, at night, when the stars seem as close as they do now,\r\n and as full,\r\n And the trees balloon and subside in the way they do\r\n \t\t\t\t\t when the wind is right,\r\n As they do now after the rain,\r\n \t\t\t the sea way off with its false sheen,\r\n And the sky that slick black of wet rubber,\r\n I’m 15 again, and back on Mt. Anne in North Carolina\r\n Repairing the fire tower,\r\n Nobody else around but the horse I packed in with,\r\n \t\t\t\t and five days to finish the job.\r\n Those nights were the longest night I ever remember,\r\n The lake and pavilion 3,000 feet below\r\n \t\t\t\t as though modeled in tinfoil,\r\n And even more distant than that,\r\n The last fire out, the after-reflection of Lake Llewellyn\r\n Aluminum glare in the sponged dark,\r\n Lightning bugs everywhere,\r\n \t\t\t the plump stars\r\n Dangling and falling near on their black strings.\r\n \r\n These nights are like that,\r\n The silvery alphabet of the sea\r\n \t\t\t\tincreasingly difficult to transcribe,\r\n And larger each year, everything farther away, and less clear,\r\n Than I want it to be,\r\n \t\t not enough time to do the job,\r\n And faint thunks in the earth,\r\n As though somewhere nearby a horse was nervously pawing\r\n the ground.\r\n \r\n I want to sit by the bank of the river,\r\n \t\t in the shade of the evergreen tree,\r\n And look in the face of whatever,\r\n \t\t the whatever that’s waiting for me.\r\n _____________\r\n \r\n There comes a point when everything starts to dust away\r\n More quickly than it appears,\r\n \t\t when what we have to comfort the dark\r\n Is just that dust, and just its going away.\r\n \r\n 25 years I used to sit on this jut of rocks\r\n As the sun went down like an offering through the glaze\r\n And backfires of Monterey Bay,\r\n And anything I could think of was mine because it was there\r\n \t\t\tin front of me, numinously everywhere,\r\n Appearing and piling up . . . \r\n \r\n So to have come to this,\r\n \t\t remembering what I did do, and what I \r\n didn’t do,\r\n The gulls whimpering over the boathouse,\r\n \t\t\t\t the monarch butterflies\r\n Cruising the flower beds,\r\n And all the soft hairs of spring thrusting up through the wind,\r\n And the sun, as it always does,\r\n \t dropping into its slot without a click,\r\n Is a short life of trouble.\t\n\n—Charles Wright\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\n“The Other Side of the River” Charles Wright from _The World of Ten Thousand\nThings: Poems, 1980-1990_. Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1991.\n\nReprinted by permission of the author.\n\n", "output": "This is James Tate reading “The Other Side of the River” by Charles Wright.\n\n[Did this poem deepen or complicate conventional notions of American\nidentity?]\n\nWell, I … I mean obviously I’m going to say yes, just because it has many\nelements throughout it, throughout the poem, that might sound familiar to most\nreaders of American poetry—it’s its place and youth and specific memories, and\nso on. But then for him to arrive at the incredible last line in the poem, “Is\na short life of trouble,” I mean, that’s pretty shocking and it jolts you to\nthink back on the whole poem and wonder how you got there and so on. And the\npoem holds up to such scrutiny.\n\n[How do you relate to this, the speaker in this poem, or as Charles Wright?]\n\nI guess I’d like to go hunting with him, you know, hunting quail. There are\nsuch beautiful memories, and so on, of childhood in the South, in the fire\ntower, and hunting with his brother, and things like that. Yeah, he’s a\nfamiliar guy and somebody I feel I care about.\n\n[How has this poem informed your work, specifically in terms of identity?]\n\nIt hasn’t.\n\nWell, I’ll speak about Charles Wright particularly. He spent most of his life\ndetailing subjects centered, always, around him and his world and … I mean,\nthere are no imaginary flights, supposedly, though of course there are in\nlanguage—language is the great conveyor of both his subject and his poetics,\nyou know? And so he seems like he’s locked into some very narrow thing, namely\nthe self, but in truth, it gets very large and wide thanks to his great use of\nlanguage, and his love of language, and the rhythm, and things of that sort.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## XIII (Dedications)\n\n \n \n I know you are reading this poem\r\n late, before leaving your office\r\n of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window\r\n in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet\r\n long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem\r\n standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean\r\n on a gray day of early spring, faint flakes driven\r\n across the plains' enormous spaces around you.\r\n I know you are reading this poem\r\n in a room where too much has happened for you to bear\r\n where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed\r\n and the open valise speaks of flight\r\n but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem\r\n As the underground train loses momentum and before\r\n running up the stairs\r\n toward a new kind of love\r\n your life has never allowed.\r\n I know you are reading this poem by the light\r\n of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide\r\n while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.\r\n I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room\r\n of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.\r\n I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light\r\n in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,\r\n count themselves out, at too early an age. I know\r\n you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick\r\n lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on\r\n because even the alphabet is precious.\r\n I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove\r\n warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand\r\n because life is short and you too are thirsty.\r\n I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language\r\n guessing at some words while others keep you reading\r\n and I want to know which words they are.\r\n I know you are reading this poem listening for something, \r\n torn between bitterness and hope\r\n turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.\r\n I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing \r\n else left to read\r\n there where you have landed, stripped as you are.\n\n—Adrienne Rich\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\nPart XIII “(Dedications)” from “An Atlas of the Difficult World”. Copyright ©\n2016 by the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust.\n\nCopyright © 1991 by Adrienne Rich, from COLLECTED POEMS: 1950-2012 by Adrienne\nRich.\n\nUsed by Permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Audio recording use by\npermission of The Frances Goldin Literary Agency.\n\n", "output": "I'm Jane Hirshfield, reading “(Dedications),” by Adrienne Rich.\n\n“(Dedications)” is the final section of Adrienne Rich's thirteen-part “An\nAtlas of the Difficult World.” The full poem is a work of stocktaking, an\ninventory both personal and cultural. It was finished almost thirty years ago,\nin 1991: the year of the first Gulf War, of Rodney King's beating and Anita\nHill's disregarded testimony, the year of the break-up of the Soviet Union, of\nCNN and the 24 hour news cycle, of the unstoppable, rising death toll of HIV-\nAIDS. Read decades after its writing, “An Atlas of the Difficult World”\nremains a startlingly relevant map of unsolved griefs.\n\n“(Dedications),” the poem's closing section, offers what also abides: its\nrelevant solace. The poem is a litany of community-summoning and blessing. It\nholds an album of lives, and of longings, recognized and unrecognized both.\nThe poem creates, too, in the way that art's outward looking makes almost\nalways also a mirror, a self-portrait of its author. Rich's own longing,\nfears, and hope are here, and her fierce, lifelong, unrelenting desire to\nwrite words that might serve.\n\nRich was a poet of political awareness, ecological awareness, social\nawareness, eros awareness, and language awareness. She wrote from and of the\ninseparability of these ways of seeing and feeling, and she wrote of shared\nlives and shared fates. One of this poem's central intentions and gifts is the\nway it enacts and expands our sense of what and who we might mean when we say\nthe word “we.” She described poetry as “a liberative language, connecting us\nto others like and unlike ourselves.” The definition of liberation as\nconnection—with not only the like but the unlike—was for Rich a foundational\nvalue. The same contract is at the core of any genuinely democratic self-\ngovernance, and at the core of a working literature, a working relationship, a\nworking compassion.\n\nRich sets into “(Dedications)” both our necessary solitudes and our necessary\nties. Each person described here stands or sits inside one moment alone\n(inside the reader's necessary and focusing solitude, inside the inner life),\nand at the same time is in a world among and with others. The figures resemble\nthose in the separate windows of a painting by Edward Hopper. Yet the central,\ngreat sleight of tongue in this poem is the way its shape-shifting,\ntransformative second-person “you” makes of separate lives the felt experience\nof a communal whole. We see the lives in the windows and we step inside them,\ninside the continuous world we also live in.\n\nIt's worth pausing to look more closely at the way this experience is made.\nThe “you” addressed in each sentence is singular, local, specific—a person\nyoung or old, in love, in exhaustion, in grief or hope or desperation, each of\nthem reaching back for these words from within their own distinct place in the\ndifficult world. And yet each uttered “you” cannot help but also be heard by\nthe person now reading the poem as himself, as herself. We read that simple,\nacknowledging phrase, “and you too are thirsty,” and, each time, “I am” comes\nas answer.\n\nTo change one into many and many into one is one of the alchemical\npossibilities of the second-person pronoun in English. It's also, in a larger\nway, one of the alchemies of poetry itself: whatever comes into awareness\nwhile reading a poem becomes subjective. We read poems as we see: from the\ninside. And we read poems as we feel and understand anything: with the heart-\nmind’s unboundaried capacity for empathy.\n\nThis poem is propelled by empathy. The poem is also propelled by its craft of\nmusic and structure. It moves on the twin devices of list and anaphora's\nparallel structure, the way each sentence begins with the same set of words.\nAny American poet reading “(Dedications)” cannot help but hear in it also some\ntrace of the earlier voice of Walt Whitman, who set out to define a still-new\ncountry in part by his own many lists. Any poem with a list of a certain\nlength signals “more”—that the list could go on without end. Whitman summoned\nour American awareness of a vast and shared country by naming its almost\ninfinite parts and labors, its lives and places. He founded an understanding\nof American poetry as one that takes up (in some of its poems, by no means\nall) that larger task: the creation of a shared, unconfining definition of the\ncountry's nature, not by generalization but by an embrace of the actual\ntopography of the real, in our lives and in the lives of others. Whitman set\nout to create and strengthen the warmly affectionate “we” of “ _E Pluribus\nUnum”_ — “from many one.” “(Dedications)” takes up that task in turn.\n\nBoth Whitman and Rich wrote, too, in the grief of America's still-\nincompletion—grief that this great “we” remains fragile, in progress,\nimperiled. Both Rich and Whitman are poets unblinded to our profound\nimperfection, yet hopeful: they set out to make with their words the country\nthey hoped might exist. Rich was a poet and an activist of inclusion. No one\nwas abandoned by her gaze or by the rigor of her compassion even in judgment.\nDignity and the fullness of being were for her both words' and life's measure.\n\nRich knew well that her work was part of a longer historical arc. But her\n“wild patience”—the phrase comes from another book's title, _A Wild Patience\nHas Taken Me This Far_ —meant she could not simply wait and hope that the rest\nof the country would someday join her. “Poetry,” she said in one interview,\n“can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that\nthere is no alternative.” She was in this work of possibility-addition for the\nlong run. However dark her poems' vision could at times be, Rich meant to\ncounter despair. She meant to increase our hunger for justice, for dignity,\nfor a sane politics, sane relationships, and a sane ecological ethic. Her\nsteady, life-saving envisioning of what she found present, what she saw\nmissing, cut windows into the walls of our separation, doors into the silences\nof our ignorance, complacency, inattention. Reading Rich can feel as if each\npoem were the conjuring of a password into a life more awake, alert, and\nunguarded. That is my experience reading this poem, in which she imagines and\nsummons her readers, her plural, singular, thirsty, companions: You _._ I. We.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## American Coma\n\n \n \n I believe in the burned field,\r\n the sailboat on the sill \r\n of a desert farmhouse.\r\n \r\n That stars on the undersides of our skulls \r\n can spell the way home \r\n even when the lights have gone out, \r\n the maps again erased. \r\n \r\n The fray of a rope. Chafe of my hands. \r\n Black horses broken loose \r\n over a trampled dawn—your body \r\n beneath the tin of a bent truck grating. \r\n Footprints at the edge of the earth \r\n where they found you. Magdalena\r\n \r\n I believe you became the clouds, \r\n the Sangre de Cristos’ pink rim of morning, \r\n the musk of your blood on my t-shirt as I drive away, \r\n all smoke and sooty desert in my rearview.\r\n \r\n It’s not the fantasy of a land that survives \r\n but its rocks, redwoods, ghosts, \r\n armadillos crushed in roadside gutters through Texas— \r\n \r\n I believe their blood can stay with you \r\n six hundred miles to the Mexican gulf,\r\n that you can use their remains \r\n to bind bear claws, cowrie shells, \r\n something to dance with.\r\n \r\n That when you awake you will not remember \r\n any of this: the sirens, sticky \r\n tubes they cocooned around you\r\n \r\n the way you looked at me from behind the in-patient door, \r\n eyes empty boats dozing on the edge\r\n and I on the rocks peering into waves\r\n piecing together fins out of crushed armadillos\r\n picked up from the roadsides I traveled to find you \r\n where Chevy appendages, cigarette-butts, \r\n the birdfood of petrified Wonderbread crusts \r\n are the songs of detached, mechanical wings. \r\n \r\n I believe\r\n when America awakes\r\n she will not remember any of this:\r\n you smashed over the precipice—\r\n a pipe dream hinged upon a dead saguaro root.\r\n \r\n Your pages flapping, tar-stained, \r\n blown into shadows of buttes.\r\n \r\n I gather you like kindling,\r\n set you on fire, the fugue of black \r\n horses drowning in the surf.\n\n—Jennifer Elise Foerster\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\n\"American Coma\" Jennifer Elise Foerster from _Leaving Tulsa_. University of\nArizona Press, 2013.\n\nReprinted by permission of the author.\n\n", "output": "This poem, “American Coma”, is from a book by young, Muskogee Creek poet\nJennifer Elise Foerster called _Leaving Tulsa_. It’s a beautiful book, a new\nbook of poems, and they really remind me of the urgent vision fueling\nKerouac’s _On the Road_ and, for Muskogee people, we’ve been on the road for\nquite a while, from the Southeastern part of the United States and a long walk\nfrom there to Oklahoma. And the book is … and this poem is … I feel like this\npoem, it’s … the whole book is embedded in this poem, is a young Muskogee\nwoman carrying that walk in her and leaving for other places in America, like\nthe Southwest, like the Bay Area, and the road is demanding, you know, the\nroad to becoming a human being, the road to acknowledging the story or the\nhistorical trauma that marks everyone in this country, every American, every\nAmerican has to deal with the effects of colonization. And the outcome here of\nthis, you know, is the damage inflicted, inflicted by America—America the\nperson, America the being, America the hungry beast.\n\nShe begins with “I believe in the burned field,” and that last stanza is\nstartling: “I gather you like kindling,/ set you on fire, the fugue of black/\nhorses drowning in the surf.” Fire is the transformer. Fire makes ashes. Fire\nis spirit and it takes every … it transforms us to the most basic part of\nourselves. And then, of course, the appearance of these black horses—these\nhorses that represent, in so many of our poems, in indigenous writers and\nAmerican writers, too, I believe, they represent, in a sense, that spirit, the\nspirit of the free America, the America of multicultural ideas and energy. So\nin this poem, she’s putting the story of a broken people back together; she’s\nmaking a road home, maybe even cleaning the road home for the people, for the\nperson in this story who’s been broken, and for her own brokenness and the\nbrokenness of a whole country.