All ye need to know?
1. Rita Dove—Penguin editor reviewed by Helen Vendler in the NYRB
2. Terrance Hayes—In Dove’s best-selling anthology, and young
3. Kevin Young—In Dove’s anthology, and young
4. Amiri Baraka—In Dove’s anthology
5. Billy Collins—in the anthology
6. John Ashbery—a long poem in the anthology
7. Dean Young—not in the anthology
8. Helen Vendler—hated the anthology
9. Alan Cordle—Time’s masked Person-of-the-Year = Foetry.com’s once-anonymous Occupy Poetry protestor?
10. Harold Bloom—you can bet he hates the anthology
11. Mary Oliver—in the anthology
12. William Logan—meanest and the funniest critic (a lesson here?)
13. Kay Ryan—our day’s e.e. cummings
14. John Barr—the Poetry Man and “the Man.”
15. Kent Johnson—O’Hara and Koch will never be the same?
16. Cole Swensen—welcome to Brown!
17. Tony Hoagland—tennis fan
18. David Lehman—fun lovin’ BAP gate-keeper
19. David Orr—the deft New York Times critic
20. Rae Armantrout—not in the anthology
21. Seamus Heaney—When Harvard eyes are smilin’
22. Dan Chiasson—new reviewer on the block
23. James Tate—guaranteed to amuse
24. Matthew Dickman—one of those bratty twins
25. Stephen Burt—the Crimson Lantern
26. Matthew Zapruder—aww, everybody loves Matthew!
27. Paul Muldoon—New Yorker Brit of goofy complexity
28. Sharon Olds—Our Lady of Slightly Uncomfortable Poetry
29. Derek Walcott—in the anthology, latest T.S. Eliot prize winner
30. Kenneth Goldsmith—recited traffic reports in the White House
31. Jorie Graham—more teaching, less judging?
32. Alice Oswald—I don’t need no stinkin’ T.S. Eliot Prize
33. Joy Harjo—classmate of Dove’s at Iowa Workshop (in the anthology)
34. Sandra Cisneros—classmate of Dove’s at Iowa Workshop (in the anthology)
35. Nikki Giovanni—for colored girls when po-biz is enuf
36. William Kulik—not in the anthology
37. Ron Silliman—no more comments on his blog, but in the anthology
38. Daisy Fried—setting the Poetry Foundation on fire
39. Eliot Weinberger—poetry, foetry, and politics
40. Carol Ann Duffy—has Tennyson’s job
41. Camille Dungy—runs in the Poetry Foundation forest…
42. Peter Gizzi—sensitive lyric poet of the hour…
43. Abigail Deutsch—stole from a Scarriet post and we’ll always love her for it…
44. Robert Archambeau—his Samizdat is one of the more visible blogs…
45. Michael Robbins—the next William Logan?
46. Carl Phillips—in the anthology
47. Charles North—What It Is Like, New & Selected chosen as best of 2011 by David Orr
48. Marilyn Chin—went to Iowa, in the anthology
49. Marie Howe—a tougher version of Brock-Broido…
50. Dan Beachy-Quick—gotta love that name…
51. Marcus Bales—he’s got the Penguin blues.
52. Dana Gioia—he wants you to read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, so what r u waiting 4?
53. Garrison Keillor—the boil on the neck of August Kleinzahler
54. Alice Notley—Penguin’s Culture of One by this Paris-based author made a lot of 2011 lists
55. Mark McGurl—won Truman Capote Award for 2011’s The Program Era: Rise of Creative Writing
56. Daniel Nester—wrap your blog around my skin, yea-uh.
57. Yusef Komunyakaa—in the anthology
58. Adrienne Rich—in the anthology
59. Jeremy Bass— reviewed the anthology in the Nation
60. Anselm Berrigan—somebody’s kid
61. Travis Nichols—kicked us off Blog Harriet
62. Seth Abramson—poet and lawyer
63. Stephen Dunn—one of the best poets in the Iowa style
64. Philip Levine—Current laureate, poem recently in the New Yorker Movin’ up!
65. Ben Mazer—Does anyone remember Landis Everson?
66. Reb Livingston—Her No Tells blog rocks the contemporary scene
67. Marjorie Perloff—strutting avant academic
