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 Zoo 263 The Player Piano 264 Women on a Bus 265 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 [. . .' one holds the snake] 290 10 ... and the hermit thrush calls] 290 XV11I CONTENTS

from "The Striped Snake and the Goldfinch" 3 [How much do I have left] 290

CAROLYN KIZER from Pro Femina Three [I will speak about women of letters] 293 The Ungrateful Garden 294 A Widow in Wintertime 295 The Copulating Gods 296 from The Blessing I [Daughter-my-mother] 297 III [Daughter, you lived through] 298 Bitch 299 Afternoon Happiness . 299 On a Line from Valery 301

YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA The Tongue Is 303 The Nazi Doll 303 Back Then 304 Villon/Leadbelly • 305 The Music That Hurts 305 "You and I Are Disappearing" 306 Thanks 306 Birds on a Powerline 307 Boys in Dresses 308 Banking Potatoes 309 Homo Erectus 310 Epithalamium 311

MAXINE KUMIN Morning Swim 313 Woodchucks 314 How It Is 314 The Longing to Be Saved 315 The Excrement Poem 316 The Grace of Geldings in Ripe Pastures 317 In the Pea Patch * • 318 Family Reunion 318 In the Park X 319 Nurture • 320 Cross-Cpuntry Skiing 320 Spring Training j 321 CONTENTS

STANLEY KUNITZ Single Vision 323 Father and Son 324 End of Summer 325 The War Against the Trees 325 Transformations 326 Robin Redbreast 327 The Artist 328 The Portrait 328 The Unquiet Ones 329 The Wellfleet Whale 329 The Abduction 333 My Mother's Pears 334

LI-YOUNG LEE The Gift , 337 Eating Alone 338 Eating Together 338 I Ask My Mother to Sing 339 My Indigo 339 This Hour and What Is Dead 340 The City in Which I Love You 341 A Story 346 You Must Sing 347

DENISE LEVERTOV The Jacob's Ladder 349 Hypocrite Women 349 A Psalm Praising the Hair of Man's Body 350 The Wings _- 351 The Altars in the Street 352 The Poem Unwritten 353 Ways of Conquest 353 Wedding-Ring 354 The Well 355 Stele (I—II c. B.C.) 355 Where Is the Angel? - 356 The Past III , 357

PHILIP LEVINE Animals Are Passirig from Our Lives 359 To a Child Trapped in a Barber Shop 359 Coming Home 360 XX CONTENTS

Starlight 361 You Can Have It 362 The House ^ 363 What Work Is 364 Among Children 365 The Simple Truth 366 JOHN LOGAN Three Moves 369 Spring of the Thief 370 Suzanne 373 Love Poem 374 from Poem in Progress Second Prelude. Reality in Albuquerque: The Son 375 Poem for My Brother 376 Avocado 377 Happening on Aegina 378 Believe It 378 ROBERT LOWELL Colloquy in Black Rock * 381 Christmas Eve Under Hooker's Statue 381 Memories of West Street and Lepke 382 Man and Wife 384 "To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage" 384 Skunk Hour 385 Eye and Tooth 386 History 387 Homecoming 388 Epilogue 389 WILLIAM MATTHEWS The Search Party 391 Blues for John Coltrane, Dead at 41 392 Swimming Off Cape Hatteras 392 Good Night 393 Pissing Off the Back of the Boat into the Nivernais Canal 393 Masterful 394 Puberty 395 Blue Nptes 396 Smoke Gets in Your Eyes 396 Onions 397 Men at My Father's Funeral 398 Practice, Practice, Practice 399 XXI CONTENTS

JAMES MERRILL Angel 401 After Greece __ 401 Laboratory Poem 403 Charles on Fire 403 from Up and Down The Emerald 404 The Victor Dog 406 Waterspout 407 A Downward Look 408 An Upward Look 409

