The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry Read online

  Next | TOC> The Creation> Knight

  For Black Poets Who Think

  of Suicide

  Black Poets should live—not leap

  From steel bridges (like the white boys do).

  Black poets should live—not lay

  Their necks on railroad tracks (like the

  white boys do).

  Black poets should seek, but not search

  Too much in sweet dark caves

  Or hunt for snipes down psychic trails—

  (Like the white boys do).

  For Black Poets belong to Black People.

  Are the flutes of Black Lovers—Are

  The organs of Black Sorrows—Are

  The trumpets of Black Warriors.

  Let all Black Poets die as trumpets,

  And be buried in the dust of marching feet.

  Etheridge Knight, 1966

  Next | TOC> The Creation> Ferlinghetti

  Constantly Risking Absurdity

  Constantly risking absurdity

  and death

  whenever he performs

  above the heads

  of his audience

  the poet like an acrobat

  climbs on rime

  to a high wire of his own making

  and balancing on eyebeams

  above a sea of faces

  paces his way

  to the other side of day

  performing entrechats

  and slight-of-foot tricks

  and other high theatrics

  and all without mistaking

  any thing

  for what it may not be

  For he's the super realist

  who must perforce perceive

  taut truth

  before the taking of each stance or step

  in his supposed advance

  toward that still higher perch

  where Beauty stands and waits

  with gravity

  to start her death-defying leap

  And he

  a little charleychaplin man

  who may or may not catch

  her fair eternal form

  spreadeagled in the empty air

  of existence

  Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1958

  Next | TOC> The Creation> Williams W

  The Artist

  Mr. T.

  bareheaded

  in a soiled undershirt

  his hair standing out

  on all sides

  stood on his toes

  heels together

  arms gracefully

  for the moment

  curled above his head.

  Then he whirled about

  bounded

  into the air

  and with an entrechat

  perfectly achieved

  completed the figure.

  My mother

  taken by surprise

  where she sat

  in her invalid's chair

  was left speechless.

  Bravo! she cried at last

  and clapped her hands.

  The man's wife

  came from the kitchen:

  What goes on here? she said.

  But the show was over.

  William Carlos Williams, 1954

  Next | TOC> The Creation> MacLeish

  Ars Poetica

  A poem should be palpable and mute

  As a globed fruit,

  Dumb

  As old medallions to the thumb,

  Silent as the sleeve-worn stone

  Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

  A poem should be wordless

  As the flight of birds.

  •

  A poem should be motionless in time

  As the moon climbs,

  Leaving, as the moon releases

  Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

  Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,

  Memory by memory the mind—

  A poem should be motionless in time

  As the moon climbs.

  •

  A poem should be equal to:

  Not true.

  For all the history of grief

  An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

  For love

  The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

  A poem should not mean

  But be.

  Archibald MacLeish, 1926

  Next | TOC> The Creation> Sandburg

  Poetry

  Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines

  of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust,

  blood, dreams.

  Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical

  link between white butterfly-wings and the

  scraps of torn-up love-letters.

  Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of

  hyacinths and biscuits.

  Carl Sandburg, 1928

  Next | TOC> The Creation> Sandburg

  Prayers of Steel

  Lay me on an anvil, O God.

  Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.

  Let me pry loose old walls.

  Let me lift and loosen old foundations.

  Lay me on an anvil, O God.

  Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.

  Drive me into the girders that hold a

  skyscraper together.

  Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the

  central girders.

  Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper

  through blue nights into white stars.

  Carl Sandburg, 1918

  Next | TOC> The Creation> Snyder

  How Poetry Comes to Me

  It comes blundering over the

  Boulders at night, it stays

  Frightened outside the

  Range of my campfire

  I go to meet it at the

  Edge of the light

  Gary Snyder, 1992

  Next | TOC> The Creation> Heaney

  Digging

  Between my finger and my thumb

  The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

  Under my windows, a clean rasping sound

  When the spade sinks into the gravelly ground:

  My father, digging. I look down

  Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

  Bends low, comes up twenty years away

  Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

  Where he was digging.

  The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

  Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

  He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright

  edge deep

  To scatter new potatoes that we picked

  Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

  By God, the old man could handle a spade.

  Just like his old man.

  My grandfather cut more turf in a day

  Than any other man on Toner's bog.

  Once I carried him milk in a bottle

  Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

  To drink it, then fell to right away

  Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

  Over his shoulder, going down and down

  For the good turf. Digging.

  The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch

  and slap

  Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

  Through living roots awaken in my head.

  But I've no spade to follow men like them.

  Between my finger and my thumb

  The squat pen rests.

  I'll dig with it.

  Seamus Heaney, 1966

  Next | TOC> The Creation> Ashbery

  Paradoxes and Oxymorons

  This poem is concerned with language on a

  very plain level.

  Look at it talking to you. You look out a window

  Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don't

  have it.

  You miss it, it misses you. You miss each
other.

  The poem is sad because it wants to be yours,

  and cannot.

  What's a plain level? It is that and other things,

  Bringing a system of them into play. Play?

  Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be

  A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,

  As in the division of grace these long August days

  Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know

  It gets lost in the steam and chatter of

  typewriters.

  It has been played once more. I think you

  exist only

  To tease me into doing it, on your level, and

  then you aren't there

  Or have adopted a different attitude. And

  the poem

  Has set me softly down beside you. The poem

  is you.

  John Ashbery, 1981

  Next | TOC> The Creation> Pound

  Coda

  O my songs,

  Why do you look so eagerly and so curiously into

  people's faces,

  Will you find your lost dead among them?

  Ezra Pound, 1915

  Next | TOC> The Creation> Lowell R

  Epilogue

  Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—

  why are they no help to me now

  I want to make

  something imagined, not recalled?

  I hear the noise of my own voice:

  The painter's vision is not a lens,

  it trembles to caress the light.

  But sometimes everything I write

  with the threadbare art of my eye

  seems a snapshot,

  lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,

  heightened from life,

  yet paralyzed by fact.

  All's misalliance.

  Yet why not say what happened?

  Pray for the grace of accuracy

  Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination

  stealing like the tide across a map

  to his girl solid with yearning.

  We are poor passing facts,

  warned by that to give

  each figure in the photograph

  his living name.

  Robert Lowell, 1977

  Next | TOC> For My People> Whitman

  I Hear America Singing

  I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,

  Those of the mechanics, each one singing his

  as it should be blithe and strong,

  The carpenter singing his as he measures his

  plank or beam,

  The mason singing his as he makes ready for

  work, or leaves off work,

  The boatman singing what belongs to him in

  his boat, the deck hand singing on the

  steamboat deck,

  The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench,

  the hatter singing as he stands,

  The wood-cutter's song, the plowboy's on his

  way in the morning, or at noon intermission

  or at sundown,

  The delicious singing of the mother, or the young

  wife at work, or the girl sewing or washing,

  Each singing what belongs to him or her and

  to none else,

  The day what belongs to the day—at night the

  party of young fellows, robust, friendly,

  Singing with open mouths their strong

  melodious songs.

  Walt Whitman, 1860

  Next | TOC> For My People> Whitman

  from "Song of Myself"

  I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

  And what I assume you shall assume,

  For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

  I loaf and invite my soul,

  I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

  My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed from this soil, this air,

  Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,

  I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health, begin,

  Hoping to cease not till death . . .

  Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

  Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.

  You shall possess the good of the earth and sun (there are millions of suns left)

  You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the specters in books.

  You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me:

  You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self . . .

  Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded,

  I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no,

  And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away . . .

  Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,

  Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,

  No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,

  No more modest than immodest . . .

  Whoever degrades another degrades me,

  And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.

  Through me the afflatus surging and surging, through me the current and index.

  I speak the password primeval, I give the sign of democracy,

  By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.

  Through me many long dumb voices,

  Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,

  Voices of the diseased and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,

  Voices of cycles and preparation and accretion,

  And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff,

  And of the rights of them the others are down upon,

  Of the deformed, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,

  Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.

  Through me forbidden voices,

  Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veiled and I remove the veil,

  Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured.

  I do not press my fingers across my mouth,

  I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,

  Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.

  I believe in the flesh and the appetites,

  Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.

  Divine I am inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from,

  The scent of these armpits—aroma finer than prayer,

  This head more than churches, bibles and all the creeds . . .

  I dote on myself, there is a lot of me and all so luscious,

  Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy,

  I cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my faintest wish,

  Nor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the friendship I take again.

  That I walk up my stoop, I pause to consider if it really be,

  A morning-glory at my window satisfies more than the metaphysics of books. . .

  I understand the large hearts of heroes,

  The courage of present times and all times,

  How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the steamship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm,

  How he knuckled tight and gave not back an inch and was faithful of days and faithful of nights,

  And chalked in large letters on a board,

  Be of good cheer, we will not desert you."

  How he followed with them and tacked with them three days and would not give it up,

  How he saved the drifting company at last,

  How the lank, loose-gowned women looked when boated from the side of their prepared graves,

  How the silent ol
d-faced infants and the lifted sick, and the sharp-lipped unshaven men;

  All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine.

  I am the man, I suffered, I was there.

  The disdain and calmness of martyrs,

  The mother of old, condemned for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children gazing on,

  The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, covered with sweat,

  The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, the murderous buckshot and the bullets,

  All these I feel or am . . .

  Behold, I do not give lectures or a little charity,

  When I give I give myself.

  You there, impotent, loose in the knees,

  Open your scarfed chops till I blow grit within you,

  Spread your palms and lift the flaps of your pockets,

  I am not to be denied, I compel, I have stores plenty and to spare,

  And any thing I have I bestow.

  I do not ask who you are, that is not important to me,

  You can do nothing and be nothing but what I will infold you.

  The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

  I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable:

  I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

  The last scud of day holds back for me,

  It flings my likeness over the rest and true as any on the shadowed wilds,

  It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

  I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

  I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

  I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

  If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

  You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

  But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

  And filter and fibre your blood.