\n\nA coma suggests that the body is here, and the spirit is out roaming around\nand is unsettled and doesn’t really feel ready to come back and take on this\nparticular life. But the poem is hopeful because, as Foerster says, “I\nbelieve/ when America awakes/ she will not remember any of this:/ you smashed\nover the precipice—/ a pipe dream hinged upon a dead saguaro root.” So\nFoerster in this poem and this book of poems is really … exemplifies the next\ngeneration of young indigenous poets who are overlapping my generation—a\ngeneration that came up through indigenous movements, indigenous rights\nmovements. And I know, I’d been looking, many of us had been looking, to see\nwho was out there and who was coming up, and here they are, and here is\nJennifer with this very powerful voice.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## Making Peace\n\n \n \n A voice from the dark called out,\r\n ‘The poets must give us\r\n imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar\r\n imagination of disaster. Peace, not only\r\n the absence of war.’\r\n But peace, like a poem,\r\n is not there ahead of itself,\r\n can’t be imagined before it is made,\r\n can’t be known except\r\n in the words of its making,\r\n grammar of justice,\r\n syntax of mutual aid.\r\n A feeling towards it,\r\n dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have\r\n until we begin to utter its metaphors,\r\n learning them as we speak.\r\n A line of peace might appear\r\n if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,\r\n revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,\r\n questioned our needs, allowed\r\n long pauses . . .\r\n A cadence of peace might balance its weight\r\n on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,\r\n an energy field more intense than war,\r\n might pulse then,\r\n stanza by stanza into the world,\r\n each act of living\r\n one of its words, each word\r\n a vibration of light—facets\r\n of the forming crystal.\n\n—Denise Levertov\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\nDenise Levertov, “Making Peace” from _Breathing the Water_.\n\nCopyright © 1987 by Denise Levertov.\n\nReprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.\n\n", "output": "Hello, this is Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States 2015 to\n2017. I want to read you a poem by one of favorite poets, Denise Levertov. It\nis titled “Making Peace” from her book _Breathing the Water,_ published in\n1997 by New Directions Press.\n\nSo now we look at the poem a little bit. Think about it a little bit. I’ve\nalways loved Denise Levertov, her writing, her position as a poet, her\nrelentless giving of her poems to the people, to this thing we call “social\nreality” that many have struggled with, to deal with. _Is it real? Is it\nperception? Is it just atomic particles?_ Denise, maybe she includes all that\nin here. But really, she’s in _it._ Let me just say that. Even though she was\ncalled, her poetry was called sentimentalist, her poetry was called not\npoetry. But it was something like, the term “pamphleteering.” It’s a pamphlet,\nit’s a small broadside, it’s a piece of a newspaper. So she received a lot of\ncriticism. Kind of literary bullying. But you know that’s what Denise is made\nof, she responds to a bigger picture. She continued talking about, writing\nabout the Detroit riots, about Vietnam, about women’s position in society,\nwriting essays, writing about poetry and writing about everything that’s in\nthis poem. The indescribable. _What is that voice? What is that darkness? What\nis that absence of war? Do we know what that is?_ It sounds easy. Four words:\nthe absence of war.\n\nI don’t think we need any ornamentalist layering and refiguring and\nemulsifying – that in itself is a key question that this poem offers. And she\nconverts it to a poem. That piece like a poem is “not there ahead of itself,”\nshe says. Ahead of itself. Peace is not ahead of itself. That’s another\ninsight, that is another insight. You and I, the reader, has to deal with\nthat. _What is this thing called that not be ahead of itself? Can we be not\nahead of ourselves? Can our life be not ahead of itself?_ And when we are\nthat, we are closer to peace. We are closer to the raw, full imagination of\nwhat peace is. If we are conjuring forward, it’s fantasy perhaps. It’s a plan\nperhaps. It’s an agenda perhaps. But it is not now where peace happens, can’t\nhappen and most of all can be made. And I really enjoy how she speaks about\nthe poem, its materials, its elements and how peace is like that. And most of\nall, how it’s all threaded and structured as, she says, in our lives, in our\nlife, stuff. She talks about rhythm, she talks about restructuring “the\nsentence our lives are making,” she says, “Revoked its reaffirmation of profit\nand power.” That is something that we can do, that we must do in this poem\ncalled peace, in making this poem called peace making, “Making Peace” as she\ntalks about loooong pauses, “until we begin to utter its metaphors, / learning\nthem as we speak,” she says. And then later on, allowing the long pauses.\n\nAnd that’s another key in this poem – there is the making of things and then\nthere is the long pause and pauses, inside and perhaps outside the making. And\nthat is a paradox – making and not-making, being and not-being, being ahead\nand being here in the now and the cadence of it and the balance of it. And the\nenergy of it. She says, “an energy field more intense than war,” the cadence\nof peace. You tell me if this is simplistic. You tell me if this is\nsentimentalist. And she goes on stanza by stanza into the world. As we make\npeace, as we make our lives in the present, outside profit and power, outside\nthe “imagination of disaster,” as she says. We are in the act of living. And I\nthink this was Denise Levertov, writing about Vietnam, writing about the\nDetroit riots, writing about women’s life in society and the power grid,\nwriting about the inside and the outside. And herself being kind of an\noutsider, born in England and growing up becoming a bigger poet here in the\nUnited States. An outsider and an insider. She spoke in her essays _Light up\nthe Cave,_ around the same decade or so when _Breathing the Water_ came out\nabout the outscape and the inscape of the poem, writing about what’s out there\nand writing about our interiority and how they’re both related, interrelated.\nAnd in a way this poem does that too, talking about war and profit and power\nand talking about each act of living. And the ending of the poem, each word,\nshe says, “a vibration of light—facets / of the forming crystal.” Here is this\nnew universe and it begins with these crystals. And these crystals have facets\nand these facets are acts of living. I know this sounds like I’m reading these\nbig pieces of thick wood or pasting them together and creating a statement\nabout her writing, about this poem. That’s not really it. These are just the\nmaterials of this poem that you and I have to address and reflect on and find\nwhat being is, find what presence is, find what the absence of war is, find\nwhat making our lives is all about, and find what making peace is.\n\nSo let us thank Denise Levertov for a wonderful life, for incredible poetry\nand for being concerned with the big questions, of war and peace, being,\nhumanity, and how it can be made with our own life.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## Come to the Stone. . .\n\n \n \n The child saw the bombers skate like stones across the fields\r\n As he trudged down the ways the summer strewed \r\n With its reluctant foliage; how many giants\r\n Rose and peered down and vanished, by the road\r\n The ants had littered with their crumbs and dead.\r\n \r\n “That man is white and red like my clown doll,”\r\n He says to his mother, who has gone away.\r\n “I didn’t cry, I didn’t cry.”\r\n In the sky the planes are angry like the wind.\r\n The people are punishing the people—why?\r\n \r\n He answers easily, his foolish eyes\r\n Brightening at that long simile, the world.\r\n The angels sway about his story like balloons.\r\n A child makes everything—except his death—a child’s.\r\n _Come to the stone and tell me why I died._\r\n \n\n—Randall Jarrell\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\n\"Come to the Stone...\" by Randall Jarrell from _The Complete Poems_.\n\nFarrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1971.\n\nUsed by permission of the publisher.\n\n", "output": "I locate the intense experience this poem offers me in the plain speech of the\nlines. “The people are punishing the people, why?” It’s such plain speech. The\nline isn’t in quotation marks. It’s the poem’s speaker or the poet who asks\nwhy, not the child, isn’t it? Still, the line is phrased like a child’s\nobservation and question. It is a puzzle, a riddle, and a stark fact, like\nman’s inhumanity to man, like violence—especially against the innocent, which\nis unthinkable suffering that’s imposed by choice. The statements in question\nare either desperate or offhanded or both. To encounter it at the center of\nthis little song is like hearing a human voice in a room in which you thought\nyou were alone.\n\nOwen Barfield says in his book _Poetic Diction_ that the appreciation of a\npoem involves a felt change of consciousness. This is such a moment for me. In\nthis line my own mind merges with that of the poet and that of the child in a\nterrible triangle containing a oneness. This isn’t the commonplace strategy of\nshowing adults how silly their behavior is by showing it to us through the\neyes of a child. This is merging of consciousnesses: “The people are punishing\nthe people—why?” Robert Lowell called Randall Jarrell the most heartbreaking\npoet of our time. I would say that this is his most heartbreaking poem, and\nthe line I cite the most heartbreaking of lines.\n\n“Come to the Stone . . . ” was first published in 1945 when no one would need\nto be told what was happening in the poem. That it could as easily be speaking\nto events in our decade is somehow more of a shock than it should be, given\nhuman history. Randall Jarrell despised power politics, the ants it makes of\nhuman beings. The death of this child, coming to him from the sky, is a horror\nof course. “’I didn’t cry, I didn’t cry.’”\n\nBut, does the poem exist because the poet can’t let the mechanical distance of\nthe bombers dehumanize the child? Does Jarrell attempt to get back the child’s\nvoice to let him show us himself the thing we’ve done? The child answers our\nquestion with “his foolish eyes,” which are of course infinitely more\nknowledgeable than our own. The poet grants the child the last word here on\ndeath. When it comes to death, this child, the “long simile” of the world has\nkilled, this child is now more knowing than any living adult can be.\n\nJarrell, who was a pilot instructor during WWII, was implicated in the deaths\nof children from the sky. This poem pours out of that dark hole in his sky. In\n“Come to the Stone . . . ” the poet labors—vainly of course—to return the\nchild’s voice to the world in the poem. He tries to show us that he himself is\na human dealing in these deaths. It’s no good. No poem is ever worth a child.\nThe poem means nothing to the child who has been killed, and in this line “The\nangels sway above his story like balloons” the poet acknowledges the useless\nand silly grandiose gift of a poem to a dead child.\n\nStill, thinking of Jarrell’s encounter here with the child he perhaps himself,\nhelped to kill, I think about the poem a drone could never write. The guilted\ndrone would never suffer. Does that matter? “Come to the stone and tell me why\nI died.” The child doesn’t ask this favor of us because it matters any longer\nto him.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## Poem out of Childhood\n\n \n \n I\r\n \r\n Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry :\r\n Not Angles, angels : and the magnificent past\r\n shot deep illuminations into high-school.\r\n I opened the door into the concert-hall\r\n and a rush of triumphant violins answered me\r\n while the syphilitic woman turned her mouldered face\r\n intruding upon Brahms. Suddenly, in an accident\r\n the girl’s brother was killed, but her father had just died :\r\n she stood against the wall, leaning her cheek,\r\n dumbly her arms fell, “What will become of me?” and\r\n I went into the corridor for a drink of water.\r\n These bandages of image wrap my head\r\n when I put my hand up I hardly feel the wounds.\r\n We sat on the steps of the unrented house\r\n raining blood down on Loeb and Leopold,\r\n creating again how they removed his glasses\r\n and philosophically slit his throat.\r\n They who manipulated and misused our youth,\r\n smearing those centuries upon our hands,\r\n trapping us in a welter of dead names,\r\n snuffing and shaking heads at patent truth . . . .\r\n We were ready to go the long descent with Virgil\r\n the bough’s gold shade advancing forever with us,\r\n entering the populated cold of drawing-rooms;\r\n Sappho, with her drowned hair trailing along Greek waters,\r\n weed binding it, a fillet of kelp enclosing\r\n the temples’ ardent fruit :\r\n Not Sappho, Sacco.\r\n Rebellion pioneered among our lives,\r\n viewing from far-off many-branching deltas,\r\n innumerable seas.\r\n \r\n II\r\n \r\n In adolescence I knew travellers\r\n speakers digressing from the ink-pocked rooms,\r\n bearing the unequivocal sunny word.\r\n Prinzip’s year bore us : see us turning at breast\r\n quietly while the air throbs over Sarajevo\r\n after the mechanic laugh of that bullet.\r\n How could they know what sinister knowledge finds\r\n its way among our brains’ wet palpitance,\r\n what words would nudge and giggle at our spine,\r\n what murders dance?\r\n These horrors have approached the growing child;\r\n now that the factory is sealed-up brick\r\n the kids throw stones, smashing the windows,\r\n membranes of uselessness in desolation.\r\n We grew older quickly, watching the father shave\r\n and the splatter of lather hardening on the glass,\r\n playing in sandboxes to escape paralysis,\r\n being victimized by fataller sly things.\r\n “Oh, and you,” he said, scraping his jaw, “what will you be?”\r\n “Maybe : something : like : Joan : of : Arc . . . .”\r\n Allies Advance, we see\r\n Six Miles South to Soissons. And we beat the drums.\r\n Watchsprings snap in the mind, uncoil, relax,\r\n the leafy years all somber with foreign war.\r\n How could we know what exposed guts resembled?\r\n A wave, shocked to motion, babbles margins\r\n from Asia to Far Rockaway spiralling\r\n among clocks in its four-dimensional circles.\r\n Disturbed by war we pedalled bicycles\r\n breakneck down the decline, until the treads\r\n conquered our speed and pulled our feet behind them,\r\n and pulled our heads.\r\n We never knew the war, standing so small\r\n looking at eye-level toward the puttees, searching\r\n the picture-books for sceptres, pennants for truth;\r\n see Galahad unaided by puberty.\r\n Ratat a drum uppon the armistice,\r\n Kodak As You Go : photo : they danced late,\r\n and we were a generation of grim children\r\n leaning over the bedroom sills, watching\r\n the music and the shoulders and how the war was over,\r\n laughing until the blow on the mouth broke night\r\n wide out from cover.\r\n The child’s curls blow in a forgotten wind,\r\n immortal ivy trembles on the wall:\r\n the sun has crystallized these scenes, and tall\r\n shadows remember time cannot rescind.\r\n \r\n III\r\n \r\n Organize the full results of that rich past\r\n open the windows : potent catalyst,\r\n harsh theory of knowledge, running down the aisles\r\n crying out in the classrooms, March ravening on the plain,\r\n inexorable sun and wind and natural thought.\r\n Dialectically our youth unfolds :\r\n the pale child walking to the river, passional\r\n in ignorance in loneliness demanding\r\n its habitation for the leaping dream, kissing\r\n quick air, the vibrations of transient light,\r\n not knowing substance or reserve, walking\r\n in valvular air, each person in the street\r\n conceived surrounded by his life and pain,\r\n fixed against time, subtly by these impaled :\r\n death and that shapeless war. Listening at dead doors,\r\n our youth assumes a thousand differing flesh\r\n summoning fact from abandoned machines of trade,\r\n knocking on the wall of the nailed-up power-plant,\r\n telephoning hello, the deserted factory, ready\r\n for the affirmative clap of truth\r\n ricochetting from thought to thought among\r\n the childhood, the gestures, the rigid travellers.