W. S. MERWIN The Drunk in the Furnace 411 Dead Hand 411 Air 412 We Continue 412 Some Last Questions 413 December Night 414 For the Anniversary of My Death 414 Tergvinder's Stone 414 Do Not Die 416 Animula 416 A Door 416 A Family 417 Son 417 After the Alphabets . 418 Chord 418 Witness 419 In the Doorway 419 White Morning 420 Vixen 420

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE The World in Translation 423 Advice 423 Streets - 423 Spruce Street, Berkeley 424 Defining White 425 Arabic Coffee . 425 The Traveling Onion 426 From Here to There 427 Arabic ' 427 How Palestinians Keep Warm 428 xxu CONTENTS

Texas, the First Time 429 My Grandmother in the Stars 430 Darling 430

FRANK O'HARA Autobiographia Literaria 433 Poem [All the mirrors] 433 To My Dead Father 434 Meditations in an Emergency 435 Lebanon 436 Ballad 437 The Day Lady Died 438 Steps 439 Yesterday Down at the Canal 440 Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed] 441 Song 441

CHARLES OLSON Maximus, to Himself 443 I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You 444 The Librarian 448 Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [Withheld] 450 A Later Note on Letter #15 452 Moonset, Gloucester, December 1, 1957, 1:58 AM 453

MARGE PIERCY A Work of Artifice 455 The Skyscrapers of the Financial District Dance with Gasman 455 The Friend . 456 Barbie Doll' 456 To Be of Use 457 You Ask Why Sometimes I Say Stop 458 Digging In 459 Touch Tones 460 from My Mother's Body 3 [What is the mask of skin we wear . . .] 461 Bite into the Onion 462 Imaging > 463

SYLVIA PLATH The Colossus , ,465 Daddy, 466 Mary's Song 468 Nick and the Candlestick 469 XXI11 CONTENTS

Lady Lazarus 470 Cut 473 Witch Burning 474 Brasilia 475

ADRIENNE RICH Aunt Jennifer's Tigers 477 Planetarium 477 Diving into the Wreck 479 Splittings 481 from Twenty-One Love Poems II [I wake up in your bed] 483 XII [Sleeping, turning in turn like planets] 483 XXI [The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones] 484 Integrity 484 For a Friend in Travail 486 Reversion 487 Amends 488 from An Atlas of the Difficult World XIII (Dedications) 489

THEODORE ROETHKE The Premonition 491 Cuttings 491 Forcing House 491 Weed Puller 492 My Papa's Waltz 492 Elegy for Jane 493 The Waking " 494 I Knew a Woman 494 Meditation at Oyster River 495 In a Dark Time 497 In Evening Air 498

ANNE SEXTON Her Kind ,. 501 With Mercy for the Greedy 501 To a Friend Whose Work Has Come.to Triumph 502 The Abortion - 503 Man and, Wife 504 In Celebration of My Uterus 505 Us . 507 XXIV CONTENTS

The Fury of Cocks 507 Two Hands 508

CHARLES SIMJC Poem 511 Dismantling the Silence 511 Watermelons 512 Toy Factory 512 Classic Ballroom Dances 513 Northern Exposure 513 My Weariness of Epic Proportions 514 A Letter 514 The Big Machine 515 The Big War 516 Heights of Folly 516 Paradise 517 Crazy About Her Shrimp 518 Love Flea 518 Children of the Storm 519

LOUIS SIMPSON To the Western World 521 In the Suburbs 521 Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain 521 American Poetry 523 After Midnight 523 Luminous Night 524 The Silent Piano 524 from Sacred Objects 1. [I am taking part . . .] 525 2. [The light that shines . . .] 525 The People Next Door 526 Riverside Drive 528 Her Weekend in the Country 528

W. D. SNODGRASS April Inventory l 531 from Heart's Needle 9 [I'get numb and go in] •. 532 "After Experience Taught Me ..." 535 from The Fuehrer Bunker Magda Goebbels (1 May, 1945) 536 Dr. Joseph Goebbels (1 May, 1945) 538 XXV CONTENTS from Snow Songs i [one. now another.] 538 iii [White out; white out] 539 viii [Leaving the snow] 540 A Presence 540