68. John Gallaher—Kent Johnson can’t get enough punishment on Gallaher’s blog
69. Fred Viebahn—poet married to the Penguin anthologist
70. James Fenton—said after Penguin review hit, Dove should have “shut up”
71. Rodney Jones—BAP poem selected by Dove riffs on William Carlos Williams’ peccadilloes
72. Mark Doty—no. 28’s brother
73. Cate Marvin—VIDA and so much more
74. Richard Wilbur—still hasn’t run out of rhyme
75. W.S. Merwin—no punctuation, but no punk
76. Jim Behrle—the Adam Sandler of po-biz
77. Bin Ramke—still stinging from the Foetry hit
78. Thomas Sayer Ellis—not in the anthology
79. Henri Cole—poetry editor of the New Republic
80. Meghan O’Rourke—Behrle admires her work
81. Anne Waldman—the female Ginsberg?
82. Anis Shivani—get serious, poets! it’s time to change the world!
83. Robert Hass—Occupy story in Times op-ed
84. Lyn Hejinian—stuck inside a baby grand piano
85. Les Murray—greatest Australian poet ever?
86. Sherman Alexie—is this one of the 175 poets to remember?
87. Geoffrey Hill—great respect doesn’t always mean good
88. Elizabeth Alexander—Frost got Kennedy, she got Obama
89. A.E. Stallings—A rhymer wins MacArthur!
90. Frank Bidart—in the anthology
91. Robert Pinsky—in the anthology
92. Carolyn Forche—in the anthology
93. Louise Gluck—not in the anthology
94. Keith Waldrop—his Hopwood Award paid her fare from Germany
95. Rosmarie Waldrop—her Hopwood helpled launch Burning Deck
96. C.D. Wright—born in the Ozark mountains
97. Forrest Gander—married to no. 96
98. Mark Strand—translator, surrealist
99. Margaret Atwood—the best Canadian poet of all time?
100. Gary B. Fitzgerald—the poet most likely to be remembered a million years from now
Scarriet 
David said,
December 31, 2011 at 7:59 pm
12. William Logan—meanest and the funniest critic (a lesson here?)
Indeed. I’ve just finished reading a couple of Logan’s reviews of Mark Doty’s work. Doty, in his Granta essay, “Insatiable”, describes the pleasure of being urinated upon by a muscular African American man. He ought to enjoy the Logan treatment.
Gary B. Fitzgerald said,
December 31, 2011 at 11:22 pm
Happy New Year
Conflicting view, this serene
yet busy egret, tall and white
against the green, seeking
sustenance along the wooded
thick-set border of the pond.
So small against the further shore
and the noisy background
of the tractor in the trees now
tearing down his home.
Conflicting time, one to consider
the new year’s hope and promise,
the losses of the last one,
and the worlds that soon will fall
as the tractor approaches.
We’ll mark them down with
the losses of the next one.
Copyright 2008 – Softwood-Seventy-eight Poems, Gary B. Fitzgerald
#65 support said,
January 6, 2012 at 10:57 am
65. Ben Mazer
http://jacketmagazine.com/40/mazer-poem.shtml
#72 support said,
January 6, 2012 at 11:01 am
72. Mark Doty
(link below goes to his poem “At the Gym”)
http://www.markdoty.org/id11.html
David said,
January 6, 2012 at 3:58 pm
I’ll never be able to do bench presses again.
thomasbrady said,
January 6, 2012 at 8:02 pm
I’ll never go to a public gym again.
#72 support said,
January 7, 2012 at 12:55 pm
72. Mark Doty
At the Gym
This salt-stain spot
marks the place where men
lay down their heads,
back to the bench,
and hoist nothing
that need be lifted
but some burden they’ve chosen
this time: more reps,
more weight, the upward shove
of it leaving, collectively,
this sign of where we’ve been:
shroud-stain, negative
flashed onto the vinyl
where we push something
unyielding skyward,
gaining some power
at least over flesh,
which goads with desire,
and terrifies with frailty.