\r\n \n\n—Muriel Rukeyser\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\n“Poem Out of Childhood” by Muriel Rukeyser.\n\nCopyright © 2005 by Muriel Rukeyser.\n\nReprinted by permission of ICM Partners.\n\n", "output": "My name is Linda Gregerson and I’m going to be reading “Poem Out of Childhood”\nby Muriel Rukeyser.\n\nIn _The Life of Poetry_ , Muriel Rukeyser describes the “first public day” she\nremembers: crowds of people filling the streets of New York, confetti and\ncrying, kissing and noise. Which prompted young Muriel to take out her drum\nand beat it. The day was April 28, 1918. False Armistice Day. “The war was not\nyet over.”\n\n“Poem Out of Childhood” is the very first poem in Rukeyser’s first book,\n_Theory of Flight_ , and it features, front and center, the political\nmanifesto from which she would never depart. “Not Angles, angels,” “Not\nSappho, Sacco.” Rukeyser had no patience for the artificial sequestrations of\npoetry and politics, private imagination and collective history. She was six\nmonths old when Gavrilo Prinzip shot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo;\nshe always considered herself to have been born under the sign of war. We are\ncreatures of history, she believed; we take it in as we take in air and milk.\nAnd, although there is ignorance aplenty, some of it deadly, there is no such\nthing as perfect innocence, if to be innocent means to be untouched. Rukeyser\nwas fierce in her insistence that the world was one: a tsunami born in Asia\nmoves across the waters to North America; a shooting in Sarajevo means\nslaughtered millions from the Caucasus to France; the dividends paid to\npensioners by Union Carbide are just a little larger because miners in West\nVirginia have been allowed to die of silicosis.\n\n“Not Angles, angels”: a musical logic, and one that appears on the surface to\nbe choosing the life of the spirit. But the phrase derives from a famous story\ntold by the Venerable Bede. When Pope Gregory, writes Bede, observed a\nconsignment of fair-skinned, fair-haired slaves in the market in Rome one day,\nhe asked his companion who they were. “Angles,” said his companion. “ _Non\nAngli, sed angeli_ ,” replied the Pope. Not Angles, angels. A story the\nEnglish construed for centuries as a sign that they were a chosen people. The\nlovely, bell-like echoes of a pun are taken to reflect the stamp of heavenly\nfavor, beneath which lies – just barely beneath – a double-sided story of\nenslavement and racial privilege.\n\n“Not Sappho, Sacco.” The notorious trials and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti\nplayed out for seven years of Rukeyser’s early life, calling into question the\nvery foundations of justice and political tolerance in America, throwing a\nharsh light on class and ethnic divisions. So when the poet, fresh out of her\nprivileged education at Vassar, claims a muse, she refuses to stay within the\nproper, decorous lyric boundaries.\n\nAnd yet. The “not” in Rukeyser’s alliterative formulations has to be taken\nwith a grain of salt, I think: the wit and the music rely upon the yoking of\nterms, after all, not upon the occlusion of one by the other. “Not only” is\nhow I hear it. Not only Sappho, but also Sacco. There is no such thing as a\nseparate realm of the aesthetic.\n\n“See us turning at breast,” she writes, and the “throbbing” over Sarajevo\nkeeps time with the milky rhythms of a nursing child. The brain’s “wet\npalpitance” is ripe for the insinuations of “sinister knowledge.” The tenors\nand textures of our era make us what we are. No “membrane” of innocence\nseparates the home front from the battlefront: the factories are boarded up;\nthe kids throw stones. Polio lurks outside the sandbox.\n\nRukeyser was only twenty-one when _Theory of Flight_ won the Yale Younger\nPoets Prize, but her artistry was as fully formed as was her moral and\npolitical sensibility. Take, for example, the indented four stanzas that\nconstitute the bulk of section two in “Poem Out of Childhood.” A flexible\npentameter is repeatedly cut off at the knees in the seventh line of an eleven\nline stanza. The joyful alliterations of a child’s early lessons in reading\nharden into wartime headlines: Six Miles South to Soissons. The seductive\nunfoldings of image and phrase give way to intimations of in-the-wings or in-\nthe-margins violence. A fugitive end rhyme (finds/spine, palpitance/dance,\nglass/paralysis) settles into something firmer (be/see, circles/bicycles,\ntreads/heads, over/cover, wall/tall) and suggests a system of sinister\nconcordances that history’s children cannot escape and time cannot “rescind.”\n\nThe fourth of these stanzas begins with the regressive rhythms of tin drum and\nadvertising jingle, then modulates into something so tempered with\ndisillusionment (“a generation of grim children”) that the reader, or this\nreader in any case, comes to think she can trust the new, more comprehensive\nmomentums (“the music and the shoulders and how the war was over”) until these\ntoo come up against the shock of new violence: “the blow on the mouth broke\nnight / wide out from cover.” I don’t know to what extent that blow on the\nmouth is meant to suggest a “merely” domestic cruelty and to what extent it is\nmeant as a reference to the crushing revelation that news of the armistice had\nbeen mistaken: its ability to resonate on both the larger and the smaller\nscale is surely part of its power. In the ordinary way of thinking, night is\nsomething that provides cover. But here it is the ghastly, underlying reality\nthat hides under cover of the ordinary and is always about to break out.\n\nThe child who “breathes-in experience” is born not merely into death, as all\nthat lives is born into mortality, but also into the surfeit of death that\nhuman beings visit upon one another. Throughout the course of her poetic\ncareer, with passion and unflinching acuity, Rukeyser would document the\ninfinite varieties this surfeit assumes: death-by-violence, death-by-poverty,\ndeath-by-indifference, death-by-greed. And precisely because she refuses to\n“edit out” the ghastliness and the systems that sustain it, she writes the\nmost life-affirming poetry I know.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## Backwater Blues\n\n \n \n When it rains five days and the skies turn dark as night\r\n When it rains five days and the skies turn dark as night\r\n Then trouble's takin' place in the lowlands at night\r\n \r\n I woke up this mornin’, can’t even get out of my door\r\n I woke up this mornin’, can’t even get out of my door\r\n There's been enough trouble to make a poor girl wonder where she want to go\r\n \r\n Then they rowed a little boat about five miles ’cross the pond\r\n Then they rowed a little boat about five miles ’cross the pond\r\n I packed all my clothes, throwed them in and they rowed me along\r\n \r\n When it thunders and lightnin’ and when the wind begins to blow\r\n When it thunders and lightnin’ and the wind begins to blow\r\n There’s thousands of people ain’t got no place to go\r\n \r\n Then I went and stood upon some high old lonesome hill\r\n Then I went and stood upon some high old lonesome hill\r\n Then looked down on the house were I used to live\r\n \r\n Backwater blues done call me to pack my things and go\r\n Backwater blues done call me to pack my things and go\r\n ’Cause my house fell down and I can’t live there no more\r\n \r\n Mmm, I can’t move no more\r\n Mmm, I can’t move no more\r\n There ain’t no place for a poor old girl to go\n\n—Bessie Smith\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\nThis poem is in the pubic domain.\n\n", "output": "Bessie Smith recorded “Backwater Blues” in 1927, and it became an anthem for\none of the most devastating national disasters in US history. The Mississippi\nRiver flood of 1927 was horrific. About a thousand people lost their lives.\nAlmost half a million homes were destroyed. Almost a million people became\nhomeless for a time. Entire black neighborhoods were wiped out. This incident\ngave birth to an important blues era, now known as the Delta Blues era. The\nblues artists who wrote and sang in this era there are famous names in this\nera such as Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Howling Wolf, and of course, Bessie\nSmith, who is one of my favorites.\n\nBessie actually wrote “Backwater Blues” for the Cumberland River flood that\nhit Nashville on Christmas morning 1926. Nonetheless, when she recorded it in\n1927 “Backwater Blues” became an anthem for the great Mississippi River Flood.\nThe flood was a devastating ordeal. There were reports that officials behaved\nin a discriminatory fashion. They relocated the white folks in an expedient\nmanner but corralled the black folks into abysmal camps. There was evidence of\nlynchings and unspeakable killings and terrible acts against the black\ncommunity. Let’s look at this poem closely. I mean, first, it sets up a\nterrible storm when it rained five days and the skies turned dark as night,\nwhen it rained five days and the skies turned dark as night. But the second\nstrophe, the second stanza, we turn inward, and it’s about personal disaster:\nI woke up this morning can’t even get out of my door, I woke up this morning\ncan’t _even_ get out of my door. The poem moves to personal depression. I\nthink in the best identity poems that the self represents something much\nlarger than the self. The scene is set with the terrific storm by the female\nspeaker, so depressed that she can’t even get out of the door. This personal\ndepression by extension is about the depression of an entire people,\nmarginalized in the back waters, stricken with poverty, homelessness,\nsuffering social injustice, discrimination, and now hit with this catastrophic\nnatural disaster. The despair is deep, is deeply personal, but it is also\nmetaphorical and speaks to the despair of an entire community. Of course, we\nAmericans have historical amnesia. Most of us don’t remember the great\nMississippi River Flood of 1927, but when I read this poem a few years ago\nduring a gathering on the behalf of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, the same\nissues resounded—neighborhoods destroyed, slow government response, the\nAfrican American neighborhoods were hit the hardest. Terrible images came\nacross the television screen and recently with global warming and continuous\nflooding and natural disasters this poem survives the test of time and can\nspeak to a variety of incidents and international dislocated peoples.\n\nLet’s look at the blues poem as a form. The first two lines are of almost\nequal length. The first line sets the scene, the second line repeats the first\nfor emphasis. The third line either comments or reverses the first two lines.\nThere is one integral line throughout the stanza. The “a” rhyme glues the\nthree-line stanza together. “Backwater blues done caused me to pack up my\nthings and go, / Backwater blues done caused me to pack up my things and go, /\n'Cause my house fell down and I can't live there no more.” This is a song\npoem. The best song poems, I believe, can live on the pages as well as in the\near. The blues poems remind us that the American poetic tradition can be\ntraced to African American oral tradition; that great art, great poems come\nfrom deep suffering that is personal, historical, and political and could be\nread on the page as well as sung out loud. I can’t do justice to this poem, to\n“Backwater Blues,” by just reciting it myself. Please download this song,\npreferably the original 1927 recording by Bessie Smith, and listen to her\namazing singing. There’s this rich toughness in her voice that tells us this\ngirl and her people are going to get through this calamity. Her voice is\nsubversive, defiant despite all odds against her.\n\nI love writing blues poems. As a poet who writes in English I know that every\ntime I write a sonnet I pay homage to the high European tradition and to\nmaster poets like Shakespeare, Dunn, Keats, Petrarch. I see myself as an\nactivist Chinese American poet, and I want to show the multiple sides of my\nliterary inheritance. I make it a point to learn the African American poetic\ntradition. The blues poems was more here on American soil, and so I study the\nblues poems closely and write blues poems to pay homage to all those African\nAmerican blues masters. Of course, I learn so much from the Bessie Smith’s\nblues poems. I have her strong voice in my ear at all times. Thank you\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## A Cowboy’s Prayer \n_(Written for Mother)_\n\n \n \n Oh Lord, I’ve never lived where churches\r\n grow.\r\n I love creation better as it stood\r\n That day You finished it so long ago\r\n And looked upon Your work and called it\r\n good.\r\n I know that others find You in the light\r\n That’s sifted down through tinted window\r\n panes,\r\n And yet I seem to feel You near tonight\r\n In this dim, quiet starlight on the plains.\r\n I thank You, Lord, that I am placed so well,\r\n That You have made my freedom so com-\r\n plete;\r\n That I’m no slave of whistle, clock or bell,\r\n Nor weak-eyed prisoner of wall and street.\r\n Just let me live my life as I’ve begun\r\n And give me work that’s open to the sky;\r\n Make me a pardner of the wind and sun,\r\n And I won’t ask a life that’s soft or high.\r\n Let me be easy on the man that’s down;\r\n Let me be square and generous with all.\r\n I’m careless sometimes, Lord, when I’m in\r\n town,\r\n But never let ‘em say I’m mean or small!\r\n Make me as big and open as the plains,\r\n As honest as the hawse between my knees,\r\n Clean as the wind that blows behind the rains,\r\n Free as the hawk that circles down the\r\n breeze!\r\n Forgive me, Lord, if sometimes I forget.\r\n You know about the reasons that are hid.\r\n You understand the things that gall and fret;\r\n You know me better than my mother did.\r\n Just keep an eye on all that’s done and said\r\n And right me, sometimes, when I turn\r\n aside,\r\n And guide me on the long, dim, trail ahead\r\n That stretches upward toward the Great\r\n Divide.\n\n—Badger Clark\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\nThis poem is in the public domain.\n\n", "output": "This is Marilyn Nelson, reading “A Cowboy’s Prayer” by Badger Clark.\n\nThat was “A Cowboy’s Prayer” by Charles Badger Clark. This poem was first\npublished in 1906, but it was published many times as anonymous. It had a life\nof its own without the name of its author. Badger Clark was so charmed by this\nthat he had a collection of anonymous publications of his poems. He collected\nthem—he had sixty copies of poems that had been—or, at times, that this poem\nhad been published anonymously.\n\nBadger Clark’s dates are 1883 to 1957. He was, and is, one of the classic\ncowboy poets and made a major contribution to the literature of the west. He\nwas the first poet laureate of South Dakota. He was named poet laureate in\n1937 and served, I think, 20 years as poet laureate of South Dakota. He lived\nalone in a cabin with no electricity, running water, or telephone, on land\nthat is now a state park. He travelled as a young man, however, and this poem,\n“A Cowboy’s Prayer,” was written during the time he was living in Arizona. I\nthink you can hear the “Westernness” of this poem. Badger Clark wrote poems\nthat were very popular during his lifetime. One of his poems was recorded by\nthe singing cowboy star Tex Ritter. Another was set to music and recorded by\nthe Fred Waring chorus. Bob Dylan recorded one of Badger Clark’s songs or\npoems as a song. And Johnny Cash recorded a version of this poem, “A Cowboy’s\nPrayer.”\n\nI think that to really appreciate this poem, we may have to set aside\npolitical correctness and ethnic sensitivity. This poem was published in 1906\nduring the ascendance of the American myth which, of course we know, refused\nto confront for many years America’s history of genocide. This was the myth of\nan America which is big, open, honest, clean, and free. I think this poem is\nrelated to Woody Guthrie’s song, which we all know and love, “This Land is\nYour Land, This Land is My Land.” Like that song, this poem expresses a\nreverence which is evoked by the land. It’s an ecological poem, I suppose one\nmight say . . . one might say it’s a green poem. It’s a poem about loving\nAmerica as _a land_. As a landscape. I think it has something also in common\nwith Emily Dickinson’s poem, 236, which begins “Some keep the Sabbath going to\nchurch / I keep it staying at home.” It is easy to think, because of Emily\nDickinson’s life, that when she said “at home” she meant _indoors_ , but a\nclose reading of the poems makes it clear that she meant _out of doors_. At\nhome, she’s at home in an orchard. It’s a poem that takes place in an orchard\nwith a bobolink as a preacher. So it’s a poem also about land reverence,\nnature reverence. Loving the land. Loving the landscape.