Favorite contemporary poets?

http://www.bucknell.edu/x3705.xml Bucknell U. has created a unique website for poetry, much of it in audio version performed by the author. quasi

MAPS


I leaf over soft uplands
Follow fanning estuaries
Into pale lakes

Imagining tides that chisel isthmuses

Towers of ice

Dark gravelly tongues of glaciers
Moving beside monstered sounds,

Archipelagoes that unfurl into infinity.

Tracking these crenellated coasts
Where the gray blobs are boisterous ports

The broken lines
Shipping routes nosing out into open water
Into latitudes licked by sun,
http://www.valpo.edu/english/vpr/archives.html
{first lines of "Maps" by Robert James Berry}....from an excellent site with many contemporary poets

AHAB'S SON


I hate the way the island goes around,
around, around, always ending up where
it began, at my father's house, my mother
raging in her upstairs room, her laudanum,
whiter than fresh snow in its blue bottle,
the trapdoor to the widow's walk padlocked
shut, the chambered nautilus on her table.
She rummages through trunks looking for
something, kneels down to pray, weeps,
then races downstairs, chattering to herself.
I hate the way the house goes up and down
like Jacob's ladder, rattling doors, the eye
in the bevelled glass in the rainbow mirror,
the pump at the kitchen sink, a single drop
of water suspended from its rusting lip.
Hate the willowware dishes in the china
closet, for company, but company never
comes. Hate the way my thoughts come,
night after night, red-haired demons
from the afterlife.
http://www.valpo.edu/english/vpr/archives.html
...........{first half of this poem by John Gilgun}

LEE PASSARELLA





IMMANENCE


Antibellum Plantation, Stone Mountain Park, Georgia



We leave the one-room schoolhouse
with the double meaning of its woodenness
spelled out in ranks of hair-shirt oaken
benches and plank-top desks without a blemish
of utility. No inkwells, no pencil minders to give
them purpose. It is a place of the truly elementary—
of bone-tired inertia and of rote, and educative homilies
about the patriot saints. On the slatted wall
above the teacher's desk, the Father of His Country
still presides from the unfinished portrait
by Gilbert Stuart. Disembodied head, dead white
on a black ground of rusty satin. It speaks to dark eternity,
bright virtue: the mythic cherry tree; the bitter winter
of faithfulness, Philadelphia locked up like an English gaol;
the patience to stick till the screw turned tight
at Yorktown. Did the hardness or the homilies prepare
those boys of 1850 for Sunday strolls to come,
ranked like Continentals, into the rifle's obliterating jaws?

{first half of "Immanence" by LEE PASSARELLA}

THE APPLICANT First, are you our sort of a person? Do you wear A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch, A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch, Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then How can we give you a thing? Stop crying. Open your hand Empty? Empty. Here is a hand To fill it and willing To bring teacups and roll away headaches And do whatever you tell it. Will you marry it? It is guaranteed To thumb shut your eyes at the end And dissolve of sorrow We make new stock from the salt. I notice you are stark naked. How about this suit- Black and stiff, but not a bad fit. Will you marry it? It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof Against fire and bombs through the roof. Believe me, they’ll bury you in it. ………….1962 ………by Sylvia Plath {first half of this poem}

SELF-PORTRAIT AGAINST DREAM



Oh, spare me the glitter
of your dreams, those
pallid rocks pulled
from the lake, losing
all magnificence
after a moment's sun.
They are merely mineral,
no more profound
than your so-precious bones
that time will unlock,
burning away all else
to reveal their muteness.

Too damn easy any morning
receiving cloud-messages—
by noon the whole scenario
will blur like watercolor
or slide home with a thump
into the drawer of Freud's
roll-top desk with the rest
of your sad Victoriana.
You don't need dream's
cartoons—all you need
is the stubborn one-foot,
one-foot plod that you
were born, admit it,
to carry out—a journey,
yes, but best if you don't
inquire too sharply
of reason or destination.



...

{part of this poem by David Graham}....valpo.edu/english/vpr/archives.html

YOU CAN'T HAVE IT ALL



But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands

gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old
finger

on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.

You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look

of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite

every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,

you can have it August and abundantly so.


...............{exceprt from this poem, by Barbara Ras, born 1949 in Bedord, Mass.: Well regarded contemporary poet, winner of many poetry awards including "honors from the National Writer's Union", has lived in Columbia and Costa Rica}

OPEN STAGE

(Horse & Cart Cafe, Charleston SC)



You have walked all day the length of streets,

cataloged anything of importance that has been here

before. Tide at the seawall, the cadence of wind,

poems moving in. The church bells chime.

A car starts. Some stranger remarks the brilliance

of sun. Palmettos bow to the weight of air.






................................


{featured poet for the Adirondack Review, Andrena Zawinski, summer 2001}

PSYCHOANALYSIS: AN ELEGY



What are you thinking about?

I am thinking of an early summer.
I am thinking of wet hills in the rain
Pouring water. Shedding it
Down empty acres of oak and manzanita
Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,
Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.
Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana
Driving the hills crazy,
A fast wind with a bit of dust in it
Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.
Or down in the city where the peach trees
Are awkward as young horses,
And there are kites caught on the wires
Up above the street lamps,
And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.

What are you thinking?


{first part of this poem by Jack Spicer: a very contemporary poet}

LOVE ON THE C TRAIN

baby, i'm a dreamer...
even in spite of the fact
that i don't sleep

maybe you won't weep
if i pass tonight
i'd like to think
that i'd be the crescent
on your lips
ear to ear beaming
like 7am sun fingers
lingering thru the blinds
giving birth to sight



...............

{contemporary poet Marcus Anderson, exceprt from Albany Poets}

Camouflaging The Chimera

Listen
We tied branches to our helmets.
We painted our faces & rifles
with mud from a riverbank,

blades of grass hung from the pockets
of our tiger suits. We wove
ourselves into the terrain,
content to be a hummingbird's target.



..............

{very well thought of contemporary poet...Yusef Komunyakaa, excerpt from this poem}

Vigils: The Night Watch



...........This is what I do not understand: how all this happens
without an answer. Without, even, a question.

The Wissahickon spills endlessly, like the night love poured through me, nearly, I thought,
uncontainable as it rushed from my fingers and out the window into people passing on the street,
over fire hydrants, pigeons, and boom boxes, through police cars, stop signs, and cockroaches,
between two dogs circling in heat. I did not need an answer then.
I would have understood the indifferent delight of the ducks. But I asked,
and my question scattered like mercury, into a million trembling globules
magnetic with yearning.

--{ Deidra Greenleaf Allan, excerpt from this poem }

A BLESSING




Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
.................................................. .................................................. ....{excerpt from this poem by contemporary poet James Wright}

PHENOMENAL WOMAN
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.


........................

{excerpt from contemporary poet Maya Angelou}

DEER DANCER



Nearly everyone had left that bar in the middle of winter except the
hardcore. It was the coldest night of the year, every place shut down, but
not us. Of course we noticed when she came in. We were Indian ruins. She
was the end of beauty. No one knew her, the stranger whose tribe we
recognized, her family related to deer, if that's who she was, a people
accustomed to hearing songs in pine trees, and making them hearts.



....

{Joy Harjo, contemporary poet from New Mexico and enviorons writes about Native American themes (not exclusively), excerpt from this poem}