Who could say who’s
added his heat to the nimbus
of our intent, here where
we make ourselves:
something difficult
lifted, pressed or curled,
Power over beauty,
power over power!
Though there’s something more
tender, beneath our vanity,
our will to become objects
of desire: we sweat the mark
of our presence onto the cloth.
Here is some halo
the living made together.
— Mark Doty
http://www.markdoty.org/
thomasbrady said,
January 7, 2012 at 1:53 pm
And for my next trick, I will write a poem on the glories of the public restroom…
And then I’ll steal the plums from your fridge…
David said,
January 7, 2012 at 4:08 pm
I went through a recent and very brief phase with Doty’s poetry, and even thought that I liked it. For the most part, it was a way of taming my judgmental attitude toward homosexual persons. I’ve moved beyond that phase (from a literary standpoint, at least) and now see Doty’s poetry for the shameless treacle that it is.
Tim Murphy is a far superior poet, and he gives me greater pause in my judgment of homosexuals.
David said,
January 7, 2012 at 6:55 pm
I think it’s interesting to compare the following two laments against bigotry:
Bigotry’s Victim
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I.
Dares the lama, most fleet of the sons of the wind,
The lion to rouse from his skull-covered lair?
When the tiger approaches can the fast-fleeting hind
Repose trust in his footsteps of air?
No! Abandoned he sinks in a trance of despair,
The monster transfixes his prey,
On the sand flows his life-blood away;
Whilst India’s rocks to his death-yells reply,
Protracting the horrible harmony.
II.
Yet the fowl of the desert, when danger encroaches,
Dares fearless to perish defending her brood,
Though the fiercest of cloud-piercing tyrants approaches
Thirsting–ay, thirsting for blood;
And demands, like mankind, his brother for food;
Yet more lenient, more gentle than they;
For hunger, not glory, the prey
Must perish. Revenge does not howl in the dead.
Nor ambition with fame crown the murderer’s head.
III.
Though weak as the lama that bounds on the mountains,
And endued not with fast-fleeting footsteps of air,
Yet, yet will I draw from the purest of fountains,
Though a fiercer than tiger is there.
Though, more dreadful than death, it scatters despair,
Though its shadow eclipses the day,
And the darkness of deepest dismay
Spreads the influence of soul-chilling terror around,
And lowers on the corpses, that rot on the ground.
IV.
They came to the fountain to draw from its stream
Waves too pure, too celestial, for mortals to see;
They bathed for awhile in its silvery beam,
Then perished, and perished like me.
For in vain from the grasp of the Bigot I flee;
The most tenderly loved of my soul
Are slaves to his hated control.
He pursues me, he blasts me! ‘Tis in vain that I fly:–
What remains, but to curse him, — to curse him and die?
Charlie Howard’s Descent
By Mark Doty
Between the bridge and the river
he falls through
a huge portion of night;
it is not as if falling
is something new. Over and over
he slipped into the gulf
between what he knew and how
he was known. What others wanted
opened like an abyss: the laughing
stock-clerks at the grocery, women
at the luncheonette amused by his gestures.
What could he do, live
with one hand tied
behind his back? So he began to fall
into the star-faced section
of night between the trestle
and the water because he could not meet
a little town’s demands,
and his earrings shone and his wrists
were as limp as they were.
I imagine he took the insults in
and made of them a place to live;
we learn to use the names
because they are there,
familiar furniture: faggot
was the bed he slept in, hard
and white, but simple somehow,
queer something sharp
but finally useful, a tool,
all the jokes a chair,
stiff-backed to keep the spine straight,
a table, a lamp. And because
he’s fallen for twenty-three years,
despite whatever awkwardness
his flailing arms and legs assume
he is beautiful
and like any good diver
has only an edge of fear
he transforms into grace.
