POETS YOU SHOULD KNOW
1. What does the title mean?
2. What does the poem mean? (Content)
Think about the meaning of the poem, not just the obvious meaning of each word
but what they mean beyond the literal. Do these words suggest something else?
• Who is the subject of the poem?
• What are they talking about?
• Why do you think the author wrote the poem?
• When is the poem happening?
• Where is the poem happening?
• What is the poet’s attitude?
• What is the message of the poem?
3. Poetic devices: Tools of the poet (Form)
Identify different poetic devices and how they convey the poem’s message.
• Simile – comparison using like or as
• Metaphor – a direct comparison
• Personification – giving human qualities to nonhuman things
• Tone – what emotion does the speaker use as he talks
• Point of view – who is the telling the poem
• Imagery – creating pictures with words
• Alliteration – repeating the same letter
• Line/Stanza – how does this exemplify the message or the meaning?
4. If you were to teach the poem, what are two questions you could ask about the poem?
ALEX DIMITROV
Like a Letter, I'm Never Coming Back
No signs outside my window,
nothing to read into autumn.
The wind with suchvelocity,
it reminds me we’ve said too many things.
Most animals, most animals prefersilence.
The distances at which we know each other
tell us little of how the dead know theearth.
Do you think restraint is a feeling you can aim with
when it’s bloodless at thecenter?
Do you think you havetime?
I’m not sure what’s more importantanymore,
our American past or future. And today is athread
I’ve had in my mouth fortoo long.
Its color has dissolved on mytongue.
It no longer remembers the fabric it camefrom,
it no longer wants to remember atall.
CATE MARVIN
Ocean is a Word in This Poem
One centimeter on the map represents one kilometer on the ground.
River I can cover with a finger, but it's not the water I resent. Ocean—
even the word thinks itself huge, and only because of what it meant.
I remember its lip on a road that ran along the coast of Portsmouth.
Waves tested a concrete brim where people stood to see how far
the water went. Sky was huge, but I didn't mind why. The sea
was too choppy and gray, a soup thick with salt and distance. Look,
sails are white as wedding dresses, but their cut is much cleaner.
No, I never planned to have a honeymoon by water, knew it'd tempt
me to leave your company, drop in. Ocean may allow boats to ride
its surface, but its word cannot anchor the white slip of this paper.
It cannot swallow the poem. Turbulence is on the wall. The map—
I would tear it, forget how I learned land's edge exists. I would sink
into the depth of past tense, more treacherous than the murk into
which our vessel went. Now when I pull down the map, eat its image
and paper, I'll swallow what wedding meant. Salt crusts my lips.
Gabrille Calvocoressi
SAVE ME JOE LOUIS
When I was small no one stopped the fights.
A man could beat you till you died,
the crowd leaning in, you on your knees,
maybe somewhere someone says,No,
but it's like spoons dropping in kitchens:
enough to make someone look up,
not enough to get them moving.
The ref's just glad it isn't him
trying to stand, shading his face
like he's coming out of the movies
into winter sun, shock of the world
made real again — brutal, to be sure,
but America is like that,
unrelenting, you get what you ask for
in the ring or on the kitchen floor.
Someone always wants you to give up,
shake hands, wipe the blood away and talk
of lighter things. And you do
because you've been fighting long enough
to know there's no one here to save you.
BRENDA SHAUGNESSY
ARTLESS
is my heart. A stranger
berry there never was,
tartless.
Gone sour in the sun,
in the sunroom or moonroof,
roofless.
No poetry. Plain. No
fresh, special recipe
to bless.
All I’ve ever made
with these hands
and life, less
substance, more rind.
Mostly rim and trim,
meatless
but making much smoke
in the old smokehouse,
no less.
Fatted from the day,
overripe and even
toxic at eve. Nonetheless,
in the end, if you must
know, if I must bend,
waistless,
to that excruciation.
No marvel, no harvest
left me speechless,
yet I find myself
somehow with heart,
aloneless.
With heart,
fighting fire with fire,
(stanza continued)
fightless.
That loud hub of us,
meat stub of us, beating us
senseless.
Spectacular in its way,
its way of not seeing,
congealing dayless
but in everydayness.
In that hopeful haunting
(a lesser
way of saying
in darkness) there is
silencelessness
for the pressing question.
Heart, what art you?
War, star, part? Or less:
playinga part, staying apart
from the one who loves,
loveless.
TRACY K. SMITH
Sci-Fi
There will be no edges, but curves.
Clean lines pointing only forward.
History, with its hard spine & dog-eared
Corners, will be replaced with nuance,
Just like the dinosaurs gave way
To mounds and mounds of ice.
Women will still be women, but
The distinction will be empty. Sex,
Having outlived every threat, will gratify
Only the mind, which is where it will exist.
For kicks, we'll dance for ourselves
Before mirrors studded with golden bulbs.
The oldest among us will recognize that glow—
But the word sun will have been re-assigned
To a Standard Uranium-Neutralizing device
Found in households and nursing homes.
And yes, we'll live to be much older, thanks
To popular consensus. Weightless, unhinged,
Eons from even our own moon, we'll drift
In the haze of space, which will be, once
And for all, scrutable and safe.
MARK BIBBINS
AND YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE THE ONLY ONE
Someone waits at my door. Because he is
dead he has time but I have my secrets—
this is what separates us from the dead.
See, I could order take-out or climb down
the fire escape, so it's not as though he
is keeping me from anything I need.
While this may sound like something I made up,
it is not; I have forgotten how to
lie, despite all my capable teachers.
Lies are, in this way, I think, like music
and all is the same without them as with.
The fluid sky retains regret, then bursts.
He is still there, standing in the hall, insisting
he is someone I once knew and wanted,
come laden with gifts he cannot return.
