Favorite contemporary poets?

Link to "Let this World Endure" in its entirety:

http://www.cstone.net/~poems/letthbon.htm

Thanks, Stlukesguild. Let me see. By the way, I meant to comment on your recent post as excellent essay; not that I can write so concisely. quasimodo1

Of a Forgetful Sea



...Desert is only a handful of sand
held by my daughter.

In her palm,
she holds small creatures,
tracks an ant, a flea
moving over each grain.

She brings them to places
she thinks are safe:



.................................................. .excerpts from "of a Forgetful Sea" by Kelli Russell Agodon

SMOKE
Smoke, it is all smoke
in the throat of eternity. . . .
For centuries, the air was full of witches
Whistling up chimneys
on their spiky brooms
cackling or singing more sweetly than Circe,
as they flew over rooftops
blessing & cursing their
kind.

We banished & burned them
making them smoke in the throat of god;
we declared ourselves
"enlightened."
"The dark age of horrors is past,"
said my mother to me in 1952,
seven years after our people went up in smoke,
leaving a few teeth, a pile of bones.


.................................................. ..excerpt from "Smoke" by Erica Jong

BURNING THE DOLL
I am the girl who burned her doll,
who gave her father the doll to burn "
the bride doll I had been given
at six, as a Christmas gift,
by the same great uncle who once introduced me
at my blind second cousin's wedding
to a man who winced, A future Miss
America, I'm sure " while I stood there, sweating
in a prickly flowered dress,
ugly, wanting to cry.

I loved the uncle but I wanted that doll to burn
because I loved my father best
and the doll was a lie.
I hated her white gown stitched with pearls,
her blinking, mocking blue glass eyes
that closed and opened, opened and closed
when I stood her up,
when I laid her down.
Her stiff, hinged body was not like mine,
which was wild and brown,
and there was no groom "
.............first two stanzas..........by Cecilia Woloch

I posted this in my blog today. Fits in this thread.

Quote:

---

White Apples
by Donald Hall

when my father had been dead a week
I woke
with his voice in my ear

I sat up in bed

and held my breath
and stared at the pale closed door

white apples and the taste of stone

if he called again
I would put on my coat and galoshes

---

MORPHOLOGY
There can be no distance
between you and me
but that created by the steps we chose to take

Like Robbe-Grillet
exploring every possibility
or Picasso re-assembling Reality yet again
we could easily
each be
someone/thing completely else
Skipping like stones
across a panoramic past and future sea
wildly vast and violent and full of
variously slanted eyes Utopian dreams
blind politics and sewer power sludge and greed
and out-stretched bearing arms kaleidoscopic seams
and evolutionary breakthrough scientific ironies
and sweat and tears and way too spilt much blood
we lose momentum on our own cue
to land precisely on the ancient turtle's back

..........................excerpt from this poem

By KittyKitty

Author statement
Why do I write? Out of the helplessness of the human condition - the only kind of control I can muster over the incoherence and apparent senselessness of it. Also to communicate and diagnose and express what cannot otherwise be expressed; to be a voice or give a voice to things that have been oppressed and repressed in my peculiar culture; to find an emotional valve for the deepest joys and sorrows.

http://www.contemporarywriters.com/a...9P274512627448 ...........an outstanding contemporary poet, sometimes writing in Gaelic.

Sea-black virgin - being in love with you
is a fine space. I will never live
in your searching wash, your grass wallpaper,
your bewildered red gardens.
You desire your wholeness, your virginity,
to be admired by angels only.
Such dry self-knowledge. Such sheer
Englishness - how could I
have mistaken you for my father?

...............poem recited by author at the Durham Literature Festival and the Colpitts Poets............this poem about her father.

RESEED



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Every cricket here has mated.
Hear it in the distant tone and timbre
of a tired, old drone: a chorus
for those who now wear only
white robes over lost bodies—

that chorus which for us rises evenings
in the cancer, neuralgic, and geriatric wards,
where all are far beyond triage.
Each moan, we know, echoes
a voice from that boundless night
preceding the afterlife.

Forget your body. Forget the afterlife.

by Kevin Rabas (excerpt from this poem...source=Atlantic Monthly) This poem is not well served by posting this fragment; reading the entire work is much more powerful.

Two Snapshots for the Inner Eye


1.

Glassed in all day like this I keep towelling the windows dry -
Trying to wipe the fog away that keeps me blind behind glass,
Unable to see the world outside for what it is, the way things
Become shadows and blunted silhouettes of themselves, birds
Only blurs where they shake a branch when they land or leave
Or just dash past, a flash of cloud-particles snatching at crumbs.
As I do each time I get the big window clear again and try
To take in the colours and shapes out there, all the living bits
Of matter that stand in their own ordinary uncanny light until
Blearing begins again and I see it's my own breathing does it.
............contemporary poet, graduate of Vassar, from his recent collection entitled "The Quick of It", Gallery press, 2005 (Part 1 of two)

TAKE THE I OUT



But I love the I, steel I-beam
that my father sold. They poured the pig iron
into the mold, and it fed out slowly,
a bending jelly in the bath, and it hardened,
Bessemer, blister, crucible, alloy, and he
marketed it, and bought bourbon, and Cream
of Wheat, its curl of butter right
in the middle of its forehead, he paid for our dresses
with his metal sweat, sweet in the morning
and sour in the evening. I love the I,
frail between its flitches, its hard ground
and hard sky, it soars between them
like the soul that rushes, back and forth,
between the mother and father. What if they had loved each other,
how would it have felt to be the strut
joining the floor and roof of the truss?
I have seen, on his shirt-cardboard, years
in her desk, the night they made me, the penciled
slope of her temperature rising, and on
the peak of the hill, first soldier to reach
the crest, the Roman numeral I--

(first part of this poem by contemporary poet, Sharon Olds)

PREFIX: FINDING THE MEASURE



Finding the measure is finding the mantram,
is finding the moon, as index of measure,
is finding the moon's source;

if that source
is Sun, finding the measure is finding
the natural articulation of ideas.

The organism
of the macrocosm, the organism of language,
the organism of I combine in ceaseless naturing
to propagate a fourth,
the poem,
from their trinity.


{beginning of this poem, by Robert Kelly}

David Berman is a poet as well as the vocalist/guitarist for Silver Jews

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by David Berman excerpt of Governors on Sominex

It had been four days of no weather
as if nature had conceded its genius to the indoors.

They'd closed down the Bureau of Sad Endings
and my wife sat on the couch and read the paper out loud.

The evening edition carried the magic death of a child
backlit by a construction site sunrise on its front page.

I kept my back to her and fingered the items on the mantle.

Souvenirs only reminded you of buying them.

---

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by excerpt of David Berman's "Self-Portrait at 28"

I walked out to the hill behind our house
which looks positively Alaskan today
and it would be easier to explain this
if I had a picture to show you
but I was with our young dog
and he was running through the tall grass
like running through the tall grass
is all of life together
until a bird calls or he finds a beer can
and that thing fills all the space in his head.

You see,
his mind can only hold one thought at a time
and when he finally hears me call his name
he looks up and cocks his head
and for a single moment
my voice is everything:

Self-portrait at 28

---

OMNISCIENT LOVE



He was in knocking range of my secrets.

He had found kelp there,

he nested in the coral beds.

In a past life he was born

to me as a set of twins.

He was applied to me as a topical ointment.



{excerpt from this poem)





Lee Upton (very contemporary poet)