Or else he is not afraid,
and in this way climbs back
up the ladder of his fall,
out of the river into the arms
of the three teenage boys
who hurled him from the edge –
really boys now, afraid,
their fathers’ cars shivering behind them,
headlights on – and tells them
it’s all right, that he knows
they didn’t believe him
when he said he couldn’t swim,
and blesses his killers
in the way that only the dead
can afford to forgive.
thomasbrady said,
January 7, 2012 at 9:05 pm
Shelley speaks for himself and his poem is universal; Doty speaks for someone else as a journalist du jour.
David said,
January 7, 2012 at 10:40 pm
Shelley’s poem is also more honest:
What remains, but to curse him, — to curse him and die?
Not the Christian response, to be sure, but it’s real..
Doty, on the other hand, in his faux canonization of Charlie Howard, invents a crowning act of heroic virtue as bogus as any that might be found in the most fanciful hagiography:
… and blesses his killers // in the way that only the dead / can afford to forgive.
What does that mean, anyway?
thomasbrady said,
January 8, 2012 at 2:43 pm
Yea, I think Doty is angling for a hollywood screen writing job.
Doty is clever, there’s no doubt about that. It probably kills him that his sister is a better poet than he is. “in the way that only the dead can afford to forgive” seems to be saying several things at once: 1. the living cannot afford to forgive those who try to kill them a) because this goes against survival instincts b) since the dead cannot forgive, the highest form of forgiveness is impossible 2. Charlie Howard is ‘dead’ to those who tried to kill him. So Doty is simultaneously saying Charlie Howard is a transcendent hero, that this transcendence is based only on the hatred and ignorance of others, and that transcendent heroism is impossible. It manages to be cynical and ‘fairy tale’ at once. It’s too ‘thought-out’ and it’s why even the good poets like Doty find only a tiny, specialized audience. Doty is a ‘great’ chef—whose food (dramatic ideas) cannot be eaten.
Shelley is the greater genius, not because he is ‘smarter,’ but because he implicitly understands the possibilities of poetry and drama in terms of honesty and accessibility.
marcusbales said,
January 9, 2012 at 2:38 am
Doty’s poetry is better than it sounds.
thomasbrady said,
January 9, 2012 at 5:21 pm
Precisely.
The ‘sound’ of poetry is how it ‘reaches’ its ‘target.’
Doty has a whole lot of magnificent powder—which blows up in his face.
#46 support said,
January 9, 2012 at 10:40 am
46. Carl Phillips
Like a Lion
Fallopian, estranged somehow,
forgetless against a backdrop of plain
sky, the limbs of the trees
fail, and rally. Everywhere
the kinds of patterns that
should be breakable, but by now it’s
been this way, it seems, forever. The wind
strikes. The wind dies down. To amplify
what’s true past recognition—never mind
the cost … Hard to believe, though I
do believe it, that that’s all
pleasure meant, once. Why not? Why
not be totally changed
into fire, as they used to say, I say
to no one. Cargo; rift; nostalgia; gold. I
fairly sway with my own aloneness, the only
half-blinding after all and, therefore,
not so unbearable flash of it, and the years
of my life, reducible to a shuddering
scant reflection in a body
of water nowhere visible, stir,
stir back.
http://poems.com/poem.php?date=15085
#26 Support said,
January 13, 2012 at 10:47 am
26. Matthew Zapruder
(reading his poem “Schwinn” in Sacto)
#26 Support said,
January 13, 2012 at 10:49 am
26. Matthew Zapruder
Schwinn
I hate the phrase “inner life.” My attic hurts,
and I’d like to quit the committee
for naming tornadoes. Do you remember
how easy and sad it was to be young
and defined by our bicycles? My first
was yellow, and though it was no Black
Phantom or Sting-Ray but merely a Varsity
I loved the afternoon it was suddenly gone,
chasing its apian flash through the neighborhoods
with my father in vain. Like being a nuclear
family in a television show totally unaffected
by a distant war. Then we returned
to the green living room to watch the No Names
hold our Over the Hill Gang under
the monotinted chromatic defeated Super
Bowl waters. 1973, year of the Black Fly
caught in my Jell-O. Year of the Suffrage Building
on K Street NW where a few minor law firms
mingle proudly with the Union of Butchers
and Meat Cutters. A black hand
already visits my father in sleep, moving
up his spine to touch his amygdala. I will
never know a single thing anyone feels,
just how they say it, which is why I am standing
here exactly, covered in shame and lightning,
doing what I’m supposed to do.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/241008
Quib said,
January 13, 2012 at 11:01 am
Oh the humanity!
