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Tag Archive for 'poetry'
For the last day of National Poetry Month, I have compiled some of my favorite poems—never before seen on this website!—that were either very lengthy, or couldn’t be showcased because there weren’t enough days in the month. I have only brushed the very tip of the iceberg—I haven’t even gotten to non-English poems—but I enjoyed sharing every one of these works.
Due to length, I’ve cut most of these works. Click on the links in the poems to read them in their entirety.
“What Do Women Want?” by Kim Addonizio
“Duality” by Tina Chang
Perhaps I hold people to impossible ideals,
I tell them, something is wrong with your
personality, (you’re a drinker, you’re
too dependent, or I think you have
a mother/son fixation). This is usually
followed by passionate lovemaking,
one good long and very well meaning
embrace, and then I’m out the door.
“Dream On” by James Tate
Some people go their whole lives
without ever writing a single poem.
Extraordinary people who don’t hesitate
to cut somebody’s heart or skull open.
They go to baseball games with the greatest of ease.
and play a few rounds of golf as if it were nothing.
These same people stroll into a church
as if that were a natural part of life.
“The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot
This poem is especially sentimental for me. Every year, the transition from winter to spring in New England is difficult. The snow sometimes lasts until May. Instead of snow, some years there is an extended mud season. Some years, there would be heavy rain. This poem, haphazard with its vivid imagery, reminds me of erratic New England weather and its cruel springs.
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
In celebration of National Poetry Month, I will share a poem that I love every day. Enjoy.
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In celebration of National Poetry Month, I will share a poem that I love every day. Enjoy.
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In celebration of National Poetry Month, I will share a poem that I love every day. Enjoy.
I know a thing that’s most uncommon;
(Envy, be silent and attend!)
I know a reasonable woman,
Handsome and witty, yet a friend.
Not warp’d by passion, awed by rumour;
Not grave through pride, nor gay through folly;
An equal mixture of good-humour
And sensible soft melancholy.
‘Has she no faults then (Envy says), Sir?’
Yes, she has one, I must aver:
When all the world conspires to praise her,
The woman’s deaf, and does not hear.
– Alexander Pope
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In celebration of National Poetry Month, I will share a poem that I love every day. Enjoy.
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In celebration of National Poetry Month, I will share a poem that I love every day. Enjoy.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
– William Butler Yeats
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In celebration of National Poetry Month, I will share a poem that I love every day. Enjoy.
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- Alix Olson’s MySpace
- “Built Like That” from CD Baby
In celebration of National Poetry Month, I will share a poem that I love every day. Enjoy.
My father used to say,
“Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow’s grave
nor the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self reliant like the cat –
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse’s limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth –
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.”
Nor was he insincere in saying, “`Make my house your inn’.”
Inns are not residences.
– Marianne Moore
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In celebration of National Poetry Month, I will share a poem that I love every day. Enjoy.
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful—
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
– Slyvia Plath
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