Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955) was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and the New York Law School, and worked for most of his life as an attorney with the Hartford Insurance Company and its predecessors, and was a vice president at the time of his death. (He turned down a faculty position at Harvard since it would have required him to quit his vice presidency at the Hartford.)

A leading light of the American Modernism, Stevens published nine collections of poetry, including Collected Poems (1954), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Four collections were published after his death, as were three collections of his letters. His poetry influenced such poets as James Merrill, Donald Justice, John Hollander, John Ashberry, Jorie Graham and many others.

This poem is from Opus Posthumous, published in 1957.

The Sick Man

Bands of black men seem to be drifting in the air,
In the South, bands of thousands of black men,
Playing mouth organs in the night or, now, guitars.

Here in the North, late, late, there are voices of men,
Voices in chorus, singing without words, remote and deep,
Drifting choirs, long movements and turnings of sounds.

And in a bed in one room, alone, a listener
Waits for the unison of the music of the drifting bands
And the dissolving chorals, waits for it and imagines

The words of winter in which these two will come together,
In the ceiling of the distant room, in which he lies,
The listener, listening to the shadows, seeing them,

Choosing out of himself, out of everything within him,
Speech for the quiet, good hail of himself, good hail, good hail,
The peaceful, blissful words, well-tuned, well-sung, well-spoken.

Billy Collins has been called the most popular living poet in America, and with good reason: he’s been more than a little successful as a poet, which in some literary quarters is rather unforgiveable.

Collins has been U.S. Poet Laureate twice (2001 and 2002) and New York Poet Laureate (2004); received fellowships for the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for Arts and the John Guggenheim Foundation; was named Poet of the Year by Poetry magazine in 1994; and received the Mark Twain Award for Humor in poetry, among many other honors and distinctions. He is Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College in the Bronx. Collins was born in 1941 in New York City, received his B.A. degree from College of the Holy Cross and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California-Riverside. He has published 13 collections of poems and had served as editor for three anthologies.

This poem is from The Trouble with Poetry (2005).

The Lodger

After I had beaten my sword into a ploughshare,
I beat my ploughshare into a hoe,
then beat the hoe into a fork,
which I used to eat my dinner alone.

And when I had finished dinner,
I beat my fork into a toothpick,
which I twirled on my lips
then flicked over a low stone wall

as I walked along the city river
under the clouds and stars,
quite happy but for the thought
that I should have beaten that toothpick into a shilling

so I could buy a newspaper to read
after climbing the stairs to my room.

Marcus Goodyear is senior editor for TheHighCalling.org (sponsored by Foundations for Laity Renewal) and FaithintheWorkplace.com (sponsored by Christianity Today). His poetry has been published in Geez Magazine, 32 Poems and Stonework Journal. Barbies at Communion: and other poems, his first volume of poetry, was published in 2010 and selected as a notable book by Englewood Review of Books. He blogs at Good Word Editing.

This poem is from Barbies at Communion.

Parable of the Sower

Judgment comes like weeds
in a lawn where the mower
sets his machine so low
it scalps the grass
and makes room for ugly
broad leaf and dollar weeds
and worse – prickles and stickers
that turn the outside wild
again, a place we can’t walk
bare foot. Slip-on sandals
aren’t even enough unless
our feet calluses are so thick we can’t feel
the spines and poisons against
the sides of our soles.
But then we plow through fields
like grounded bees spreading seed,
sowing forms of life we’d never choose,
the fallen world redeemed by our shoes.

Related:

Marcus Goodyear’s interview with TweetSpeak Poetry.

Reviews of Barbies at Communion at Amazon.com.

Pablo Neruda was the pen name of Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto (1904-1973), a Chilean poet and diplomat whom Gabriel Garcia Marquez called “the great poet of the 20th century in any language.” The article on him at Wikipedia contains a wealth of information about his life, family, involvement in the Spanish Civil War, embrace and later rejection of Stalinism, the speech he made in Chile in 1948 which forced him into hiding and then exile, and many other facets of his life. The Poetry Foundation also has a good profile on the poet, as does poets.org.