thomasbrady said,
January 14, 2012 at 2:37 pm
This has a Dean Young energy. I enjoyed the bike part, but then the cute references and all the proper name punning overwhelmed. The super bowl reference (Miami’s perfect season) is when I threw up my hands. The poetry quickly morphed into nostalgic tom-foolery.
thomasbrady said,
January 15, 2012 at 5:07 pm
As to the video of Zapruder reading his poem:
When someone reads a poem to us, we must like it, and do, because of empathy.
Empathy will make anything good.
Empathy, the great enemy of beauty.
David said,
January 15, 2012 at 5:23 pm
Interestingly, it was after watching / listening to a video of Mark Doty reading a poem that I began to like his poetry. There was also the motive of wanting to empathize with people of Doty’s, er, persuasion, to become less judgmental. Along the way, I forgot to judge the quality of Doty’s poetry. Lessons learned reading this blog, combined with my disgust at Doty’s pornographic essay in Granta, made me take a second look.
thomasbrady said,
January 15, 2012 at 5:31 pm
‘the devil wears prada’
the devil reads his poem on video
LOL
#78 Support said,
January 13, 2012 at 11:31 am
78. Thomas Sayers Ellis
Sticks
My father was an enormous man
Who believed kindness and lack of size
Were nothing more than sissified
Signs of weakness. Narrow-minded,
His eyes were the worst kind
Of jury—deliberate, distant, hard.
No one could outshout him
Or make bigger fists. The few
Who tried got taken for bad,
Beat down, their bodies slammed.
I wanted to be just like him:
Big man, man of the house, king.
A plagiarist, hitting the things he hit,
I learned to use my hands watching him
Use his, pretending to slap mother
When he slapped mother.
He was sick. A diabetic slept
Like a silent vowel inside his well-built,
Muscular, dark body. Hard as all that
With similar weaknesses
—I discovered writing,
How words are parts of speech
With beats and breaths of their own.
Interjections like flams. Wham! Bam!
An heir to the rhythm
And tension beneath the beatings,
My first attempts were filled with noise,
Wild solos, violent uncontrollable blows.
The page tightened like a drum
Resisting the clockwise twisting
Of a handheld chrome key,
The noisy banging and tuning of growth.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/238662
thomasbrady said,
January 14, 2012 at 2:29 pm
Interesting how the poet feels compelled to compare the beats and breaths of his poem to the violence of his father—were this done humorously, it would be more effective, since we cannot help but notice the tremendous difference between a big man’s violence and poetic rhythm—yet the situation itself is anything but funny, thus precluding this strategy, unfortunately for the father, the poet—and his poem, which strains under the weight of the over-wrought metaphor. The poet who errs most in this way—who comes immediately to mind—is Seamus Heaney.
#21 Support said,
January 15, 2012 at 12:08 am
Act of Union
Seamus Heaney
I
To-night, a first movement, a pulse,
As if the rain in bogland gathered head
To slip and flood: a bog-burst,
A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
Your back is a firm line of eastern coast
And arms and legs are thrown
Beyond your gradual hills. I caress
The heaving province where our past has grown.
I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder
That you would neither cajole nor ignore.
Conquest is a lie. I grow older
Conceding your half-independant shore
Within whose borders now my legacy
Culminates inexorably.
II
And I am still imperially
Male, leaving you with pain,
The rending process in the colony,
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act sprouted an obsinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignmorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they’re cocked
At me across the water. No treaty
I foresee will salve completely your tracked
And stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again
thomasbrady said,
January 15, 2012 at 4:37 pm
yah. thanks, nice link demonstrating what i iz talking about…
heaney’s sex as ‘bogland’
metaphoric ewww.
too clever by half…
better just get to the point.
Let me try…
Mountains and Valleys Are Making Love
The rains, as I run into the valley, mist my face.
