Contemporary American Poetry
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CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY SIXTH EDITION Edited by A. Poulin, Jr. State University of New York, College at Brockport HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY BOSTON TORONTO Geneva, Illinois Palo Alto Princeton, New Jersey Contents Contemporary American Poetry: A Chronology xxix Preface xxxi A. R. AMMONS Apologia Pro Vita Sua 3 He Held Radical Light 3 Working with Tools 4 The Unifying Principle 5 Cut the Grass 6 The City Limits 6 The Eternal City 7 White Dwarf 8 Distraction • 8 Breaking Out 9 Extrication 9 Volitions x 10 Chiseled Clouds 10 Loft 11 JOHN ASHBERY Our Youth 13 "They Dream Only of America" 14 Leaving the Atocha Station 15 As You. Came from the Holy Land 17 Street Musicians 18 Paradoxes and Oxymorons 19 Posture of Unease 19 My Philosophy of Life 20 MARVIN BELL They 23 White Clover 23 The Extermination of the Jews 24 from The Escape into You Homage to the Runner 25 To Dorothy 25 The Last Thing I Say .^ 26 Drawn by' Stones, by Earth, by Things That Have Been in the Fire ( ' 26 Long Island 27 How He Grew Up 28 ix CONTENTS Ending with a Line from Lear 29 from The Book of the Dead Man (#1)1. About the Dead Man 30 (#50) 1. About the Dead Man and the Cardboard Box 30 JOHN BERRYMAN The Song of the Tortured Girl 33 from The Dream Songs 1 [Huffy Henry] 33 4 [Filling her compact & delicious body] 34 8 [The weather was fine] 34 9 [Deprived of his enemy] 35 13 [God bless Henry] 35 „ 14 [Life, friends, is boring] 36 29 [There sat down, once] 37 45 [He stared at ruin] 37 46 [I am, outside] 38 55 [Peter's not friendly] 38 230 [There are voices] 39 384 [The marker slants] 39 from Eleven Addresses to the Lord 1 [Master of Beauty] 40 Henry's Understanding 41 ELIZABETH BISHOP The Man-Moth 43 TheFish 44 The Armadillo 46 North Haven 47 In the Waiting Room 48 One Art 51 ROBERT BLY Surprised by Evening 53 Waking from Sleep 53 Poem in Three Parts 54 Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter 54 Watering the Horse 54 Counting Small-Boned Bodies 55 Looking into a Face 55 The Hermit 55 Looking into a Tide Pool 56 Opening the Door of a Barn I Thought Was Empty on New Year's Eve 56 XI CONTENTS Insect Heads- 57 Passing an Orchard by Train . 57 Driving My Parents Horne at Christmas 57 For My Son Noah, Ter? Years Old 58 At Midocean 58 In Rainy September 58 Gratitude to Old Teachers 58 Poem for James Wright 59 Sitting Down to Dinner 60 The Beehive 60 Warning to the Reader 61 GWENDOLYN BROOKS from A Street in Bronzeville the mother 63 a song in the front yard 64 of De Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery 64 The Lovers of the Poor 65 We Real Cool 67 An Aspect of Love, Alive in the Ice and Fire 68 To Don at Salaam 69 Telephone Conversations 69 To the Young Who Want to Die 70 To Black Women 70 LUCILLE CLIFTON admonitions • 73 miss rosie 73 [if i stand in my window] 74 the lost baby poem 74 god's mood 75 [come home from the movies] 76 to a dark moses 76 cutting greens 76 [at last we killed the roaches] , 77 homage to my hips 77 [there is a girl inside] - 78 forgiving my father . 78 [here is another bone to pick with you] 79 the lost women x 79 from tree ofiife 80 adam thinking eve thinking 80 lucifer understanding at last 80 • XII CONTENTS wishes for sons 81 poem to my uterus , 82 lumpectomy eve 82 telling our stories 83 leaving fox 83 ROBERT CREELEY The Business 85 I Know a Man 85 A Form of Women 86 A Wicker Basket 87 The Flower 88 The Rain 88 The Memory 89 The Rescue 89 The Language 90 The Window 91 On Vacation 92 Mother's Voice 92 First Love 93 JAMES DICKEY The Heaven of Animals 95 The Performance 96 The Hospital Window 97 In. the Mountain Tent 99 Sled Burial, Dream Ceremony 100 The Sheep Child 101 Adultery ,~ 103 Deer Among Cattle 104 False Youth: Autumn: Clothes of the Age 104 RITA DOVE Nexus 107 "Teach Us to Number Our Days" 107 Adolescence — III - 108 Then Came Flowers, 108 In the Bulrush 109 A Father Out Walking on the Lawn 109' from Thomas and Beulah Variation on Pain 110 Compendium 111 Daystar 111 Sunday Greens 112 Mississippi 113 X1U CONTENTS Silos N " 114 The Breathing, the Endless News 114 After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed "~~ " " 114 The Island Women of Paris 115 ALAN DUGAN Love Song: I and Thou 117 Tribute to Kafka for Someone Taken 118 General Prothalamion for Wartimes 118 To a Red-Headed1 Do-Good Waitress . 