\n\nI first encountered Badger Clark’s poem in a tourist gift shop, somewhere on a\nhighway—probably Route 66. My family stopped at, somewhere out West, on one of\nseveral cross-country driving trips we made during the 1950s. I remember\npicking up the poem as a postcard in a postcard rack, and I believe it was\nidentified as being anonymous. I remember reading this poem and being deeply\nmoved by it. I must have been maybe nine. I begged my parents to buy it for me\nand for years I kept it in my box of childhood treasures. I liked then, and\nstill like, the poet’s sense of reverence without dogma. The fact that this is\nnot a poem that takes you to any particular religion. I liked its simple\nethical values. Its hope to be clean and honest, sort of, Boy Scout\nvalues/Girl Scout values. And I also liked its humility. Its confession of\nfailures, of faults. And I also loved—as a child, I loved the speaker of this\npoem as I loved all those painfully honest, tough but gentle, big, open,\nhonest, clean and free movie and television cowboys, who populated America’s\ndream of herself when I was a child during that first half of this last\ncentury.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## Howl, Part III\n\n \n \n Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland \r\n where you’re madder than I am \r\n I’m with you in Rockland \r\n where you must feel very strange \r\n I’m with you in Rockland \r\n where you imitate the shade of my mother \r\n I’m with you in Rockland \r\n where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries \r\n I’m with you in Rockland \r\n where you laugh at this invisible humor \r\n I’m with you in Rockland \r\n where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter \r\n I’m with you in Rockland \r\n where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio \r\n I’m with you in Rockland \r\n where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses \r\n I'm with you in Rockland \r\n where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica \r\n I’m with you in Rockland \r\n where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx \r\n I’m with you in Rockland \r\n where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the \r\n actual pingpong of the abyss \r\n I’m with you in Rockland \r\n where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal \r\n it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse \r\n I’m with you in Rockland \r\n where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from \r\n its pilgrimage to a cross in the void \r\n I’m with you in Rockland \r\n where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist\r\n revolution against the fascist national Golgotha \r\n I’m with you in Rockland \r\n where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living \r\n human Jesus from the superhuman tomb \r\n I’m with you in Rockland \r\n where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing \r\n the final stanzas of the Internationale \r\n I’m with you in Rockland \r\n where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the \r\n United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep \r\n I’m with you in Rockland \r\n where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes \r\n roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital \r\n illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside \r\n O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory \r\n forget your underwear we’re free \r\n I’m with you in Rockland \r\n in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across \r\n America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night\n\n—Allen Ginsberg\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\nFrom \"Howl\" by Allen Ginsberg, from _Collected Poems: 1947-1997_ by Allen\nGinsberg. Copyright © 1956, 2006 by Allen Ginsberg, LLC, used by permission of\nThe Wylie Agency LLC.\n\n", "output": "It’s sometimes interesting to look at poetry through the lens of history. In\n1955, the year 29-year-old Allen Ginsberg wrote the poem he titled “Howl,”\nMarian Anderson became the first African American singer to perform with the\n71-year-old metropolitan opera company in New York City. That same year, 1955,\nrock ‘n’ roll debuted in a film called “Blackboard Jungle,” an adaptation of a\nnovel by Evan Hunter about inner-city teaching. The movie featured the song\n“Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley & His Comets. When the film was\nscreened, teenage audiences began dancing in the aisles. Steve Jobs was born\nin 1955, the visionary entrepreneur who would introduce the personal computer\nand desktop publishing to the world, and set in motion a global, technical\nrevolution. In November of 1955, America increased its military involvement in\nthe conflict between North and South Vietnam. Having just won their struggle\nfor independence from France, the two had decided to go to war against one\nanother.\n\nIt’s rare that a single event results in permanent social change, and more\nrare, yet, when that single event is the publication of a poem. “Howl” is one\nof those few poems. Dedicated to Carl Solomon, a man Ginsberg met when he was\nvisiting his mother in a mental hospital, “Howl” famously begins, “I saw the\nbest minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked\n. . .” It goes on from there to become a sustained, high-energy complaint\nabout social hypocrisy. The poem’s essential argument is that America in 1955\nhad so narrow an idea of what is considered “normal,” that there was no room\nfor any diversity or creativity. For a man, “normal” in 1955 was someone with\na nine-to-five job who intended to marry, or had already married, a woman who\nwore short-waist dresses and high heels. Homosexuals like Ginsberg risked not\njust social alienation, but imprisonment. In every state of the union, sex\nbetween consenting adults of the same sex was punishable by a jail or prison\nsentence.\n\nIn “Howl,” Ginsberg celebrates all of those whose lives fell outside what was\nconsidered mainstream. He celebrates those who are marginalized because of\ntheir sexuality, or their race, or because their political ideas were\nconsidered radical, or because they were artists or musicians, or because they\nwere drug addicts. He registers his objection to the fact of their social\noutcast status, and highlights the contradiction between a country that says\nit welcomes difference but then fails to protect the rights of those who are\ndifferent.\n\nThe poem, written in long lines, has four parts—the last of which is titled\n“Footnote for Howl.” The long-line free verse form was first used 100 years\nearlier by another American poet, Walt Whitman. In Whitman’s poem “Song of\nMyself,” those long lines celebrate Whitman’s individuality, and invite all\nreaders to likewise celebrate theirs. Whitman’s argument is that we all belong\nin the same universe. Because both poems are written in long lines, the music\nof the two poems is in some way similar, and yet is also very different. Both\npoets use a poetic strategy called “anaphora,” where the poet creates a sound\npattern based on repeating one or more words at the beginning of several\nconsecutive lines. In Whitman’s poem, the use of anaphora gives the poem an\nexpansive, oracular quality similar to Protestant sermons in the King James\nBible. In Ginsberg’s poem, the use of anaphora also has echoes of a sermon,\nbut the sound is more like a sermon delivered by a zealous, ecstatic, almost\nmanic revival tent preacher.\n\nIn spite of the tonal difference, both poets are widely inclusive, folding\ninto the poem anything and everything American, and of their moment: Whitman’s\nvast pastoral landscape becomes Ginsberg’s mean-city streets. While Whitman\nslyly gestured toward both homosexual and heterosexual practices, Ginsberg’s\nsexual references are explicit, slang-based, and sometimes graphic. While both\npoems argue for freedom, and for belonging, Ginsberg’s poem is much more\nconfrontational. There’s a persistent sense in “Howl” of an explosive charge\nabout to be detonated, as if the narrow confines of 1955 were so narrow they\nwere bound to give way.\n\nAfter the poem was published in 1956 by City Lights Books, the publisher,\npoet, and City Lights bookstore owner, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, was arrested and\ncharged with disseminating obscene literature. The “Howl” obscenity trial came\ndown to the question of who has the right to speak, and who has a right to\nread that speech. Academics were called to the witness stand, with some\nspeaking for, and others against, the poem’s literary merits. The deciding\njudge, Clayton Horne, found that the poem was not obscene. He wrote this in\nhis decision:\n\n> The authors of the first amendment knew that novel and unconventional ideas\n> might disturb the complacent, but they chose to encourage a freedom which\n> they believed essential if vigorous enlightenment was ever to triumph over\n> slothful ignorance.\n\nHe went on to say:\n\n> I do not believe that “Howl” is without redeeming social importance. The\n> first part of “Howl” presents a picture of a nightmare world; the second\n> part is an indictment of those elements in modern society destructive to the\n> best qualities of human nature—such elements are predominately identified as\n> materialism, conformity, and mechanization leading toward war; the third\n> part presents a picture of an individual who is a specific representation of\n> what the author conceives of as a general condition; “Footnote to Howl”\n> seems to be a declamation that everything in the world is holy, including\n> parts of the body by name—it ends in a plea for holy living.\n\n“Howl,” fueled by the publicity from the trial, became one of the most famous\npoems of the 20th century. It’s the artifact of a moment when the young poet\nAllen Ginsberg decided to take a stand to support and protect the freedom that\ndemocracy promises. There was no poem like “Howl.” He invented it out of his\nyouthful desire to be rebellious, both in his life and in his poetry.\nRebellion is part of the American identity, and “Howl” embodies rebellion. It\ncalls into question limits on sexuality, and on art.\n\nBy reprising Whitman’s long poetic line, Ginsberg linked his poem to existing\npoetic tradition, but he shifted the focus and revved the speed to make it\nbetter represent his own historical moment. In doing so, he ushered in a new\nmusic in poetry, just as the music of rock ‘n’ roll was being born, and racial\nbarriers were coming down, and the contentious Vietnam War was beginning. The\ncontinual effort to reinvent the past for one’s own era is very American.\nWe’re charmed by changes in fashion, cars, and architecture. We tell time by\nevolving styles. “Howl” defines a certain moment when the beat generation\nrefused to behave, but its greatness lies in the fact that it is timeless in\nits concerns, and the way it takes its stand for lasting principles. That’s\nwhat makes it a great poem—and a great American poem.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## A Plain Song for Comadre\n\n \n \n Though the unseen may vanish, though insight fails\r\n And doubter and downcast saint\r\n Join in the same complaint,\r\n What holy things were ever frightened off\r\n By a fly's buzz, or itches, or a cough? \r\n Harder than nails\r\n \r\n They are, more warmly constant than the sun,\r\n At whose continual sign\r\n The dimly prompted vine\r\n Upbraids itself to a green excellence.\r\n What evening, when the slow and forced expense\r\n Of sweat is done,\r\n \r\n Does not the dark come flooding the straight furrow\r\n Or filling the well-made bowl?\r\n What night will not the whole \r\n Sky with its clear studs and steady spheres\r\n Turn on a sound chimney? It is seventeen years\r\n Come tomorrow\r\n \r\n That Bruna Sandoval has kept the church \r\n Of San Ysidro, sweeping\r\n And scrubbing the aisles, keeping\r\n The candlesticks and the plaster faces bright,\r\n And seen no visions but the thing done right\r\n From the clay porch\r\n \r\n To the white altar. For love and in all weathers\r\n This is what she has done.\r\n Sometimes the early sun\r\n Shines as she flings the scrubwater out, with a crash \r\n Of grimy rainbows, and the stained suds flash\r\n Like angel-feathers.\n\n—Richard Wilbur\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\n\"A Plain Song for Comadre\" from THINGS OF THIS WORLD by Richard Wilbur.\n\nCopyright © 1956, renewed 1984 by Richard Wilbur.\n\nUsed by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights\nreserved.\n\n", "output": "Not his most famous poem, and neither short nor long, Richard Wilbur’s “A\nPlain Song for Comadre” has nonetheless haunted this reader since I first came\nupon it in the 1970s. The poem is partly about the years passing, so I’ll date\nit within the context of Wilbur’s life (he lived 96 years, dying in 2017) and\nmy own life. The poem’s first journal appearance was in _Poetry_ in February\n1954, half a year before I was born, and it was then collected in Wilbur’s\nthird book, _Things of This World_ , in 1956. I don’t think a single year has\ngone by in the last forty when I haven’t read it at least two or three times,\nor discovered a few lines from it echoing in my head—particularly “It is\nseventeen years /Come tomorrow //That Bruna Sandoval has kept the church /Of\nSan Ysidro…”\n\nWhy this milestone achieved by Bruna Sandoval, a “comadre” (in Spanish, a\nneighbor or a friend or a godmother) who cleans a church in a small California\ntown on the Mexican border, should so move me, born in Michigan to a wholly\ndifferent life, is something of a mystery. Any solution may have to start with\nthe tone of high importance Richard Wilbur so often brings (I’m going to use\nthe present tense about him—his poetry lives) to the things of this world.\nWhat we do matters: writing or reading poems, scrubbing floors. And yet\nWilbur’s reader must be careful not to say anything too neat and summary about\nhis poems; this poet may have perfected simplicity, but he isn’t easy.\nAlthough the title’s “Plain Song” suggests both the unison singing of the\nearliest Christian church choristers and Wilbur’s own lyric, he starts on such\na high philosophical plane that we have difficulty knowing what he means.\n“Though the unseen may vanish”—the very first phrase is a conundrum. Isn’t it\nthe _seen_ that may vanish?\n\nThe sentence goes on: “though insight fails /And doubter and downcast saint\n/Join in the same complaint…” Oh, now we “see.” The “insight” that fails us is\nthe failure of faith; of thinking that “holy things” may have vanished merely\nbecause we don’t see them. The art of seeing has always been at least as\nessential to Wilbur’s enterprise (he was the son of a painter) as his\nChristian beliefs. Having established the metaphor of vision here, as in so\nmany poems, Wilbur now enriches the scene by listing “holy things” (“a fly’s\nbuzz, or itches, or a cough”) perceived only by senses other than the\nvisual—of hearing and of touch. Wilbur’s fly, as many readers have noted,\ndrifts in by way of his beloved Emily Dickinson. (“I heard a Fly buzz - when I\ndied,” her poem begins; and its later phrase “With Blue - uncertain -\nstumbling Buzz” is a little triumph of synesthesia that may also have inspired\nWilbur’s sense-scumbling.)\n\nIn any case, holy things are “harder than nails”—a homely cliché that is not a\ncliché, given that it may hint too at the Crucifixion; and perhaps it’s here,\nat the end of the first stanza, that we first take note of how liquidly\nWilbur’s enjambments contradict the hard-as-nails edges of his lines. Although\nthe rhyme scheme of the six-line stanza is securely hammered in place (each\nrhyme exact, and in the symmetrical sequence _abbcca_ ), the liquidity comes\npartly from a metrical scheme that contradicts that chosen symmetry. The\nnumber of stresses per line as the stanza progresses (that is, 5 stresses in\nthe first line, followed by 3,3,5,5, and 2) makes its own asymmetrical\npattern. That means that in the poem’s first line, for instance, a pentameter\nending in “fails” will eventually rhyme perfectly with the stanza’s final\nline, “nails”—but that concluding line is uniquely, dramatically brief, with\nonly two stresses. Although sense will spill into the second stanza, this\nsixth line of the first stanza catches you up short. The closest analogy in\nmusic might be counterpoint. If such a technique could be called plain song,\nWilbur surely relishes being complicated about plainness.\n\nAnother way to take conscious note of the poem’s liquidity is to look at the\nlength of sentences. The first sentence ends with a question on line 5; the\nsecond with a period on line 10. But the poem, we remember, isn’t in five-line\nstanzas. Its six-line-per-stanza logic depends more on a sort of propulsive\npatience—on both poet and reader continuing to follow the stanza past the\nresounding cadence of a sentence. Wilbur’s delays—subjects and predicates\npreceded by dependent clauses (such as “Though the unseen may vanish”), or by\nadjectival phrases (as in “Harder than nails //They are”)—take their time in a\nway that compliments the reader: you can be patient too. The gorgeousness of\nthe language itself makes you content to wait. Taking such firm but leisurely\ncontrol, in long sentences, of what you will learn when, Wilbur resembles\nanother of his beloved poets—John Milton, whose cosmology seems to be invoked\ntoo. Wilbur’s “whole / Sky with its clear studs and steady spheres” that “Turn\non a sound chimney” is one whose musical spheres ring out from a long-gone\nera.