O Heaney, your metaphors are sticky
And fall into a sacred place.
With a Ph.D.
You ravage me.
David said,
January 15, 2012 at 4:52 pm
That’s ugly.
David said,
January 15, 2012 at 4:54 pm
I refer to Heaney’s sordid lines, not Tom’s reply.
#54 support said,
January 15, 2012 at 11:27 am
54. Alice Notley
http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/see-and-hear-poetry/h-n/alice-notley/
thomasbrady said,
January 15, 2012 at 4:49 pm
an acid trip of “fat, wigged men with demonic expressions…”
a nightmare of dead white males haunts the hippie feminist poet o let allen ginsberg sing you a lullaby we love you we do we know you must do what it takes to get by we obey your words, poet, even your eye
#85 support said,
February 21, 2012 at 10:22 am
85. Les Murray
http://www.lesmurray.org/
Fame
We were at dinner in Soho
and the couple at the next table
rose to go. The woman paused to say
to me, I just wanted you to know
I have got all your cookbooks
and I swear by them!
I managed to answer her, Ma’am
they’ve done you nothing but good!
Which was perhaps immodest
of whoever I am.
#66 support said,
February 22, 2012 at 10:50 am
66. Reb Livingston
http://notellpoetry.blogspot.com/2011/12/best-poetry-books-of-2011-reb.html
noochiecoochieman said,
February 23, 2012 at 1:32 pm
101. Joyce Carol Oates
Waiting on Elvis, 1956
This place up in Charlotte called Chuck’s where I
used to waitress and who came in one night
but Elvis and some of his friends before his concert
at the Arena, I was twenty-six married but still
waiting tables and we got to joking around like you
do, and he was fingering the lace edge of my slip
where it showed below my hemline and I hadn’t even
seen it and I slapped at him a little saying, You
sure are the one aren’t you feeling my face burn but
he was the kind of boy even meanness turned sweet in
his mouth.
Smiled at me and said, Yeah honey I guess I sure am.
noochinator said,
February 26, 2012 at 11:07 am
30. Kenneth Goldsmith
Click to access Traffic.pdf
noochinator said,
February 26, 2012 at 11:10 am
Goldsmith’s “Traffic” is long,
And, for all I know, good —
But I think I prefer Traffic
With Stevie Winwood:
R said,
February 26, 2012 at 12:48 pm
I am curious to know the story about how it came to be that he was invited to the White House.
thomasbrady said,
February 26, 2012 at 4:35 pm
He knew somebody
#32 support said,
February 27, 2012 at 10:36 am
http://oddityandlight.posterous.com/?tag=aliceoswald
32. Alice Oswald
VARIOUS PORTENTS
Various stars. Various kings.
Various sunsets, signs, cursory insights.
Many minute attentions, many knowledgeable watchers,
Much cold, much overbearing darkness.
Various long midwinter Glooms.
Various Solitary and Terrible stars.
Many Frosty Nights, many previously Unseen Sky-flowers.
Many people setting out (some of them kings) all clutching at stars.
More than one North star, more than one South star.
Several billion elliptical galaxies, bubble nebulae, binary systems.
Various dust lanes, various routes through varying thickness of Dark,
Many tunnels into deep space, minds going back and forth.
Many visions, many digitally enhanced heavens,
All kinds of glistenings being gathered into telescopes:
Fireworks, gasworks, white-streaked works of Dusk,
Works of wonder and of water, snowflakes, stars of frost …
Various dazed astronomers dilating their eyes,
Various astronauts setting out into laughterless earthlessness,
Various 5,000-year-old moon maps,
Various blindmen feeling across the heavens in Braille.
Various gods making beautiful works in bronze,
Brooches, crowns, triangles, cups and chains,
Various crucifixes, all sorts of nightsky necklaces.
Many Wise Men remarking the irregular weather.
Many exile energies, many low-voiced followers,
Watchers of whisps of various glowing spindles,
Soothsayers, hunters in the High Country of the Zodiac,
Seafarers tossing, tied to a star…
Various people coming home (some of them kings). Various headlights.