An interesting note: the 1994 Italian movie Il Postino (The Postman) is a story of how a postman’s life is changed when he strikes up a friendship with a poet in exile on Sardinia – and that poet is Pablo Neruda, who indeed spent several years of exile there.

The author of numerous works of poetry, Neruda received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. This poem is taken from 100 Love Sonnets, or Cien sonetos de amor, which Neruda dedicated to his wife, Matilde Urrutia (the poems were translated by Stephen Tapscott and published by the University of Texas Press).

Sonnet LXXIII

Maybe you’ll remember that razor-faced man
who slipped out from the dark like a blade
and – before we realized – knew what was there:
he saw smoke and concluded fire.

The pallid woman with black hair
rose like a fish from the abyss,
and the two of them built up a contraption,
armed to the teeth, against love.

Man and woman, they felled mountains and gardens,
they went down to the river, the scaled the walls,
they hoisted their atrocious artillery up the hill.

Then love knew it was called love.
And when I lifted my eyes to your name,
Suddenly your heart showed me my way.

L.L. Barkat is a writer, editor, poet, columnist, speaker and entrepreneur. She is the author of Stone Crossings: Finding Grace in Hard and Hidden Places, God in the Yard: Spiritual Practice for the Rest of Us, and InsideOut: Poems. Barkat is Managing Editor at The High Calling and staff writer for International Arts Movement’s The Curator. She’s also a co-editor here at TweetSpeak Poetry.

This poem is taken from InsideOut: Poems, published in 2009 by International Arts Movement.

Foyer

Who looks
at the new straw
hat, remembering
Grandma,

how she beat
brazen rays each
day by sneaking
under a brim

like that. And who
notices the wrought
iron roses now
hung askew

on our cherry
coat rack; she
wrung pits
out of red fruit

too, swatted flies,
rolled tart sweet
flesh, juice into
crust, but that is

another story;
I am asking you
about the roses
broken, and a

missing screw,
but you are busy
arranging tailored
black wool on

a cool hook worn
brass blue, we’re
just in the hall,
after all, we’re just

passing through.

The career of William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) spanned two centuries, and he became one of the foremost figures of English literature. He was a major force behind the Irish Literary Revival and was a co-founder of the famed Abbey Theater in Dublin. Active in politics, drama and literature, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923. Born in Dublin, he died in France and is buried there.

This poem is taken from Early Poems, published in 1993 as a Dover Thrift Edition. Much of his early poetry was influenced by Irish folklore and myth.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavement’s gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) wrote poetry for more than 70 years, and has the distinction of being the first black author to win the Pulitzer Prize (in 1950 for Annie Allen: Poems). She also received numerous other honors and recognitions, including a nomination for the National Book Award, the National Medal for the Arts, serving as poet laureate of Illinois and poet laureate of the United States, the Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and more than 75 honorary degrees from colleges and universities.

This poem is from Selected Poems (2006) but was first published in The Bean Eaters (1960).

A Lonely Love

Let it be alleys. Let it be a hall
Whose janitor javelins epithet and thought
To cheapen hyacinth darkness that we sought
And played we found, rot, make the petals fall.
Let it be stairways, and a splintery box
Where you have thrown me, scraped me with your kiss,
Have honed me, have released me after this
Cavern kindness, smiled away our shocks.
That is the birthright of our lonely love
In swaddling clothes. Not like that Other one.
Not lit by any fondling star above.
Not found by any wise man, either. Run.
People are coming. They must not catch us here
Definitionless in this strict atmosphere.

Brendan Galvin has published 21 books and chapbooks of poetry. He graduated from Boston College in 1960 with a B.S. degree in the natural sciences, and received his MFA and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Massachusetts. One work, Atlantic Flyway (1980) was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize and Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005 (2005) was a National Book Award finalist.

Many of Galvin’s poems reflect his interest and background in the nature and the natural sciences. “Pollen” was first published in Great Blue: New and Selected Poems in 1990 and included in Habitat in 2005.

“Pollen”

As when a breeze
slips off the water
and crosses a headland,
and even those limp zeroes
wavelets make, fragile as
smoke rings, erase themselves
from the viscid surface,
and sails slacken,
so the air
this afternoon slackens,
and the page blurs
under your eyes
as the massive invisible
orgy of flower
quickening flower
sifts through the atmosphere,
drifts at its peak,
rose to rose,
and from the roadside locust trees
birds stagger, drunk,
daring tires, kneeling in the grass.