\n\nBut let’s not pass over another moment that precedes this image—in stanza two,\nwhere in response to the “sign” of the sun, “the dimly prompted vine /\nUpbraids itself to a fine excellence.” Richard Wilbur wrote a lot of light\nverse, most of it aimed at children, and no account of his seriousness should\nfail to note that he could be laugh-aloud funny. More often, though, his humor\ninvolves quiet wit like this. The vine is “dimly” prompted because it doesn’t\nget enough at first of the “warmly constant” sun; it’s also “dim” because it’s\nshort on intelligence. And yet it has character—it “Upbraids itself,” it self-\ncriticizes as it grows and entwines itself upward. (Note how the word\n“Upbraids” is placed at the beginning of the line, which by the rules of this\npoem means “U” must be capitalized—it’s a little taller already.)\n\nThat self-castigating hard laborer, the vine, which becomes rhymingly “fine”\nin its excellence, might be seen as a symbol of Bruna Sandoval. But we haven’t\nmet her yet! Among the seemingly casual architectural feats of this 30-line\npoem is that with the word “Turn” on line seventeen, Wilbur turns at last from\ngeneral principles to one single human, Bruna Sandoval, and tells us of her\nseventeen years of work. From here on out, it is her poem. She has “kept” the\nchurch of San Ysidro—and with this verb the poet, who seems to enjoy a god-\nlike omniscience about his unsung heroine, shows special attentiveness. He\nnever says she “cleans” the church; instead, she keeps it. She keeps “the\nplaster faces bright” as well as the “clay porch”—there’s no immortal art in\nthis church, no monumental marble. With his nod in the direction of humble\nmaterials, the great Richard Wilbur shows something of his own humility and\nwhy he is drawn to Bruna Sandoval’s. She is a person who “has seen no visions”\n(which recalls the first line’s reference to the “unseen”) and whose goal is\n“the thing done right.” The simple monosyllabic word “done” is repeated\nsurprisingly soon, too—repeated when the sophisticated Wilbur might have\nchosen some loftier verb. “For love and in all weathers / This is what she has\ndone.” Doing, over and over, is a form of prayer, he seems to say. The words\n“sweeping” and “scrubbing” appear _before_ “grimy” and “stained”—that is, the\nsweeping and scrubbing will be done again. Bruna Sandoval is familiar with\nthis soiled world, and she has no idea she is being celebrated for what she\ndoes with it. What she knows is how to “fling the scrubwater out” and, matter-\nof-factly, to see rainbows and angel-feathers there.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## The Argonaut\n\n \n \n What made anyone think I was a Communist I don’t know. I never went\r\n to any of the Communist meetings. I didn’t know any other Communists.\r\n I didn’t believe in any of their tenets. It’s true, I hunted elk in the\r\n winter. I never actually shot any, but I followed them. And I laced my\r\n cranberry juice with vodka. But these things didn’t make me a Communist.\r\n I stood on the bridge and watched the boats go out to sea. I dreamed\r\n of going with them one day. I danced alone in my apartment. I hated my\r\n job with the government. I went to parties where I didn’t know anyone.\r\n I went to the zoo and talked to the animals. I dreamed I had an affair\r\n with a zebra and its stripes rubbed off on me. I met a woman I\r\n liked and called her on the phone. She said she liked phone sex and I\r\n didn’t know what she meant. I lay on the couch and counted my blessings.\r\n There were none, or so few they slipped through my fingers. I got up and\r\n looked out the window. A cloud of sparrows flew by. I made myself a can\r\n of soup. I thought of my relatives, all gone except for one. I called\r\n her on the phone. She didn’t remember me. I told her I was Edna’s son.\r\n She said, “I remember Edna. I never liked her. She cursed too much.”\r\n My mother never cursed, but I wasn’t about to argue. I went to the movies.\r\n I saw Hopalong Cassidy. I wished he didn’t wave so much. But I liked\r\n the popcorn. I walked about the city, feeding the pigeons. I bought a\r\n soda on the street. I sat down in a garden. A woman came along and sat\r\n down beside me. She said, “Nice day, isn’t it?” I said, “Yes, very,\r\n I like it.” “What do you do for a living?” she said. “I’m an accountant\r\n in the government,” I said. “That must be nice,” she said. “But most\r\n people I know think I’m a Communist,” I said. “That’s a joke, right?”\r\n she said. “To me it is,” I said. “To me, you look more like an\r\n Argonaut,” she said. “What’s an Argonaut?” I said. “It’s somebody\r\n who swims in the deep waters of the ocean in search of treasure,” she\r\n said. “I found a penny in my bathtub once when I was a kid,” I said.\r\n “Then you’re an Argonaut,” she said.\n\n—James Tate\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\nJames Tate, “The Argonaut” from _The Government Lake_. \nCopyright © 2019. \nReprinted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins\n\n", "output": "James Tate died on July 8th, 2015, at the age of 71. This poem is from his\nfinal volume of poetry, _The Government Lake_. His life as a poet lasted\nnearly fifty years, since his first book, _The Lost Pilot_ , won the Yale\nYounger Poets award when Jim was 22. Jim was my teacher at the MFA program at\nUMass Amherst, and later became a friend. I loved him and his poems dearly,\nand learned so much from him and them, and still do.\n\nFrom his very earliest poems his voice was always completely present and\nappealing. It’s that thing great poets have, that you can’t exactly describe\nand can never imitate, not that you would want to. Jim was from the Midwest,\nand his poems have a straightforward, no bull, goofy, casually brilliant\nbemusement that is unmistakably American: a bit of Chaplin, or the hilarious\nvictim Joseph Keaton, nicknamed Buster by Houdini when he fell down a flight\nof stairs at the age of three, along with some Will Rogers, the knowing\nvaudeville cowboy from Oologah, Oklahoma.\n\nThere was always a storytelling impulse in Jim’s poems, even in the most wild\nand surreal. In his last several books, he fully embraced the possibilities of\nnarrative, from shaggy dog stories to distracted stemwinders to ordinary\nrambles that turn sharply surreal. Most are written in the first person, and\ndescribe more or less ordinary situations that are constantly slipping into a\ndreamlike quasi-reality. You could almost add a paradox to a paradox and call\nthem lineated prose poems.\n\nOften in Jim’s poems, beyond the antic hilarity, there is also a sense of\nundefined dread, a gradual unraveling of the conventions we depend on, and our\nassumptions. This double consciousness, that whatever is “normal” barely\ncovers up something deeper, wilder, stranger, more anarchic, and beyond our\nordinary ken, strikes me as characteristic of much of the best of American\nliterature.\n\nAs in “The Argonaut,” Jim’s poems often start with a premise, either mundane\nor absurd, as if the reader has wandered into an ongoing internal monologue.\nHere the speaker gently quarrels with the anachronistic accusation that he’s a\ncommunist. He examines his behaviors for signs, and makes a kind of\nhaphazardly organized confession, at turns absurd and heartbreaking, not to\nbeing a communist, but something else. A confused lonely dreamer? It does seem\na bit dangerous to be one of those these days.\n\nIt’s a tired truism to say that poems take things that are ordinary, mundane,\nsmall, ignorable, and transform them, making them feel full of magic and\nimportance. Yet that is exactly what they sometimes do. And when it happens,\nas it does here with this small childhood memory and moment of connection\nbetween strangers, it can feel thrilling, sad, full of regret and hope and\npossibility, a representation of how our lives can feel suddenly meaningful in\nundeniable, unparaphrasable, fathomless ways.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## Guidelines\n\n \n \n If they ask you what you are,\r\n say Arab. If they flinch, don't react,\r\n just remember your great-aunt's eyes.\r\n \r\n If they ask you where you come from,\r\n say Toledo. Detroit. Mission Viejo.\r\n Fall Springs. Topeka. If they seem confused,\r\n \r\n help them locate these places on a map,\r\n then inquire casually, Where are you from?\r\n Have you been here long? Do you like this country?\r\n \r\n If they ask you what you eat,\r\n don't dissemble. If garlic is your secret friend,\r\n admit it. Likewise, crab cakes.\r\n \r\n If they say you're not American,\r\n don't pull out your personal,\r\n wallet-sized flag. Instead, recall\r\n \r\n the Bill of Rights. Mention the Constitution.\r\n Wear democracy like a favorite garment:\r\n comfortable, intimate.\r\n \r\n If they wave newspapers in your face and shout,\r\n stay calm. Remember everything they never learned.\r\n Offer to take them to the library.\r\n \r\n If they ask you if you're white, say it depends.\r\n Say no. Say maybe. If appropriate, inquire,\r\n Have you always been white, or is it recent?\r\n \r\n If you take to the streets in protest,\r\n link hands with whomever is beside you. \r\n Keep your eyes on the colonizer's maps, \r\n \r\n geography's twisted strands, the many colors\r\n of struggle. No matter how far you've come, remember:\r\n the starting line is always closer than you think.\r\n \r\n If they ask how long you plan to stay, say forever.\r\n Console them if they seem upset. Say, don't worry,\r\n you'll get used to it. Say, we live here. How about you?\n\n—Lisa Suhair Majaj\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\n“Guidelines” by Lisa Suhair Majaj from _Geographies of Light_.\n\nWeb del Sol Association, 2009.\n\nReprinted by permission of author.\n\n", "output": "This is Naomi Shihab Nye and I’m reading a poem by Lisa Suhair Majaj called\n“Guidelines.”\n\n“Keep your eyes on the colonizer’s maps”—“Guidelines” by Lisa Suhair Majaj, an\nArab-American poet who currently lives in Cyprus with her husband and two\nchildren, is one of my favorite poems about identity. This poem is included in\nLisa’s book _Geographies of Light_ published by Del Sol Press, Washington DC\nin 2009. Her title has bearing here too. Lisa’s poem sheds a clear, compelling\nlight on the sometimes thorny terrain of immigration, identity and belonging,\nand it does this in an imaginative, comfortable tone which includes us all in\nthe conversation. “Guidelines” functions through a series of simple, potent\nquestions and comments: advice to the listener as it were, arranged in three-\nline stanzas. It’s friendly. It doesn’t get irritated even when pressed. It\nreminds me of the power of language to ease situations of potential conflict.\nInstead of backfiring with fury, the poem gently engages and expands. Its\nplayfulness and nuanced possibility ending with that most gracious\nturnaround—“How about you?”—suggests the peculiar curiosity of this issue. Who\ndoes belong? Does everyone belong? Do we have to do something special to\nbelong? Do people who look like you belong a little bit more?\n\nI like the openhearted tone of “Guidelines.” Nobody could say they don’t\nunderstand this poem. Yet it’s clever and surprising, as well as revealing and\nwise. Walking in Claremont, California the other day, I saw a handwritten sign\non a wall: NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL. Because I live in a Texas city with a high\nmajority of Latino residents and an ongoing conversation about citizenship and\nhuman rights, this sign caught me up. I had never seen the truth stated so\nsimply before. It made me think of what Lisa’s poem “Guidelines” is saying. I\nthink about the people who first lived on all our lands here in the United\nStates and the indignities they have had to face being so often neglected in\nthe presumptions of belonging. I think of my Palestinian refugee father and\nhis lives in both countries—Palestine and the United States—always wanting to\nbelong, always seeking connection.\n\nLisa Suhair Majaj and I happen to share exactly the same heritage, Palestinian\nfathers and Midwestern German-American mothers, but this is not the reason I\nlike her poem. Her poem speaks for all of us: for bullied middle schoolers and\noutsider teens, for anyone who ever feels marginalized, for oddballs and\nwallflowers and hermits and eccentrics and, well, maybe that person who lives\nright next door to you. How are they doing?\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## For My People\n\n \n \n For my people everywhere singing their slave songs \r\n repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues \r\n and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an \r\n unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an \r\n unseen power;\r\n \r\n For my people lending their strength to the years, to the \r\n gone years and the now years and the maybe years, \r\n washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending \r\n hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching\r\n dragging along never gaining never reaping never \r\n knowing and never understanding;\r\n \r\n For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama\r\n backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor \r\n and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking \r\n and playhouse and concert and store and hair and\r\n Miss Choomby and company;\r\n \r\n For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn \r\n to know the reasons why and the answers to and the \r\n people who and the places where and the days when, in \r\n memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we \r\n were black and poor and small and different and nobody \r\n cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;\r\n \r\n For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to \r\n be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and \r\n play and drink their wine and religion and success, to \r\n marry their playmates and bear children and then die\r\n of consumption and anemia and lynching;\r\n \r\n For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox \r\n Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New \r\n Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy \r\n people filling the cabarets and taverns and other \r\n people's pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and\r\n land and money and something—something all our own;\r\n \r\n For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time \r\n being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when \r\n burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled \r\n and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures \r\n who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;\r\n \r\n For my people blundering and groping and floundering in \r\n the dark of churches and schools and clubs \r\n and societies, associations and councils and committees and \r\n conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and \r\n devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches, \r\n preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by \r\n false prophet and holy believer;\r\n \r\n For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way\r\n from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding, \r\n trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people, \r\n all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;\r\n \r\n Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a \r\n bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second \r\n generation full of courage issue forth; let a people \r\n loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of \r\n healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing \r\n in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs \r\n be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now \r\n rise and take control.\n\n—Margaret Walker\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\n“For My People” Margaret Walker from _For My People_.\n\nYale University Press, 1942.\n\nBy permission of the University of Georgia Press.\n\n", "output": "If I could tell you how much I treasure Margaret Walker, if I could tell you\nhow much I miss her presence, her courage, her strength, her non-compromising\neyes and intellect, I would. But I all I can do is read what she wrote and\nleft for us, as map, as guide. So that’s what I will do.