119 For Masturbation 120 Fabrication of Ancestors 120 Poem [What's the Balm] 121 Elegy for a Puritan Conscience 122 Prayer (God I need a job) 122 On Leaving Town 123 On Finding the Tree of Life 123 Last Statement for a Last Oracle 124 Closing Time at the Second Avenue Deli 124 ROBERT DUNCAN Poetry, A Natural Thing 127 Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal 128 Such Is the Sickness of Many a Good Thing 129 My Mother Would Be a Falconress 130 The Torso Passages 18 ' 132 from Dante Etudes 134 The Work 134 LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI [Constantly risking absurdity] 137 [Sometime during eternity] 138 [The pennycandystore beyond the El] 139 Monet's Lilies Shuddering 140 Making Love in Poetry 141 Ascending over Ohio- 141 from The Canticle of feck Kerouac 2 [There is a garden in the memory of America] 142 6 [And then Ti-Jehn with Joual tongue] 143 Uses of Poetry ""'--, 144 ISABELLA GARDNER Summers Ago 147 Lines to a Seagreen Lover 147 XIV CONTENTS In the Museum 148 The Widow's Yard _ 148 The Milkman 149 Letter from Slough Pond 150 Part of the Darkness 150 On Looking in the Looking Glass 152 The Accomplices 153 That Was Then 153 This Neighborhood 155 ALLEN GINSBERG Howl 157 America 164 Love Poem on Theme by Whitman 166 Psalm III 167 Wales Visitation 168 On Neal's Ashes 170 Fourth Floor, Dawn, Up All Night Writing Letters 170 Ode to Failure 171 LOUISE GLUCK Cottonmouth Country 173 Love Poem 173 Messengers 173 Thanksgiving 174 The Drowned Children 174 The Mirror 175 Mock Orange 175 Hyacinth 176 Celestial Music 178 The Untrustworthy Speaker 179 The Red Poppy 180 The White Lilies 180 DONALD HALL Christmas Eve in Whitneyville 183 Maple Syrup 184 Kicking the Leaves 186 Ox Cart Man 189 from The Day I Was Older The Pond 190 The Day 191 The Cup 191 XV CONTENTS When the Young Husband 191 Elbows 192 MICHAEL S. HARPER New Season 195 Black Study . 195 Here Where Coltrane Is 196 The Borning Room 197 Song: / Want a Witness 197 Nightmare Begins Responsibility 198 Grandfather 199 Healing Song 200 Motel Room 201 The Ghost of Soul-making 202 ROBERT HASS Letter 205 Bookbuying in the Tenderloin 206 Meditation at Lagunitas 207 The Pure Ones 207 Picking Blackberries with a Friend Who Has Been Reading Jacques Lacan 208 Late Spring 209 A Story About the Body 210 Privilege of Being 210 from Dragonflies Mating 5 [This morning in the early sun] 211 Happiness 212 Our Lady of the Snows 213 ROBERT HAYDEN Frederick Douglass ' 215 "From the Corpse Woodpiles, from the Ashes" 215 Those Winter Sundays 216 Night, Death, Mississippi 216 Monet's "Waterlilies" 218 Soledad 218 The Night-Blooming Cereus 219 The Prisoners > 221 The Tattooed Man 222 LINDA HOGAN Red Clay 225 The Truth' Is 225 Heartland 227 XVI CONTENTS To Light 227 Potatoes 228 Our Houses 229 The Young Boys 229 Two of Hearts 230 Skin Dreaming 231 Two 232 Great Measures 233 RICHARD HUGO Death of the Kapowsin Tavern 235 G.I. Graves in Tuscany 235 Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg 236 Montgomery Hollow 238 Montana Ranch Abandoned 238 The House on 15th S.W. 239 Farmer, Dying 240 The Hilltop 241 Here, but Unable to Answer 242 Distances 243 DAVID IGNATOW Communion 245 Sunday at the State Hospital 245 My Place 246 Epitaph 247 The Bagel 247 Rescue the Dead 248 Against the Evidence 248 First Coffin Poem 249 Waiting Inside 250 from Shadowingjhe Ground 1 [The world is so difficult to give up] 251 7 [This is the solution: to be happy with slaughter] 251 9 [Old men spend their days farting] 251 25 [Here I am] ' 251 33 [White-haired, tl walk in on my parents] 252 38 [I would be buried beside my parents] 252 42 [We were an aging couple] \ 252 43 [I' don't know which to mourn] •- 253 5 5 [How lonely it is to live] 253 59 [I just know I am growing near to death] 253 66 [Ignatow is dying] 254 67 [I live with my contradictions] 254 xvu CONTENTS It's a Sick Life 254 Wherever 255 Myself _ 255 RANDALL JARRELL The Black Swan 257 To the New World 257 90 North 259 The Snow-Leopard 260 The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner 261 Eighth Air Force 261 A Camp in the Prussian Forest 262 The Woman at the Washington Zoo 263 The Player Piano 264 Women on a Bus 265 DONALD JUSTICE Landscape with Little Figures 267 Counting the Mad 267 Variations for Two Pianos 268 Bus Stop 268 Men at Forty 269 The Missing Person 270 Hands 271 Poem [This poem is not addressed to you] 272 Variations on a Text by Vallejo 273 Sonatina in Yellow 274 Presences 275 Children Walking Home from School Through Good Neighborhood 275 Dance Lessons"bf the Thirties 276 Pantoum of the Great Depression 276 GALWAY KINNELL First Song 279: On Frozen Fields 279 Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond 280 The Bear ' 281 from The Book of Nightmares Under the Maud Moon 284 Last Songs 288 Saint Francis and the Sow 289 from When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone 4 [.