Two or three children standing or sitting on the low wall.
Various winds, the Sea Wind, the sound-laden Winds of Evening
Blowing the stars towards them, bringing snow.
R said,
February 29, 2012 at 9:40 am
Gorgeous poem. I am not familiar with Oswald – will be looking into her.
thomasbrady said,
February 29, 2012 at 2:45 pm
Gorgeous? Seems rather prosaic to me.
R said,
February 29, 2012 at 3:07 pm
Oh really? Prosaic? Mmkay,Tom. Well, we disagree.
R said,
February 29, 2012 at 3:15 pm
Why exactly are you finding this poem ‘prosaic’? The way it is written? The subject matter?
thomasbrady said,
February 29, 2012 at 9:09 pm
All that “various” and “many” and “more,” for a start.
#55 support said,
February 28, 2012 at 11:11 am
55. Mark McGurl
http://nplusonemag.com/the-zombie-renaissance-r-n
#36 support said,
February 29, 2012 at 9:27 am
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/From+%22The+Madman+Sings%22.-a0225573383
36. William Kulik
The Eye Behind
My secretary: what a girl! You never know what she’ll do next. Like coming to work in a blouse two sizes too small, top two buttons undone. Even better, with no skirt on; just a pair of ice-blue panties (black, one guy insists) she keeps tugging at, snapping the elastic where it circles her upper thigh, right beneath her cute round ass with its tight little tuck (especially in those four-inch stilettos we love to see her wear). Imagine what it’s like to watch as she fingers the lacy waistband, drawing it slowly down to reveal a glimpse of pubic hair, thick and dark (or is it thin and light?). As she does her jobs—filing, taking dictation, reading email (who, we wonder, is sending her all those messages?), her silky brown (or maybe it’s blonde?) hair falls lightly on her shoulders. But it’s equally possible it could be tied in a bun or braided or fastened by a glittering black clip, an exotic Polynesian comb or an elegant silver chain that barely tinkles as she parades back and forth all day long, the sensuous apprehension of baby eyes upon her
#65 support said,
March 4, 2012 at 12:36 pm
http://toddswift.blogspot.com/2011/09/new-poem-by-ben-mazer.html
65. Ben Mazer
Untitled
Their floors and floors of unknown lives conspire
to neon, darkness, fog and rain and fire.
* * *
All lay in bed, and toss in negligees
or monogrammed pajamas, have their ways
of trimming their hair or doctoring their water.
One stares in blankness at the jewels he bought her,
goes to the window, braced to see the fog.
One fingers old certificates of stock,
and ties his tie. Although they all will die,
each one looks fabulous in evening dress,
and sloughs off the incipient duress.
The city is reflected in the sky,
has its own taxis, bars, Empire State
building. Theirs is a common fate.
The monstrous outgrowth of a humble start
crushes the spirit, suffocates the heart.
#41 support said,
March 5, 2012 at 10:44 am
41. Camille Dungy
Requiem
Sing the mass—
light upon me washing words
now that I am gone.
The sky was a hot, blue sheet the summer breeze fanned
out and over the town. I could have lived forever
under that sky. Forgetting where I was,
I looked left, not right, crossed into a street
and stepped in front of the bus that ended me.
Will you believe me when I tell you it was beautiful—
my left leg turned to uselessness and my right shoe flung
some distance down the road? Will you believe me
when I tell you I had never been so in love
with anyone as I was, then, with everyone I saw?
The way an age-worn man held his wife’s shaking arm,
supporting the weight that seemed to sing from the heart
she clutched. Knowing her eyes embraced the pile
that was me, he guided her sacked body through the crowd.
And the way one woman began a fast the moment she looked
under the wheel. I saw her swear off decadence.
I saw her start to pray. You see, I was so beautiful
the woman sent to clean the street used words
like police tape to keep back a young boy
seconds before he rounded the grisly bumper.