\n\nThis is Nikki Finney, and that was Margaret Walker. Margaret Walker’s epic,\nbeautiful, stunning, ageless, “For my People,” which is the title poem from\nher collection, _For my People,_ that was published in 1942 and won the Yale\nYounger Poets award. And it’s a book, and a poem, and a poet that have always\nmeant a great deal to me.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell\n\n \n \n I hold my honey and I store my bread\r\n In little jars and cabinets of my will.\r\n I label clearly, and each latch and lid\r\n I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.\r\n I am very hungry. I am incomplete.\r\n And none can tell when I may dine again.\r\n No man can give me any word but Wait,\r\n The puny light. I keep eyes pointed in;\r\n Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt\r\n Drag out to their last dregs and I resume\r\n On such legs as are left me, in such heart\r\n As I can manage, remember to go home,\r\n My taste will not have turned insensitive\r\n To honey and bread old purity could love.\r\n \n\n—Gwendolyn Brooks\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\nGwendolyn Brooks, “my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell” from\n_Selected Poems._\n\nCopyright © 1963 by Gwendolyn Brooks. Reprinted By Consent of Brooks\nPermissions.\n\n", "output": "My name is Patricia Spears Jones. I will be reading Gwendolyn Brooks’ “my\ndreams, my works, must wait till after hell.”\n\nGwendolyn Brooks will be ever known as the first black American author to win\na Pulitzer Prize, and she was a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress.\nHer time there served as a model for poet laureates to come. Brooks’ subjects\nwere the life and times of black Americans, especially those who moved north\nduring the Great Migration when millions of southern blacks moved to the\nstates in the Midwest, the West, and the North.\n\nSince she was Chicago-raised (even if Kansas-born) her focus was on Chicago\nblacks, with whom she and her family shared trying social and economic times.\nShe understood and deeply cared about the plight and aspirations of her fellow\nblack citizens. “my dream, my work, must wait till after hell” is an excellent\nintroduction to Brooks’ ability to express the very complicated lives of black\nAmericans. Written as part of a series of poems dedicated to black American\nservicemen who were about to enter military service in World War II, these\npoems—all sonnets—captured their plight. Here were black men who were daily\ndiscriminated against going off to fight fascism. The patriotism was strong,\nand their willingness to fight and die for this nation showed that love of\nthis difficult country. But, more importantly, Brooks’ speaker wants to\nlive—to return, to gain the “bread and honey” that he will miss when he goes\nto war.\n\nGwendolyn Brooks is one of my poetry foremothers, and she represents what\nAmerican poets should continue to be like. She worked on her craft, she deeply\ncared about the ways in which the ideals of this nation rarely served its\ncitizens, and her work demanded that we attend to those ideals and create the\nenvironment to make them real, so that the “bread and honey” would feed all of\nus.\n\nI am so pleased to have this fine poem—this exemplary sonnet—enter into the\nsoundscape of the Library of Congress.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## February\n\n \n \n A chimney, breathing a little smoke.\r\n The sun, I can't see\r\n making a bit of pink\r\n I can't quite see in the blue.\r\n The pink of five tulips\r\n at five p.m. on the day before March first.\r\n The green of the tulip stems and leaves\r\n like something I can't remember,\r\n finding a jack-in-the-pulpit\r\n a long time ago and far away.\r\n Why it was December then\r\n and the sun was on the sea\r\n by the temples we'd gone to see.\r\n One green wave moved in the violet sea\r\n like the UN Building on big evenings,\r\n green and wet\r\n while the sky turns violet.\t\r\n A few almond trees\r\n had a few flowers, like a few snowflakes\r\n out of the blue looking pink in the light.\r\n A gray hush\r\n in which the boxy trucks roll up Second Avenue\r\n into the sky. They're just\r\n going over the hill.\r\n The green leaves of the tulips on my desk\r\n like grass light on flesh,\r\n and a green-copper steeple\r\n and streaks of cloud beginning to glow.\r\n I can't get over\r\n how it all works in together\r\n like a woman who just came to her window\r\n and stands there filling it\r\n jogging her baby in her arms.\r\n She's so far off. Is it the light\r\n that makes the baby pink?\r\n I can see the little fists\r\n and the rocking-horse motion of her breasts.\r\n It's getting grayer and gold and chilly.\r\n Two dog-size lions face each other\r\n at the corners of a roof.\r\n It's the yellow dust inside the tulips.\r\n It's the shape of a tulip.\r\n It's the water in the drinking glass the tulips are in.\r\n It's a day like any other.\n\n—James Schuyler\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\nJames Schuyler, \"February\" from _Collected Poems_.\n\nCopyright © 1993 by James Schuyler.\n\nReprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.\n\n", "output": "I love James Schuyler’s poetry—its effortlessness and grace, its sound, its\nthick (and at times gnarly) descriptions. A palpable sense of irreality is\neverywhere present in it; his poems combine the attention of an ethnographic\naccount with the charm of a great dinner guest. Add to this a private reading\nof the physical world imprinted on his nervous system. In his hyper-real\ndescriptions, colors shift. The words shimmer. The “violet sea” verges on the\nviolent. There’s a deeper cold behind the “gold and chilly” weather as he\nchronicles a major American city from his window. We see beauty and power\ntwinned, the UN building on big evenings, and the green leaves of the tulips\non my desk like grass light on flesh.\n\nIn one sense “February” is composed as a painstakingly specific catalog of\ndiscrete images. Each line is a surprise, delighting in the pleasures of\ncoincidence, like “the pink of five tulips/ at five p.m.” Gradually we\nprogress through the New York City day to the dust inside the tulip, to the\nshape of the tulip, the container the tulip is in (a glass), and the container\nthe glass is in (this day).\n\n“February” is not a tranquil Romantic recollection; it is active observation\nthat creates the effect of recollection. Schuyler exchanges a syntax of memory\nand judgment for a syntax of simultaneity. He uncouples his sentences so that\nthe electric spark must jump from noun to noun, and from event to event, no\nmatter how disparate or seemingly unrelated. The gaps between his lines give\nus the experience of the passage of time, a verbal time-lapse photography,\nkind of. Schuyler is a watcher. If you look out the window long enough you can\nactually “see” time pass as the light and colors of the world shift. John\nAshbery wrote “Everything has a schedule, if you can find out what it is,” and\none might say that in this poem, “February,” Schuyler does the work to\ndisclose this invisible schedule, revealing the seemingly random syntax of the\nphysical world.\n\nThis world as he presents it is both reassuring and unstable. The “day before\nMarch 1st” is not always February 28th and by not naming it—but naming what is\nnext to it—he draws attention to this hinge of seasonal, temporal change, this\n“leap.” The poem is partly about this passage, getting over the hump of\nwinter, as the truck disappears over the hump of the hill, or the speaker\n“can’t get over” his latest observation. And in this simple gesture nature,\ncommerce, and human reason are intertwined. It is this interconnectedness that\nmakes Schuyler’s poems reassuring in spite of the instability of their\nsurface. One has the sense of events and words being brought together out of\nnecessity, to conduct a vision, giving the apparent randomness of living a\nsense of coherence and even inevitability.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## 9/11\n\n \n \n The first person is an existentialist\r\n \r\n like trash in the groin of the sand dunes\r\n like a brown cardboard home beside a dam\r\n \r\n like seeing like things the same\r\n between Death Valley and the desert of Paran\r\n \r\n An earthquake a turret with arms and legs\r\n The second person is the beloved\r\n \r\n like winners taking the hit\r\n like looking down on Utah as if\r\n \r\n it was Saudi Arabia or Pakistan\r\n like war-planes out of Miramar\r\n \r\n like a split cult a jolt of coke New York\r\n like Mexico in its deep beige couplets\r\n \r\n like this, like that . . .like Call us all It\r\n Thou It. “Sky to Spirit! Call us all It!”\r\n \r\n The third person is a materialist. \n\n—Fanny Howe\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\n“9/11” by Fanny Howe, _On the Ground_.\n\nGraywolf Press, 2004.\n\nBy permission of the author.\n\n", "output": "I’m Rae Armantrout and I chose Fanny Howe’s poem, “9/11.” I chose this poem\nbecause it considers the long war we’ve been involved in well since the date\nof its title. So I’ll start by reading the poem.\n\nSo “9/11” is a psychological, philosophical and political kaleidoscope. It\nshakes up our identification and recognitions through its relentless use of\nsimile. Many poets are leery of simile now, and for good reason. Sylvia\nPlath’s dazzling use of the device spawned a generation of pallid imitators.\nFor a while, in other words, some poets thought the dogged comparison was what\npoetry consisted of and then a newer generation looked back, to the modernist\nperhaps, and started avoiding similes. Of course, Fanny’s use of simile is\nnothing like that of the middle-of-the-road post-confessionalist. She is\nalways a radical. She doubles and triples her similes here. And her similes\nlink some very dissimilar things. So likening isn’t just a device in this\npoem, it might be said to be the real subject. What happens if we see the\ndeserts of Utah as the same as the deserts of Iraq? We become they, I becomes\nyou, and finally, in the most radical move of all, we all become it. How does\nthat happen?\n\nFor one thing the poem moves between two philosophical stanchions that diverge\nsharply in the 1960s: existentialism, which was fashionable back then,\nemphasizes the responsibility of the individual; individuals give meaning to\nthings. The poem begins with the existentialist and ends with the materialist.\nI think Fanny uses materialist at least partly in the Marxist sense.\nExistentialist is for First World people who have choices and the time to\nthink about them. You become a materialist when history happens to you. I\ndon’t think Fanny is really eschewing one and supporting the other, though. I\nthink she is pulled between these positions. The poem puts in the middle. But\nmaybe I should go through it more slowly.\n\nIn the first three lines, the existentialist first person seems isolated. Here\nshe is like trash in the groin of a sand dune, and like a cardboard home\nbeside a dam. The image of the desert gets introduced almost casually. But it\nturns out to be central. The fourth, fifth, and sixth lines first equate Death\nValley with the desert of the Jewish exodus. And then locate a disaster there,\nan earthquake, a turret with arms and legs. The isolated existentialist figure\nthen flips into second person, which is associated not with a philosophy, but\nnaturally enough with the beloved. The second person sees Utah as if it were\nSaudi Arabia and imagines winners—Americans?—taking the hit. I just want to\nsay that a line about winners taking the hit is a brave thing to write in a\npoem called “9/11.” It seems to suggest that it might do the winners some good\nto know what it feels like to be hit. And post 9/11 America doesn’t like to\nhear that. So now the hit is headed elsewhere, and war planes out of Miramar\nare like a jolt of coke.\n\nIn the last three lines the poem acknowledges its own method. “Like this, like\nthat / like call us all it / thou it.” Now she seems to be addressing God as\nboth thou and it. “Sky to Spirit! Call us all it!” I love the double or triple\nmeanings of that phrase. In one sense, to be called it is to be equated with a\nthing, to be brought low. Fanny seems to be saying, “Bring us all low. Make us\nhumble.” On the other hand the lines remind me of the game of hide-and-seek,\nwhere the one who’s “it” is the center of attention and is searched for. So is\n“it” a bit of rubble? Or is “it” the beloved being sought? That’s a real\nquestion.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## Areíto por todos\n\n \n \n Me sacaron como apache de la llanura y del viento\r\n me arrojaron como inca de la barca del silencio\r\n pero vengo de la sombra\r\n del pasado y del futuro\r\n me sacaron como indio\r\n pero vuelvo como negro.\r\n \r\n Me sacaron como negro del tambor de la esperanza\r\n me negaron el trapiche para moler mis adentros\r\n me negaron en yoruba\r\n en bantú carabalí\r\n pero vuelvo en la manigua\r\n cimarrón en blanco y negro.\r\n \r\n Me sacaron por judío, por latino, por moreno\r\n me sacaron por hispano, por guloya y por negrero\r\n me sacaron de las nubes donde desnudé la lluvia\r\n me sacaron de los montes donde desnudé la tierra\r\n pero vuelvo como indio, pero vuelvo como negro.\r\n \r\n Per vuelvo en español, en yoruba y en taíno\r\n regresando por los montes estrenando un rostro nuevo\r\n vengo con el mascarón de los que no tienen patria\r\n me sacaron, me sacaron, pero vuelvo, pero vuelvo.\n\n—César Sánchez Beras\n\n## Ritual Song for Us All\n\n \n \n They tossed me away as Apache from the plains and the wind\r\n they tossed me out as Inca from the bark of silence\r\n but I come back from the shadow\r\n of past and future\r\n they tossed me aside as Indian\r\n but I return as Black.\r\n \r\n They tossed me away as Black from the drumbeat of hope\r\n they denied me the sugar mill used to grind my insides\r\n they denied me in Yoruba\r\n in Bantú in Carabalí\r\n but I return to the scrubland\r\n as runaway slave in white and black.\r\n \r\n They tossed me away as Jew, as Latin, as Moor\r\n they tossed me away as Hispanic, as Gullah, as slaver\r\n they tossed me out of the clouds where I denuded the rain\r\n they tossed me out of the hills where I denuded the earth\r\n but I return as Indian, I return as Black.\r\n \r\n But I return in Spanish, in Yoruba and in Taíno\r\n trekking back across the wild trying on a new face\r\n I come wearing the mask of those who have no country\r\n they tossed me away, tossed me away, but I return, I return.\n\n—César Sánchez Beras, _Areíto por todos_ (Eng. trans. by Rhina P. Espaillat)\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\n“Areíto por todos” by César Sánchez Beras, _Lawrence City and Other Poems /\nCiudad de Lawrence y otros poemas._\n\nWellington House Publishing Co., Lowell, 2007.\n\nBy permission of the author.\n\nEnglish translation by Rhina P. Espaillat.\n\n", "output": "“Ritual Song for Us All” is my English translation of a poem in Spanish,\ntitled “Areíto por todos” by César Sánchez Beras, a poet who was born in the\nDominican Republic and, like me, has lived in the United States for many\nyears.\n\nI've chosen this particular poem to read for the “Poetry of America” Project\nbecause it deals with Immigration and Migration from an unusual point of view,\nwith a passion and urgency that befits the importance of the issue, but with a\nbreadth that humanizes and universalizes the issue, rather than narrowing it\ndown to the interests of any one group.\n\nThe speaker of the poem conveys, in his first-person narrative, the situation\nof the many displaced human beings who, over the centuries and into the\npresent, have been forced by countless circumstances to leave their\nbirthplaces and roots, and begin life over somewhere else.\n\nThe word “areíto” comes from the Taíno language spoken by the native people of\nthe Caribbean islands. It means “group ritual” or “tribal invocation,̶ and\nsuggests cultural unity, the sense of belonging that is fundamental to the\ntraditional notion of identity. But in this poem, Sánchez Beras refers not\nonly to the Tainos who presumably formed part of his own ancestry and mine,\nbut also to the Apaches, the Incas, the various African people who were\nbrought to the Americas as slaves—Yorubas, Bantus, Carabalis—and then,\nwidening the circle to include still others who have wandered the earth and\nsettled far from home, he goes on to the Jews, the Gullahs, and by implication\n“Others” from every culture.\n\nSpeaking for that multitude he invokes, the speaker lists his dispossessions,\nhis many losses: he has been denied the landscapes he once inhabited, the\nfuture, his hopes, the fruits of his labor, his liberty. But, he says, each\ntime he is dispossessed, he returns, even if in a different guise: sometimes\nas the next wave of Others, sometimes, ironically, as a member of the very\ngroup that once tossed him out. Even the conqueror and the slaver turn up in\nthe speaker's list of guises, and rightly so, because they, too, are part of\nour history, and even—for some of us—our ancestry, our present families, our\nchildren, and therefore our unborn descendants. Those of us who intermarry\nknow perfectly well that “identity” is not a stable construct but an ongoing\nprocess, and that the blood of those who were once “enemies”; is now mingled\nforever with our own. That knowledge, and its acceptance as a reality of our\nnational life, is one of the glories of America.