Insistent as midges, grains
tease at your nostrils,
and you cry onto the page
for no human reason.
And if somewhere
a boy’s arm breaks the chains
of this lassitude
long enough
to toss a stone at a squirrel,
that pine exploding into gold
tilts you toward sleep
lightly. You whisper
how wings and the shadows of
wings circle you,
surrounding the years.

Richard Beban spent 30 years as a journalist and televisiona nd screen writer, and then became a poet. Since 1994, his poetryhad been published in numerous literary journals and websites and in 16 anthologies. He’s also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and co-authored numerous non-fiction books and collections. He and his wife, writer Kaaren Kitchell, live in Los Angeles.

His three published books of poetry include I Burn for You (1999), What the Heart Weighs (2004) and Young Girl Eating a Bird (2006). This poem is taken from What the Heart Weighs.

My Parents Watch the July Fourth Parade

Perhaps they were both dyslexic;
never clear on the difference
between marital & martial.
Thought the wedding march was
by John Phillip Sousa or Francis
Scott Key – bombs bursting in
the living room, kitchen, beat of
muffled drums, sharp staccato
racket of sticks on rims, crack of
ribs, crack of small arms fire,
small children abandoned in the
corners like spent shell casings.
The stars & stripes forever
imprinted – stars as blows hit the
skull, stripes from the slashing leather
belt across the backs of thighs. Red
welts, white skin, blue bruises never
shown at school where you stood for the
Pledge of Allegiance & learned how fine
a country this is & why our parents fought
so hard to keep it free. Learned the price
of war was high, but teacher said it
was worth it. Look at all we had
that children in other countries wanted.

Caroline Dellosso may be the youngest poet you’ve never heard of, but you will hear of her one day. She’s eight years old, and she’s started to write poetry. Her dad, author Mike Dellosso, decided to post a couple of her poems on his web site, and we were so impressed with what a good poet she already is that we decided to feature her here for National Poetry Month. Caroline lives with her family in Pennsylvania.

We have two poems by Caroline Dellosso.

                    Me In the Mirror
              My reflection in the mirror
                     Told me one day.
                           “I’ll see you.”
                          And he did.
              One day I walked past him
                      And we both said,
             “Wait, where is my mom?”
                      And finally I said,
         “Oh, she went to the bathroom,
         Lets’ talk about something else.”
                     And he said, “OK.”
        I said, “Let’s talk about you doing
               Everything I do and say.”
                                                                               “No way!”
                                                                            Sigh, oh well.

           Ants in My Pants
       I have ants in my pants,
                  I really do.
    They’re always laying eggs.
         They run in my pants
        And it tickles, because
       I have ants in my pants!
    And the ants aren’t moving
            to different pants.
        My mom doesn’t believe
         I have ants in my pants.
I said, “I never changed my pants,
                                                    That’s why
                                           I have ants in my pants!”

We have a winner in our giveaway of Neruda’s Memoirs: Poems by Maureen Doallas. Number were assigned to the comments, written on slips of paper, each slip folded over twice, and then one was pulled out of a bowl.

And the winner is Kelly Sauer. Congratulations, Kelly!

In Touch, the monthly magazine of In Touch Ministries, now features work by contemporary Christian poets, including recent contributions from Nicholas Samaras, Anya Silver, Luci Shaw, and Robert Siegel (Samaras, Silver and Shaw have been featured here at TweetSpeak Poetry as part of National Poetry Month). They’re currently seeking poetry submissions—by known and unknown voices—that explore the beauties and complexities of life in Christ and reveal how poetry enhances relationship with God, neighbor and creation.

If you’re interested, please send three to five unpublished poems (PDF or Word .doc files) to poetry@intouch.org. Due to space limitations, shorter poems (30 lines or less) are preferred. Payment is $50 per poem. To receive a digital sample of the magazine, send an e-mail inquiry to the address above.

You can view the magazine online at In Touch Magazine.