The woman who cordoned the area feared my memory
would fly him through the world on pinions of passion
much as, later, the sight of my awful beauty pulled her down
to tears when she pooled my blood with water
and swiftly, swiftly washed my stains away.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/185787
#41 critique said,
March 5, 2012 at 10:46 am
For this judgment I may be deserving of the lash,
But this poem reminded me of J.G. Ballard’s Crash
#47 support said,
March 6, 2012 at 1:41 pm
47. Charles North
(Link below goes to North’s “Prometheus at Fenway”)
http://poems.com/poem.php?date=15263
#38 support said,
March 7, 2012 at 10:36 am
38. Daisy Fried
She Didn’t Mean to Do It
Oh, she was sad, oh, she was sad.
She didn’t mean to do it.
Certain thrills stay tucked in your limbs,
go no further than your fingers, move your legs through their paces,
but no more. Certain thrills knock you flat
on your sheets on your bed in your room and you fade
and they fade. You falter and they’re gone, gone, gone.
Certain thrills puff off you like smoke rings,
some like bell rings growing out, out, turning
brass, steel, gold, till the whole world’s filled
with the gonging of your thrills.
But oh, she was sad, she was just sad, sad,
and she didn’t mean to do it.
More #38 support said,
March 7, 2012 at 10:38 am
38. Daisy Fried
(Link below goes to her poem “Torment”)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/241240
#46 support said,
March 10, 2012 at 1:19 pm
46. Carl Phillips
Leda, After the Swan
Perhaps,
in the exaggerated grace
of his weight
settling,
the wings
raised, held in
strike-or-embrace
position,
I recognized
something more
than swan, I can’t say.
There was just
this barely defined
shoulder, whose feathers
came away in my hands,
and the bit of world
left beyond it, coming down
to the heat-crippled field,
ravens the precise color of
sorrow in good light, neither
black nor blue, like fallen
stitches upon it,
and the hour forever,
it seemed, half-stepping
its way elsewhere—
then
everything, I
remember, began
happening more quickly.
Anonymous said,
March 12, 2012 at 6:49 am
The Gate
BY MARIE HOWE
I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world
would be the space my brother’s body made. He was
a little taller than me: a young man
but grown, himself by then,
done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,
rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water.
This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I’d say, What?
And he’d say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I’d say, What?
And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.
Anonymous said,
March 12, 2012 at 7:12 am
Anonymous said,
March 12, 2012 at 7:22 am
Anonymous said,
March 12, 2012 at 7:52 am
#71 support said,
March 12, 2012 at 9:42 am
71. Rodney Jones
PLEA FOR FORGIVENESS
The old man William Carlos Williams, who had been famous for kindness
And for bringing to our poetry a mannerless speaking,
In the aftermath of a stroke was possessed by guilt
And began to construct for his wife the chronicle
Of his peccadilloes, a deplorable thing, a mistake,
Like all pleas for forgiveness, but he persisted
Blindly, obstinately, each day, as though in the end
It would relieve her to know the particulars
Of affairs she must have guessed at and tacitly permitted:
For she encouraged his Sunday drives across the river;
His poems suggest as much, anyone can see it.
The thread, the binding of the voice, is a single hair
Spliced from the different hairs of different lovers,
And it clings to his poems, blonde and dark,
Tangled and straight, and runs on beyond the page.
I carry it with me, saying, “I have found it so.”
It is a world of human blossoming, after all.
But the old woman, sitting there like rust —
For her, there would be no more poems of stolen
Plums, of round and firm trunks of young trees,
Only the candor of the bedpan and the fouled sheet,
When there could no longer have been any hope
That he would recover, when the thing she desired
Was not his health so much as his speechlessness.
#60 support said,
March 13, 2012 at 10:43 am
60. Anselm Berrigan
http://www.shampoopoetry.com/ShampooTwentyfour/berrigan.html
#95 support said,
March 20, 2012 at 10:33 am
The Round World
BY ROSMARIE WALDROP
nature’s inside, says Cézanne and
frightening
I do not like the fleshy
echo
even so, it is
after this close proof
vision is made
of matter
another mirror
it’s possible
the eye knows
even where there should have been a lake
this optic an illusion
look
at the cat, his changing
shapes
a habit
light
color
composition
the subject more than meets the
situation, always
looking
at our own eye