\n\nThe poem would be a recital of fruitless travels and endless alienation if it\nwere not for the phrases—repeated nine times—“pero vengo” and “pero vuelvo,”\nmeaning \"I come, I return.\" That stubborn phrase, meant to convey the natural\ntenacity of every living thing, transforms the poem into a challenge, a\ntriumphal promise that man makes to himself: “Whoever I may be, however I may\nbe perceived and treated over time, however often I may be tossed from place\nto place, I return in some form or other, because I am indomitable.”\n\nThat implied statement resonates with me, as the daughter of political exiles,\nbut it applies equally to those “tossed out” of their place in the world for\nany reason at all, be it political, religious, economic, or military. And the\npoem does more than that: it suggests that the human race is—as the science of\ngenetics now affirms—one race, one huge family, linked inexorably,\ninterdependent, whose members are destined to return from every exile, changed\nbut persistent, and continue to braid together, unbraid, and braid again, as\nlong as we exist.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## A Step Away From Them\n\n \n \n It’s my lunch hour, so I go \r\n for a walk among the hum-colored \r\n cabs. First, down the sidewalk \r\n where laborers feed their dirty \r\n glistening torsos sandwiches \r\n and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets \r\n on. They protect them from falling \r\n bricks, I guess. Then onto the \r\n avenue where skirts are flipping \r\n above heels and blow up over \r\n grates. The sun is hot, but the \r\n cabs stir up the air. I look \r\n at bargains in wristwatches. There \r\n are cats playing in sawdust. \r\n On \r\n to Times Square, where the sign \r\n blows smoke over my head, and higher \r\n the waterfall pours lightly. A \r\n Negro stands in a doorway with a \r\n toothpick, languorously agitating. \r\n A blonde chorus girl clicks: he \r\n smiles and rubs his chin. Everything \r\n suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of \r\n a Thursday. \r\n Neon in daylight is a \r\n great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would \r\n write, as are light bulbs in daylight. \r\n I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET’S \r\n CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of \r\n Federico Fellini, _è bell’ attrice_. \r\n And chocolate malted. A lady in \r\n foxes on such a day puts her poodle \r\n in a cab. \r\n There are several Puerto \r\n Ricans on the avenue today, which \r\n makes it beautiful and warm. First \r\n Bunny died, then John Latouche, \r\n then Jackson Pollock. But is the \r\n earth as full as life was full, of them? \r\n And one has eaten and one walks, \r\n past the magazines with nudes \r\n and the posters for BULLFIGHT and \r\n the Manhattan Storage Warehouse, \r\n which they’ll soon tear down. I \r\n used to think they had the Armory \r\n Show there. \r\n A glass of papaya juice \r\n and back to work. My heart is in my \r\n pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.\r\n \n\n—Frank O’Hara\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\n\"A Step Away from Them\" \nFrom LUNCH POEMS, Copyright © 1964 by Frank O'Hara published by City Lights\nBooks. Permission by Maureen Granville-Smith.\n\n", "output": "Hi, my name is Ron Padgett. I’m an American poet, and I’ve been invited by the\nLibrary of Congress to read a poem that somehow deals with the idea of the\n“American identity.” I chose a poem by the poet Frank O’Hara, an American who\nwas born in 1926 and died in 1966, called “A Step Away from Them.” I chose\nthis poem not because Frank O’Hara in it talks about the American identity or\ndiscusses this concept, but because the poem itself is, I think, an embodiment\nof a particular kind of American identity; that is to say, the identity of\nFrank O’Hara, who was extremely American. And it’s just such a perfect example\nof a poem that, I think, well, I was going to say couldn’t be written anywhere\nelse, but that’s an assumption I can’t make. I’ll say, though, that it\n_wasn’t_ written anywhere else up until the time Frank O’Hara wrote it.\n\nFrank O’Hara wrote this poem in 1956 at a time when, well, a lot of people\nknew who Jackson Pollock was, but not a lot of people knew who Bunny was, or\nJohn Latouche, or Edwin Denby, or even in America, Pierre Reverdy. But Frank\nO’Hara knew who they were, and he put them in this poem because they were\neither friends or someone he felt close to in some way. And it’s that\ncloseness that I want to talk about here. That this poem, to me, sounds almost\nlike a letter to a friend: it has a personal tone, it’s conversational, it’s\nvery open and unguarded. So it’s kind of vulnerable in a way that European\npoetry, for example, at the time wasn’t, and, in fact, still isn’t often. So\nit’s particularly American in its willingness to be open to people and places\nand of course he’s totally open to his lunch hour [laughs]. That is to say, he\nhas a lot of experiences during this lunch hour, and he puts them all in to\nlet you know what they are. So, other things that make this poem “American” in\nparticular are, well, first of all, the idea of the “lunch hour,” and then the\nproduct such as Coca-Cola, and a location such as Times Square, and then the\nsort of melting pot that America is supposed to be, and sometimes even is. In\nthis poem there’s several Puerto Ricans, there’s a black guy, there’s a blonde\ngirl, there are construction workers with no shirts on, there’s a woman\nwearing foxes. So there’s really a tremendous mix of people, which, again, in\na lot of other countries at that time you didn’t find such an obvious\ninternational, multi-cultural setting.\n\nOther things about this poem that make it particularly American are these: for\ninstance, he doesn’t use any rhyme in this poem; he doesn’t use any set,\nmetrical, or rhythmical patterns; he doesn’t use any metaphors; he doesn’t use\nany so-called “poetic” language; he doesn’t try to compress the issue down to\nthis very fine, dense, cryptic, sort of “diamond-like” that people often\ndescribe poetry as having. And on the other hand, it goes the other way: it’s\nquite open and expansive, and a little bit influenced, I guess, by Walt\nWhitman. But I think also, maybe, it was influenced by the French poet\nGuillaume Apollinaire, who wrote a poem called “Zone,” which is kind of an\naccount of Apollinaire’s walking across Paris. I think that might have been an\ninfluence on this poem.\n\nBut also it has some nice bits of humor in it that are particularly American,\nand are kind of subtle. For instance, when he talks about the\n\n> . . . laborers feed their dirty \n> glistening torsos sandwiches \n> and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets \n> on . . .\n\nThe word “on” there—I don’t know why it strikes me as funny, but it is, and\nalso you kind of for a moment think the yellow helmets are on the Coca-Cola or\nthe sandwiches—of course they aren’t, but . . . And then later, there’s\nanother sort of delayed bit of information where he stops for a cheeseburger\nat—well, talk about an American thing, wow—:\n\n> I stopped for a cheeseburger at JULIET’S \n> CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of \n> Federico Fellini, _è bell’ attrice._ \n> And chocolate malted . . .\n\nSo he delays putting the chocolate malted in. I don’t think Frank did that on\npurpose, I think it’s just the way he thought, that’s the way a lot of people\nthought, and think— _oh yeah, let me add this!_ And so he does, instead of\nputting it up with the cheeseburger, and somehow the delay between the\ncheeseburger and then you get this café, and you get Giulietta Masina the\nactress, and Federico Fellini the director, and _then_ the chocolate malted\ncomes back. It’s also in a funny spot in which a lady in foxes on such a day\nputs her poodle in a cab. It’s funny [because] she’s taking such good care of\nher poodle but she hasn’t taken such good care of the dead foxes that she’s\nwearing. That juxtaposition, I think, is kind of funny.\n\nLet’s see, what else can I say about this? Maybe I should explain that Edwin\nDenby was a friend of Frank O’Hara’s and was a wonderful writer. He wrote\nabout dance, especially, but also was a wonderful poet. And Bunny, another\nperson in the poem, one of the people who died, was a woman who was a friend\nand a writer of Frank O’Hara’s named V.R. Lang, but known as Bunny Lang, and\nthen there’s a reference to John Latouche, who was a wonderful writer of songs\nand of Broadway plays and of operas. And then Jackson Pollock, the famous\npainter, but they’re all three grouped here because they all three died in\nvery quick succession, and they were all young. So it was quite a blow to\nO’Hara.\n\nAnd, let’s see, what else can I say? Oh, what’s interesting at the end of the\npoem—[in] all of this poem—I’m perfectly happy to believe that this really\nhappened, that Frank didn’t make up anything. Except at the very end of the\npoem, the last parts say: “. . . My heart is in my pocket, it is Poems by\nPierre Reverdy.” And Pierre Reverdy was a French poet who actually died four\nyears after this poem was written, but was hardly known at all in the United\nStates. But Frank O’Hara knew his poems and he refers to what seems to be a\nbook by Pierre Reverdy, but Pierre Reverdy never published a book called\n“Poems.” So Frank did a little inventing right there, but otherwise I think it\nall sounds like a thing that really happened.\n\nAnyway, the American part is also, as I said, it’s a very full poem for a\nlunch hour—a lot seems to happen. Partly because it’s happening in New York\nCity, a big city with a lot of activity, and a lot of quick coming and going,\nand of all the different kinds of things. So it’s a bombardment of the senses,\nwhich I associate with New York City, certainly very much, and with the United\nStates, certainly. Not the whole United States, of course. No place in America\nis as busy as New York. But it makes it a particularly American poem for me. \n \nLet’s see. Actually, one thing I didn’t say is I love this poem and I always\nhave. When I first read it, along with some others in a similar vein by him,\nit had a big effect on me as a writer. At the time, I was kind of a young poet\nand very intense and serious and a little bit tight, actually, in the writing.\nWhile I tried to improvise and be far out, I really wasn’t, even that felt\nforced and tense. Reading poems like this by Frank let me realize I could\nrelax. I could just sit back and relax and say anything I wanted. And\nsomething nice might happen as a result, so I’ve always loved these\npoems—these kind of lunch poems of Frank’s. I like other poems by him as well,\na lot of them. In fact, trying to pick just one to read by him was kind of\ndifficult. But this one is a sure winner for me. I’ve always loved it.\n\nSo, I guess, let’s see, should I say anything else? Maybe I’ve said enough.\nAnyway, I hope you like this poem, too, and that you’ve read or will read a\nlot more poems by Frank O’Hara, because he is an American treasure, and if\nhe’s any example of what it’s like to be an American, I’m happy to be one\nmyself.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## The March into Virginia\n\n \n \n Did all the lets and bars appear\r\n To every just or larger end,\r\n Whence should come the trust and cheer?\r\n Youth must its ignorant impulse lend--\r\n Age finds place in the rear.\r\n All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys,\r\n The champions and enthusiasts of the state:\r\n Turbid ardors and vain joys\r\n Not barrenly abate--\r\n Stimulants to the power mature,\r\n Preparatives of fate.\r\n \r\n Who here forecasteth the event?\r\n What heart but spurns at precedent\r\n And warnings of the wise,\r\n Contemned foreclosures of surprise?\r\n The banners play, the bugles call,\r\n The air is blue and prodigal.\r\n No berrying party, pleasure-wooed,\r\n No picnic party in the May\r\n Ever went less loth than they\r\n Into that leafy neighborhood.\r\n In Bacchic glee they file toward fate,\r\n Moloch uninitiate;\r\n Expectancy, and glad surmise\r\n Of battle's unknown mysteries.\r\n \r\n All they feel is this: 'tis glory,\r\n A rapture sharp, though transitory,\r\n Yet lasting in belaureled story.\r\n So they gayly go to fight,\r\n Chatting left and laughing right.\r\n \r\n But some who this blithe mood present,\r\n As on in lightsome files they fare,\r\n Shall die experienced ere three days are spent--\r\n Perish, enlightened by the vollied glare;\r\n Or shame survive, and, like to adamant,\r\n The throe of Second Manassas share.\n\n—Herman Melville\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\nThis poem is in the public domain.\n\n", "output": "I am Rosanna Warren. I am reading the poem, “The March into Virginia Ending in\nthe First Manassas” by Herman Melville.\n\nThis poem appeared in Melville’s collection of poetry _Battle Pieces and\nAspects of the War,_ which he published in August 1866 at the end of the Civil\nWar. It’s a poem much concerned with identity: North or South? Youth or age?\nWhat is it to be an American? What is it to be living? What is it to be dead?\nWhat is it to be ignorant? What is it to be (as the poem says) “enlightened?”\nThe Battle of Bull Run, also called First Manassas, was fought on July 20th\nand 21 in 1861—one of the first major battles of the war—and in it the Union\narmy of the North commanded by General McDowell was 35,000 men strong and\nmarched out from Washington to meet the Confederates on the field at Manassas\nJunction, Virginia, just 20 miles away from Washington, D.C. The Union forces\nwere so convinced of their superiority that they treated it like a picnic, or\nas Melville says, a “berrying party”— not b-u-r-y-i-n-g, which is the pun\nhidden there, but “berrying”—as in collecting b-e-r-r-i-e-s: strawberries,\nraspberries, blackberries. And so convinced was the North of its victory that\ncivilians went out from Washington in their carriages and on horseback with\npicnic baskets and bottles of wine as if it were a sporting event they were\ngoing to witness and cheer on. What happened was a furious, bloody battle and\na humiliating defeat for the North. There was revealed the military genius of\nthe Southern commander who became known as Stonewall Jackson because in this\nbattle he stood, as they said, like a stone wall and repulsed the Northern\ntroops. So even though the Confederate army of 31,000 there under General\nBeauregard was smaller than the Union, they outfought them and outwitted them.\nThe best description of the humiliation of the Northern army is by Walt\nWhitman, who wasn’t present at the battle, but was in Washington at the time\nand described the return of the defeated soldiers in his book, _Specimen\nDays._\n\nHere’s Whitman:\n\n> The defeated troops commenced pouring into Washington over the Long Bridge\n> at daylight on Monday, 22d—day drizzling all through with rain. The Saturday\n> and Sunday of the battle (20th, 21st,) had been parch’d and hot to an\n> extreme—the dust, the grime and smoke, in layers, sweated in, follow’d by\n> other layers again sweated in, absorb’d by those excited souls—their clothes\n> all saturated with the clay-powder filling the air—stirr’d up everywhere on\n> the dry roads and trodden fields by the regiments, swarming wagons,\n> artillery, &c.—all the men with this coating of murk and sweat and rain, now\n> recoiling back, pouring over the Long Bridge—a horrible march of twenty\n> miles, returning to Washington baffled, humiliated, panic-struck. Where are\n> the vaunts, and the proud boasts with which you went forth? Where are your\n> banners, and your bands of music, and your ropes to bring back your\n> prisoners? Well, there isn’t a band playing—and there isn’t a flag but\n> clings ashamed and lank to its staff.\n\nMelville’s focus in his poem is on the boys, on the youth of the soldiers; as\nhe says, “All wars are boyish and are fought by boys.” And, master poet that\nhe is, he understands that meaning is carried by sound patterning in poetry.