If I open the door he'll flash and fade
like heat lightning behind a bank of clouds
one summer night at the edge of the world. -
Ada Limón
THE FIRST
Down to the basics of the basics,
deep star on the horizon, full blown
vision in the mountains. These are the cave
drawings, the beginning of our precious
pieces of self worth, our arms holding
ourselves, our arms made of paper,
our paper arms holding our beating
organs inside our paper selves.
TINA CHANG
Imagine, Refugee
Dream blood, dream red, dream.
Therand then theeaand thedm.
Let the letters ride there, then subtract it.
The roof of a shelter, the grandeur
of smoke, a sun print on a rocket.
I have come to the border town.
Take away theIand put it in a shelter dream,
now fill it up with bullets, now dream
bull. Now take thebout of it which is
the engine that makes it go.
There’s a baby in a basket. There’s a burning
basket lullabye. You know the words.
The words are mixed with the soil when
the soil is lifted with a shovel.
Place the soil on top of the wooden boxes
whose bodies dreamoo’s andah’s,
of fireworks branching out in the sky
on holiday, pots and pans clanging,
children playing by dawn, a dream
nailed down to a box.
MEGHAN O’ROURKE
MEDITATIONS ON A MOTH
How splendid yellow is.-Vincent van Gogh
My poor eye. It has done
so much looking--at the sky, at the dark-fretted
trumpets in the frescoes of the Chrysler Building,
at the opium dens ofHigh and Low,
where bodies sway like white flowers--
amount due, amount due.
Is the blue the blue you think of when I tell you?
Do ghosts have neuroses?
What is the point of the haunting they do?
Here--look. No, look.
I am trying to rid myself of myself;
to see past the tumbling clouds.
All evening drums rumble in the corner park.
The mobsters convene when the cops leave.
What goes down stays down,
the street at three A.M. a fantastic absence of color.
Outside the studio window
a river slides along its dulcimer bed,
aquifers and accordions and Alcatraz.
But you have to get up in the morning.
The brute blind glare of snow in sun.
Look again, and up you may rise
to something quite surprising in the distance.
RANDALL MAN
THE MORTICIAN IN SAN FRANCISCO
This may sound queer,
but in 1985 I held the delicate hands
of Dan White:
I prepared him for burial; by then, Harvey Milk
was made monument—no, myth—by the years
since he was shot.
I remember when Harvey was shot:
twenty, and I knew I was queer.
Those were the years,
Levi’s and leather jackets holding hands
on Castro Street, cheering for Harvey Milk—
elected on the same day as Dan White.
I often wonder about Supervisor White,
who fatally shot
Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Milk,
who was one of us, a Castro queer.
May 21, 1979: a jury hands
down the sentence, seven years—
in truth, five years—
for ex-cop, ex-fireman Dan White,
for the blood on his hands;
when he confessed that he had shot
the mayor and the queer,
a few men in blue cheered. And Harvey Milk?
Why cry over spilled milk,
some wondered, semi-privately, for years—
it meant “one less queer.”
The jurors turned to White.
If just the mayor had been shot,
Dan may have had trouble on his hands—
but the twelve who held his life in their hands
maybe didn’t mind the death of Harvey Milk;
maybe, the second murder offered him a shot
at serving only a few years.
In the end, he committed suicide, this Dan White.
And he was made presentable by a queer.
Mary Ruefle
SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION
Ann Galbraith
loves Barry Soyers.
Please pray for Lucius Fenn
who suffers greatly whilst shaking hands.
Bonny Polton
loves a pug named Cowl.
Please pray for Olina Korsk
who holds the record for missing fingers.
Leon Bendrix loves Odelia Jonson
who loves Kurt who loves Carlos who loves Paul.
Please pray for Cortland Filby
who handles a dead wasp, a conceit for his mother.
Harold loves looking at Londa's hair under the microscope.
Londa loves plaiting the mane of her pony.
Please pray for Fancy Dancer
who is troubled by the vibrissa in his nostrils.
Nadine St. Clair loves Ogden Smythe
who loves blowing his nose on postage stamps.
Please pray for William Shakespeare
who does not know how much we love him, miss him and think of him.
Yukiko Pearl loves the little bits of toffee
that fall to the floor when Jeffrey is done with his snack.
Please pray for the florist Marieko
who wraps roses in a paper cone then punches the wrong code.
Muriel Frame loves retelling the incident
that happened on the afternoon of November third.
Please pray for our teacher Ursula Twombly
who does not know the half of it.
By the radiator in a wooden chair
(stanza continued)
wearing woolen stockings sits a little girl
in a dunce's cap, a paper cone rolled to a point
and inverted on her hair; she's got her hands
in her lap and her head bowed down, her chin
is trembling with having been singled out like this
and she is sincere in her fervent wish to die.
Take it away and give it to the Tartars
who roll gloriously into battle.
Michael Earl Craig
This I Believe
I don’t know how to behave but
I know what I believe. I believe
that if I stick my head in the oven
I won’t take it out. I believe in
corduroy couch cushions. I believe
in digging a tunnel with a small
silver spoon. I believe in tunneling
with this spoon under the city
and never giving up.
I believe in after-breakfast naps
and Russian roulette—
Russian roulette while eating ice cream
as I watch the evening news.
I believe in the evening news.
And I believe in celebrity.
I believe in those photos
on the web of Putin playing doubles
Ping-Pong, outdoors, in his Speedo.
(Find those.) I believe in haircuts
and bubble gum, and putting my face
down into a pillow or cushion,
and that when I do this I will see
the future, plus other cultures, most
of them, and I’ll get work done
that couldn’t be done another way.
I believe in tacos and mortification.
I believe that all people fall
into one of two categories: Doonesbury or Far Side.