Poems

• Robert Burns, Composed In August (1980)
• Robert Frost, Nothing New (1918)
• Ada Limon, What I Didn’t Know Before (2018)
• Christian Wiman, Prelude in Grey Major (2024)
• Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things (2012)
• Ernest Lawrence Thayer (1863 – 1940), Casey at the Bat
• Seamus Heaney, Mint
• Raymond Carver (1988), Late Fragment
• Joanne Kyger, Night Palace
• Gertrude Stein reads poem If I Had Told Him a Completed Portrait of Picasso
  • “It gives words an oddly new intimate flavor and at the same time makes familiar words seem almost like strangers, doesn’t it,” he said. One works with words and one would like words that have a taste on the lips, that have a perfume to the nostrils, rattling words one can throw into a box and shake, making a sharp, jingling sound, words that, when seen on the printed page, have a distinct arresting effect upon the eye, words that when they jump out from under the pen one may feel with the fingers as one might caress the cheeks of his beloved. And what I think is that these books of Gertrude Stein’s do in a very real sense recreate life in words. There is a city of English and American words and it has been a neglected city. Strong broad shouldered words, that should be marching across open fields under the blue sky, are clerking in little dusty dry goods stores, young virgin words are being allowed to consort with whores, learned words have been put to the ditch digger’s trade. Only yesterday I saw a word that once called a whole nation to arms serving in the mean capacity of advertising laundry soap.
• Jane Kenyon, Having it Out with Melancholy (1993)
• Friedrich Hölderlin (1808), The Rhine
• Mahmud Shabistari (1317), A Fancied Dot
• Fernando Pessoa, poem
• Arthur Sze (1998), The Shapes of Leaves
• W. H. Auden (1937), As I Walked Out One Evening
• Walt Whitman (1856), Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
• Rudyard Kipling (1897), Recessional
• Ijeoma Umebinyuo, poem from Questions For Ada
• Muriel Rukeyser (1974), Islands
• Ron Padgett (2001), Fairy Tale
• William Stafford (1993), Are you Mr. William Stafford?
• William Stafford (1962), At the Aesthetics Meeting
• Nadia de Vries (2017), Technological Sublime
• Shy Watson (2021), WAKING DREAM #2
• Emily Berry (2022), Gods
• Ed Dorn (1964), Daffodil Song
• W. H. Auden (1938), Musee des Beaux Arts
• Margaret Atwood (1970), from The Creatures of the Zodiac
• Alabaster dePlume, Go Forward in the Courage of Your Love
• Kobayashi Issa, owl haiku
• Joseph Ceravolo (1979), Ghosts of Spring
• Ruth Krauss (1970), Poem
• Niina Pollari (2022), from The Frog
• Muriel, Rukeyser (1968), Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars) (1968)
• Richard Brautigan (1967), A Mid-February Sky Dance
• Diane Wakoski (1972), My Little Heart Pops Out, Like Springs
• Joshua Poteat (2015), Tintype
• Joseph Ceravolo (1979), Infinite Thunder
• Michael Ondaatje (1998), Driving with Dominic in the Southern Province We See Hints of the Circus
• Saba (c. 1250), Luxury
• Eileen Myles (2001), And
• Garous Abdolmalekian, Pattern
• Langston Hughes (1951), Harlem
• Richard Wright (1960), Haiku 519
• W. H. Auden (1939), Epitaph on a Tyrant
• Eileen Myles (1997), Road Warrior
• Richard Wright (1960), Haiku 526
• Tom Snarsky (2021), Song
• Ann Kim (2012), A Cold November Night
• Crispin Best (2019), One Good Thing
• Jim Moore (2021), A Young Man, a Stranger, Smiled at Me
• W.S. Merwin (1988), Conqueror
• Li Bai, Waking drunk on a spring day
• Leonard Cohen, My Career
• Cody-Rose Clevidence, from Nectaries
• Jim Harrison, I Believe
• Michael Sheen performing the Welsh poetry of Dylan Thomas in Under Milk Wood (video)
• Diane di Prima, from Revolutionary Letter #2
• Ursula K. Le Guin, The People
• William Shakespeare, Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
• Richard Siken (2015), Turpentine
• Philip Larkin, Aubade
• Laura Gilpin, Two-Headed Calf
• James Galvin, About
• Elaine Kahn (2020), from Somewhere There’s a Nothing I’m a Part Of
• Hubei Qingwa (2016), The Moon’s Professional Life
• Antonio Porchia (1943), The cold
• E.E. Cummings (1931), i sing of Olaf
• Rachelle Toarmino (2020), from I Said Okay
• Robert Creeley (1966), A Prayer
• Anne Carson (2020), O Small Sad Ecstasy of Love
• James Tate (1970), The Immortals
• Henry David Thoreau, I Knew A Man By Site