\nHe gives us a very powerful patterning with the sound of “b”; we’ve already\nhad the cue that “b” is associated with the boys—“all wars are boyish”—so we\nget these other “b” words like the sexual energy of the boys in the phrase\n“turbid ardors,” “Not barrenly abate,” with “banners,” “bugles,” “berrying\nparty,” the air is “blue.” And the “b”s reach their height, their intensity,\nin the god Bacchus, in “Bacchic glee they file toward fate.” Bacchus, the god\nof wine, the god of freedom, the god of wild celebration. This is the boys’\nignorance, this “Bacchic glee,” they think it will be a wild party, this\nbattle. In the very next line they are delivered to a very different god,\nMoloch. Moloch, the god, the Ammonite god of the ancient Near East, worshipped\nby the Canaanites and the Phoenicians through child sacrifice. This poem shows\nus that Melville regarded the Civil War as, among other things, child\nsacrifice. And part of the, I’d say, moral wisdom of this poem and its drama\nof identity and of Melville’s whole book _Battle Pieces and Aspects of the\nWar_ is that he didn’t finally take sides as so many of the other contemporary\npoems did at the time, either pro-North or pro-South. Melville was a\nNortherner. He hated slavery. There was no question about his allegiance in\nthis war, but his contemplation of the larger tragedy of the war went far\nbeyond partisanship. He saw it as a dreadful, fratricidal killing of the\nchildren and killing of certain democratic possibilities in order to make\npossible other democratic possibilities, which he held sacred, as did Lincoln.\n\nOther points to make about this poem: the somewhat irregular pattern of the\nmetrics; it veers between four-beat lines, three-beat lines, sometimes goes\nout to authoritative five-beat line as in “all wars are boyish, and are fought\nby boys.” And the pattern of light and dark, so that, in the early part of the\npoem, the boys are marching out to war in lightsome files, that means they’re\nin a kind of radiant light of hope and youthful ignorance, but what they\nexperience, ironically, some of them by dying, is enlightenment as Melville\nsays, “Perish, enlightened by the vollied glare;” that is the blaze of the\nrifle fire and the canon shot. “What good is it to be enlightened if you are\ndead?” the poem seems to ask us.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## Owl\n\n \n \n the sign for making the most of what you have\r\n on the human hand is a thumb at full right angle to the palm\r\n for the owl it’s two talons forward two back a flexible foot\r\n that crushes the prey and lifts it to the beak to the eyes\r\n which are legally blind this is why the owl\r\n \r\n hunts in the dark in the dusk when nothing is clearly seen\r\n and why the owl’s eyes are fixed facing ahead to better focus\r\n so its whole face swivels in each direction like the turret on a tank\r\n the round plates of feathers surrounding the eyes collect the least sound\r\n when it turns the owl is computing by geometry the exact\r\n \r\n location of the mouse or snake or songbird\r\n that moves imperceptibly in its nest toward which the owl\r\n sets out from the hole in the tree the burrow the eave of the barn\r\n and crosses the field in utter silence wing-feathers overlapped\r\n to make no sound poor mouse poor rabbit\r\n \r\n last night\r\n from the porch obbligato to the brook and the snuffling deer\r\n intent on the gnarled worm-bitten apples we leave on the tree\r\n I heard what must have been a Barred Owl or a Barn Owl\r\n or a Lesser Horned Owl close by not deep in the woods\r\n what I heard was less a call than a cry\r\n \r\n a fragment repeating repeating a kind of shudder\r\n which may be why the country people I come from\r\n thought an owl was prescient ill-omen meant to unspool\r\n the threads they’d gathered and wound I was a grown woman\r\n when my father took the key from under the eave\r\n \r\n and unlocked the door to the darkened house he had grown up in\r\n and stepped across the threshold and said as he entered the empty room\r\n hello Miss Sally as though his stepmother dead for weeks\r\n were still in her usual chair\r\n \r\n in the Medicine Wheel\r\n the emblem for wisdom is the same for gratitude at dusk at dark\r\n the farsighted owl strikes in utter silence when we hear it\r\n from the tree or the barn what it announces\r\n is already finished\n\n—Ellen Bryant Voigt\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\n“Owl”, from _Headwaters: Poems_ , by Ellen Bryant Voigt.\n\nCopyright © 2013 by Ellen Bryant Voigt.\n\nUsed by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.\n\n", "output": "My name is Sally Keith and I am a poet living in Washington, DC. Thinking\nabout it today, it’s February 2018, I would call a great American poem one\nable to radically describe one kind of time, or experience, inside of another;\nsuch a poem would be magnificent in innovation but equally delicate, able to\nattend to and hear what might otherwise be overlooked. The poem I have chosen\nto read is Ellen Bryant Voigt’s “Owl.” Reminding me at once of Whitman in its\nexpansiveness and Dickinson in it sly profundity (if not also Marianne Moore\nfor yoking the habits of animal and man) the depth of Voigt’s poem is shown\nmost truly by its simultaneously fastidious and wild construction.\n\n“Owl” opens recalling an idiomatic phrase (“The sign for making the most of\nwhat you have”), one perhaps deeply entrenched in American ideals, a\nspringboard for the description of the owl, and then its kill, that will\neventually open out to the story of a human life. Ellen Voigt is a rural poet;\nhaving grown up in Virginia and then spending most of her adulthood in\nVermont, she always has been. _Headwaters_ , the larger collection, is Voigt’s\nmost recent book, one in which she innovates, letting go of punctuation in\nfavor of carefully arranging “chunks of syntax,” as she has called them, over\nand across lines, a method of composing that necessitates a fine-tuned\nawareness of the grand sweep of the sentence, on the one hand, and the\nrhythmic stress of individual words and phrases on the other.\n\nWithout an exhaustive dismantling of syllable, line, and sentence, it’s easy\nto see (and hear) dominant repetitive structures. Most notably, at first, are\nthe extensions in lines like “to the beak to the eyes,” and “in the dark in\nthe dusk,” which intrigue me in their combined dedication to the description\nand song. It seems this kind of repetition wouldn’t quite work if the sound\ndidn’t dig back, making us recall an actual human voice. As the poem goes on\nand we are increasingly comfortable with its movement, the kind of repetition\nvaries, and new parts of the poem feel as though they clap together outside of\nthe sequence of the running sentence. We hear the “turret” and the “tank,”\nwhich makes way for, at the beginning of the fifth stanza, the sound of the\nowl as “less a call then a cry” (a phrase we, somewhat oddly, come to hear as\nrepetition). The owl’s supposed “cry” leads, via its own modification, to the\npoem’s only literal and sequential repetition: the cry like “a fragment\nrepeating repeating.” I’m struck by this reference back to the poem (as\nwriting), and, more importantly, to the aspect of human behavior from which\nthe poem began.\n\nThe repeating fragment is like a shudder from the “country people” who\n“Thought an owl was prescient ill-omen meant to unspool threads they’d\ngathered and wound.” It is at this moment, in the poem’s tightest pivot,\nthrough a sonic repetition that is the most distant in its repetitive\nproperties (“they’d gathered and _wound_ I was a _grown_ woman”) that a brief\npersonal narrative emerges. Here, the speaker’s memory of her father\nrevisiting his childhood home, his almost thoughtlessly calling to Miss Sally,\nhis stepmother, long gone, allows the segue into the final consideration of\nthe owl’s mysterious cry. We are ushered into silence, no sound. We feel the\npower of this invitation not because of the intricate weave of human and owl\ndescription, but because we have heard what it sounds like for sonic markers\nin a longer chain of language to call forth and prioritize one sound while the\nother, helplessly, falls away.\n\nI love the way “Owl” (along with all the poems in _Headwaters_ ) is likely to\nget described as a kind of writerly feat, which it is, but, then, how wrong we\nwould be in settling there. It is the complexity of the innovation in\ncombination with the tender humanity which makes me feel the poem as American.\nThe poem’s belief (if I can say such a thing), felt both in its construction\nand what it actually says, is not that it has unearthed rare fact, or\nconfessed a dark story, but somehow, and more deeply, that out of pattern and\nrigor, individuality will emerge, or has, or, better put: our originality is\ninherent.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## won’t you celebrate with me\n\n \n \n won't you celebrate with me\r\n what i have shaped into\r\n a kind of life? i had no model.\r\n born in babylon\r\n both nonwhite and woman\r\n what did i see to be except myself?\r\n i made it up\r\n here on this bridge between\r\n starshine and clay,\r\n my one hand holding tight\r\n my other hand; come celebrate\r\n with me that everyday\r\n something has tried to kill me \r\n and has failed.\n\n—Lucille Clifton\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\nLucille Clifton, “won’t you celebrate with me” from _The Book of Light_.\nCopyright © 1993 by Lucille Clifton.\n\nUsed with the permission of the The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of\nCopper Canyon Press, [www.coppercanyonpress.org _External\nlinks_](http://www.coppercanyonpress.org/).\n\n", "output": "My name is Sharon Olds and I’m going to read Lucille Clifton’s poem “won’t you\ncelebrate with me?”\n\nLucille Clifton: “Won’t you celebrate with me?” Yes we will, Lucille. I love\nthis poem. I love that the poem is an invitation and it begins almost with a\nkind of negative: “Won’t you celebrate with me? Will you celebrate with me?” I\nlove, also, the phrase: “A kind of life.” So many of us feel that we don’t\nhave a normal life but something approximating it—a _kind_ of life. I love the\nwords “shaped” and “model”, sort of Lucille as God in Genesis, creating\nherself, the way we must try to make ourselves, make our characters better if\nwe can. I love the word “Babylon”, also, the biblical tones of that and the\nsense of the diaspora of exile. And I love the shiny word “starshine” and the\ngloomy word “clay” and the image of holding one’s own hand, the star-shine\nhand clasping the clay hand for solace and courage. And the way we are made of\nthe earth and the stars—we actually, physically are made of the matter of the\nstars, it turns out.\n\nAnd oh, that ending, that “something”: “something has tried to kill me.” And\nthe word “try”, the way the speaker of the poem _tried_ to shape a life,\n“something has tried to kill me,” “try” as a dangerous word here. And the word\n“fail” as a triumphant word: brief, poignant, tough, musical, swift with\ntruth. Miss Lucille, how we do miss you.\n\n"} +{"instruction": "## The Orange Bears\n\n \n \n The Orange bears with soft friendly eyes\r\n Who played with me when I was ten,\r\n Christ, before I'd left home they'd had\r\n Their paws smashed in the rolls, their backs\r\n Seared by hot slag, their soft trusting\r\n Bellies kicked in, their tongues ripped\r\n Out, and I went down through the woods\r\n To the smelly crick with Whitman\r\n In the Haldeman-Julius edition,\r\n And I just sat there worrying my thumbnail\r\n Into the cover—What did he know about\r\n Orange bears with their coats all stunk up with soft coal\r\n And the National Guard coming over\r\n From Wheeling to stand in front of the millgates\r\n With drawn bayonets jeering at the strikers?\r\n \r\n I remember you could put daisies\r\n On the windowsill at night and in\r\n The morning they'd be so covered with soot\r\n You couldn't tell what they were anymore.\r\n \r\n A hell of a fat chance my orange bears had!\n\n—Kenneth Patchen\n\n### __Rights & Access\n\n“The Orange Bears” Kenneth Patchen from _Collected Poems of Kenneth Patchen_.\n\nNew Directions, 1949.\n\nReprinted by permission of New Directions.\n\n", "output": "This is Tony Hoagland. I’m going to read a poem by Kenneth Patchen, an\nAmerican poet. The poem is called “The Orange Bears.”\n\nI love this poem by Kenneth Patchen, and let me tell you a little bit about\nhim as an American poet. He was born in 1911. He died in 1972. He had a\nbeautiful early career in which he was published by Random House and given a\nGuggenheim grant. And he belongs to a tradition I’d call the sort of buried\nvisionary tradition in American poetry. He was a great pacifist; in some ways\nhe was a socialist, in some ways he was affected by William Blake; and he was\na romantic visionary. This is kind of a repressed tradition in American\npoetry, especially in 20th century American poetry. It seems we are\nembarrassed by our visionaries. We are also embarrassed by our political\npoets. The entire socialist tradition of the ‘20s and ‘30s has been repressed\nand sort of removed from the anthologies, which is a sort of canonical\nexcision which has been documented and described by the scholar Cary Nelson in\nhis anthology of American poetry.\n\nSo Kenneth Patchen was sort of part of that tradition. He was born in\nWheeling—he was born in Youngstown, Ohio, close to Wheeling, West Virginia.\nAnd the poem “The Orange Bears” is obviously set in a coal-mining area where\nthere is coal soot covering everything. The poem is obviously in the voice of\nchild, and it’s a poem of great passion, and great grief, and also great\nanger. To me, this seems like one kind of political poem, really worthwhile\nkind of political poem. The kind of poem that is in defense of the human, and\ndefense of childhood, and defense of the innocent part of us that is\nchildlike, and given to wonder, and has friends like the orange bears.\n\nOne of the functions of the poet is to explain the world for the rest of us,\nfor citizens, and to sort of sketch out a map of the world’s hierarchies and\ncausalities and consequences. And I feel that Kenneth Patchen does this in\nthis poem quite beautifully because he’s situating so many different kinds of\nsocial and imaginative and anti-imaginative forces in the world that he’s\ndescribing. You know the National Guardsmen coming over to strike break, to\nprevent the union members from striking with their drawn bayonets. You have\nthe coal soot and the coal dust that settles on everything, which is the\nconsequence of industry. And you have the orange bears which are these\nimaginative allies, part of childhood. You have the wounded child who’s angry\nat having his innocence taken away, and you have the odd ally, apparently, of\nWalt Whitman in the Haldeman-Julius edition which the speaker of the poem\ntakes down to the creek to read. And then he says, What did he know about\norange bears and the National Guard coming over from Wheeling, West Virginia\nwith drawn bayonets? So, it’s wonderful the way that the speaker is situated\namong all kinds of forces, and his meticulous mapping of those forces\njustifies his grief, his anger. And in that sense, I feel like Kenneth\nPatchen’s poem redeems and reminds us of that part of us that has been\nviolated. I don’t mean that in any kind of artsy, therapeutic way. He actually\nis describing the way that the soul is tarnished and innocence is evicted.\nThis seems to me to be a beautiful social and political act performed through\npoetry, which is the act that really lies at the heart of pacifism and our\nideas of justice and reminds us of our right to feel outrage, and reminds us\nof the defense of the soul or the violation of the soul that happens all the\ntime.\n\nIn that sense I just want to remind you of two other American poets. One is\nWallace Stevens, who believed in a very different way that he practiced that\nthe poem is an act of violence designed to push out, to push back at the\nforces of violence and invasion and nihilism that surround us—to defend the\nspace of the self and the space of the soul. The other is—the other poet I\nwant to bring up is Walt Whitman, who in Kenneth Patchen’s poem is in some\nways maligned because all the promises that Whitman makes about the freedom of\nthe self and the immortality of the soul and the great beauty of the world\nturn out to have been empty promises as far as the speaker of this poem goes.\nSo I love that in his striking back, he strikes back at Whitman also and says:\n“What did he know about / orange bears with their coats all stunk up with soft\ncoal / And the National Guard coming over / . . . with drawn bayonets?” I love\nit that this is an equal opportunity outrage on the part of the speaker of the\npoem. But the other poem, the other—there are a few lines by Whitman which I’d\nlike to remind you of in which Whitman says, in the middle of “Leaves of\nGrass,” “I do not say these things for a dollar or to fill up the time while I\nwait for a boat, / (It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the\ntongue of you.”\n\n_I do not say these things for a dollar or to fill up the time while I wait\nfor a boat_ —and I just want to say here that we have to remember the urgent\nimportance that certain things be said, and be said again and again, not to\nwaste the time of our readers, and not to waste the mission of poetry and what\nit can do.\n\n"}