GARY SNYDER Riprap 543 Milton by Firelight 543 Vapor Trails 544 Song of the Taste 545 I Went into the Maverick Bar 546 The Bath 546 As for Poets 549 Axe Handles 550

GARY SOTO from The Elements of San Joaquin Field 553 Rain 553 Summer 554 History . 554 Catalina Trevino Is Really from Heaven 556 TV in Black and White 557 Mexicans Begin Jogging 558 Envying the Children of San Francisco 558 Who Will Know Us? 560 Old House in My Fortieth Year 561

WILLIAM STAFFORD At the Bomb Testing Site 563 Traveling Through the Dark 563 Vocation 564 My Father: October 1942 564 Across Kansas 565 A Family Turn 565 An Introduction to Some Poems 566 Report from a Far Place 567 The Stick in the Forest 567 Temporary Facts 567 Assurance 568 Ode to Garlic 568 Answerers' 569 Things That Happen Where There Aren't Any People 569 XXVI CONTENTS

The Early Ones ! 570 Notice What This Poem Is Not Doing 571

GERALD STERN Lord, Forgive a Spirit 573 AtBickford's 573 The Cemetery of Orange Trees in Crete 574 The War Against the Jews 575 The Shirt Poem 575 Weeping and Wailing . 578 Romance 578 Three Hearts 579 Diary 579 One Gift 581

MARK STRAND Sleeping with One Eye Open 583 Old People on the Nursing Home Porch 584 Keeping Things Whole 584 The Mailman 585 Eating Poetry 586 The One Song 586 Shooting Whales 587 Always 589 The End 590 from Two De Chiricos 2. The Disquieting Muses 590 from The Next Time 1. [Nobody sees it happening] 591

LUCIEN STRYK Awakening 593 The Cannery 595 Summer 596 Letter to Jean-Paul Baudot, at Christmas 596 Farmer - 597 Cherries , 598 Exterminator 598 Watching War Movies , 599 Juggler 600 Visiting My Father 600

RICHARD WILBUR Advice to a Prophet 603 Love Calls Us to the Things of This World 604 XXVI1 CONTENTS

On the Eyes of an SS Officer 605 Year's End ' 605 A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra 606 Potato 608 A Dubious Night 609 Praise in Summer 610 Cottage Street, 1953 610 The Writer 611 Transit 612 Hamlen Brook 613

C. K. WILLIAMS It Is This Way with Men 615 Then the Brother of the Wind 615 They Warned Him Then They Threw Him Away 616 From My Window 616 The Critic 618 The Ladder 619 War 619 The Modern 620 Dominion: Depression 620 Villanelle of the Suicide's Mother 621 My Book, My Book 622

CHARLES WRIGHT The New Poem 625 Blackwater Mountain 625 Snow 626 Equation 626 Reunion 627 April 627 Driving Through Tennessee 627 from Three Poems for the New Year 628 2 [How strange it is to awake] 628 3 [All day at the window seat] 628 Night Journal 629 Chickamauga , 631 Blaise Pascal Lip-Syncs the Void 631 The Silent Generation 632 Winter-Worship 632

JAMES WRIGHT Saint Judas 635 Gondbve to the Poetrv of Calcium 635 XXV111 CONTENTS

As I Step over a Puddle at the End of Winter, I Think of an Ancient Chinese Governor 636 Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio 636 Lying in a Hammock at William Dufify's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota 637 The Jewel 637 Fear Is What Quickens Me 638 A Blessing 638 In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned 639 A Poem of Towers 640 Beautiful Ohio 640 Saying Dante Aloud 641 A Small Grove in Torri del Benaco 641 The Journey 641 Ohioan Pastoral 642 Lightning Bugs Asleep in the Afternoon 643

Contemporary American Poetry: The Radical Tradition (Essay) 645 Notes on the Poets 667 Criticism: A Selected Bibliography 737 A Note on the Editor 741 Acknowledgments 743