Prayer

by Galway Kinnell

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

Billy Collins was the former poet laureate, and although some feel he is a bit of poetry sellout — I have to be honest, I actually enjoy a lot of his work. I thumbed through the book seeing it was a collection of modern poets. I am a casual follower of poetry. The problem is, it can be really hard to find modern poets that you like. I’ve always thought that poetry is a lot like photography — you have to take tons of shots to find one that captures you.

180 Poems is designed to make it easy for high school students to hear or read a poem on each of the 180 days of the school year. The poems are collected with this audience in mind including poems about the Birthdays, Football, and Summer, but also just beautiful words and stories of human existence. In the introduction to the book Billy Collins requests:

Whether the poems are read over a PA system or at the end of a school assembly, students can hear poetry on a daily basis without feeling any pressure to respond. I wanted teachers to refrain from commenting on the poems or asking students “literary” questions about them. No discussion, no explanation, no quiz, no midterm, no seven-page paper — just listen to a poem every morning and off you go to your first class.

So regardless, of how old you are this is a great little collection, and a good opportunity to get an introduction to some of the best modern poets of our time. You can see the entire collection online at Poetry 180. The magic of poetry is it can be as simple or as complicated as you care to make it. A good poem is one that you like. That’s it.

Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

I love it for many reasons. Partly because of the brilliant tragedy that T.S. Elliot spent most of his life covered in numbers as a banker and accountant — don’t you just love the idea of a literary genius sitting at a desk undiscovered — like Superman and Clark Kent. Second, because he wrote a collection of poems about Cats, and I love a good cat poem.

A professor from Washington State University put up a little info about about the poem and T.S.:

Eliot was born in St. Louis and educated at Harvard University, but most of his adult life was passed in London. In the vanguard of the artistic movement known as Modernism, Eliot was a unique innovator in poetry and The Waste Land (1922) stands as one of the most original and influential poems of the twentieth century. As a young man he suffered a religious crisis and a nervous breakdown before regaining his emotional equilibrium and Christian faith. His early poetry, including “Prufrock,” deals with spiritually exhausted people who exist in the impersonal modern city. Prufrock is a representative character who cannot reconcile his thoughts and understanding with his feelings and will. The poem displays several levels of irony, the most important of which grows out of the vain, weak man’s insights into his sterile life and his lack of will to change that life. The poem is replete with images of enervation and paralysis, such as the evening described as “etherized,” immobile. Prufrock understands that he and his associates lack authenticity. One part of himself would like to startle them out of their meaningless lives, but to accomplish this he would have to risk disturbing his “universe,” being rejected. The latter part of the poem captures his sense defeat for failing to act courageously. Eliot helped to set the modernist fashion for blending references to the classics with the most sordid type of realism, then expressing the blend in majestic language which seems to mock the subject.

It’s a long poem — so I posted the entire work on a separate page, but below are a few favorite excerpts:

T.S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1919)

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
******

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair–
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin–
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:–
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

******
I grow old . . .I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

I went to look
for pity.
Poor death, I thought,
he loves me.

I guessed right,
he does.
And now I love him too,
just because.

By Andrew Motion

I know I said I would take a break from poetry, but let me explain. One of my favorite Poetry books is call “The World’s Wife” by Carol Ann Duffy. I was looking for a poem from the book to print. It is a unique collection. She writes as the wives of various historical figures — Midas’s wife, King Kong’s Wife, Darwin’s Wife. Brilliant.

Anyway, I was looking for a poem of hers, but alas, I couldn’t find it. Then I read this in the wiki:

Carol Ann Duffy was almost appointed the British Poet Laureate in 1999 (after the death of previous Laureate Ted Hughes), but lost out on the position to Andrew Motion. According to the Sunday Times, Downing Street sources stated unofficially that Prime Minister Tony Blair was ‘worried about having a homosexual poet laureate because of how it might play in middle England’. Duffy later claimed that she would not have accepted the laureateship anyway, saying in an interview with the Guardian newspaper that ‘I will not write a poem for Edward and Sophie. No self-respecting poet should have to.’ She says she regards Andrew Motion as a friend and that the idea of a contest between her and him for the post was entirely invented by the newspapers.

So buy her book. You won’t be sorry.

Through an accidental crack in the curtain
I can see the eight o’clock light change from
charcoal to a faint gassy blue, inventing things
in the morning that has a thick skin of ice on it
as the water tank has, so nothing flows, all is bone,
telling its tale of how hard the night had to be

for any heart caught out in it, just flesh and blood
no match for the mindless chill that’s settled in,
a great stone bird, its wings stretched stiff

from the tip of Letter Hill to the cobbled bay, its gaze
glacial, its hook-and-scrabble claws fast clamped
on every window, its petrifying breath a cage

in which all the warmth we were is shivering.

Eamon Grennan

Yes, I have an Exactlywatt on a chain!
Exactly what on a chain?
Yes!
Yes what?

No, Exactlywatt!
That’s what I want to know!
I told you – Exactlywatt!
Exactly what?
Yes!
Yes what?
Yes, it’s with me!

What’s with you?
Exactlywatt – that’s what’s with me.
Me who?
Yes!
Go away!

Knock knock…

By Shel Silverstein

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

By William Carlos Williams

It is a poem about ice cream.You see?
About how you might stroll into a shop and ask;
One Strawberry Split. One Mivvi.

What did I tell you ?
No one will die.
No licking tongues will melt like candle wax.
This is a poem about ice cream. Do not cry.

by Andrew Motion

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		Mon, 17 Apr 2006 04:00:46 +0000
		vtgirl
				
		
		
		

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			At the end of my suffering

there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death

I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.

Then nothing. The weak sun

flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive

as consciousness

buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being

a soul and unable

to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth

bending a little. And what I took to be

birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember

passage from the other world

I tell you I could speak again: whatever

returns from oblivion returns

to find a voice:

from the center of my life came

a great fountain, deep blue

shadows on azure seawater.

By  Louise Gluck
P.S.  even if you don’t like poetry — her work will speak to you.  I reccomend everyone pick up one of her books.   
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		vtgirl
				
		
		
		

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			Sometimes I have wanted

to throw you off

like a heavy coat. 

Sometimes I have said

you would not let me

breathe or move.
But now that I am free

to choose light clothes

or none at all
I feel the cold

and all the time I think

how warm it used to be.
By Vicki Feaver

 
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