David Wheeler is a musician, essayist and poet. He’s produced an album entitled “There, There” and his writing has appeared at the Burnside Writers collective, The Morning News, the Pacific Northwest Reader (an essay collection) and The High Calling. He blogs at Dave Writes Right.

His first collection, Contingency Plans: Poems, published in 2010, was named to the Longlist of the Indie Booksellers Awards. This poem is taken from that collection.

Awake! Revival

And once these modern day fatigues are burned
we’ll start undrawing drapes and leave them piled
against the empty bureau drawers; unfiled
manila documents; disturbed, upturned,
and potted plants; corroded lanterns; urns
that spill their contents; shattered marble tiles;
and hardwood planks misshaped and warped; all while
we dress in tails for me, and you, couture.

Our drowse abandoned altogether there
is left to blaze along with everything;
and, we in motorcade display arrive
atop the high-rise over everywhere
to see the beacon light and rising string
of smoke from our unraveled former lives.

Related:

Talking with David Wheeler, interview at Faith, Fiction, Friends.

The Real Wonder of Writing is Alchemy, interview at The High Calling.

An Interview with David Wheeler, here at TweetSpeak Poetry.

Review of Contingency Plans at Faith, Fiction, Friends.

Former U.S. Poet Laureate (2008-2010) Kay Ryan has received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for The Best of It: New and Selected Poems. And at virtually the same time as the Pulitzer announcment, the Concord Monitor and the New Hampshire Writers Project announced that she had received the $5,000 Hall-Kenyon Prize in American Poetry.

Ryan received her B.A. and M.A. degrees from UCLA, and has won numerous prizes and fellowships. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Yale Review, Paris Review, American Scholar, The Threepenny Review, Parnassus and many other publications and anthologies. One of her poems has been permanently installed at New York’s Central Park Zoo. She lives in Marin County, California.

The following poem is from her 2000 collection Say Uncle:

Patience

Patience is
wider than one
once envisioned,
with ribbons
of rivers
and distant
ranges and
tasks undertaken
and finished
with modest
relish by
natives in their
native dress.
Who would
have guessed
it possible
that waiting
is sustainable—
a place with
its own harvests.
Or that in
time’s fullness
the diamonds
of patience
couldn’t be
distinguished
from the genuine
in brilliance
or hardness.

Related:

Ryan’s profile page at poets.org.

Her profile page at the Poetry Foundation.

Ryan reads the poem “Home to Roost” (audio)/

Barbara Chai at the Wall Street Journal interviews Ryan on the Pultizer Prize.

Cyra Dumitru was born in The Hague, Holland and received degrees in English from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1979 and the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1995. Her professional life has included residencies as a Poet-in-the-Schools as well as years of medical writing in Virginia and San Antonio. A passionate swimmer, she currently works as a poet, author of memoir, and meditative essay. She lives near San Antonio.

Her volumes of poetry include What the Body Knows (1999), Listening to Light (2003) and remains (2008). This poem is from Listening to Light: Voice Poems (which I found in the bookstore at Laity Lodge, in the Hill Country of Texas).

Set

She has found him,
I can feel it.
Even in death they love
blazing green that falls

short of my desert.
I have always been the divided one –
buried in dunes
in waves of salt water
one edge never touching the other.

Nephthys pulls away even further,
grows more deeply dark
since I banished Anubis below.
She doesn’t even want the moon.
Isis claims that, so hungry for light.

If only the boy had been my son!
A son to bring my scattered lands
under one rule,
a son to be an orchard
upon my lonely deserts,

an abundance that might
make me feel whole again.

George Bilgere is the author of several books of poetry, including The Going (1994), Haywire (2006), The Good Kiss (2010) and The White Museum (2010). Haywire won the 2006 May Swenson Poetry Award. Bilgere has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the Society of Midland Authors, the Fulbright Foundation and the Witter Bynner Foundation. He received a Pushcart Prize in 2009, and he currently teaches at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.

This poem is from The White Museum.

Blank

When I came to my mother’s house
the day after she had died
it was already a museum of her
unfinished gestures. The mysteries
from the public library, due
in two weeks. The half-eaten square
of lasagna in the fridge.

The half-burned wreckage
of her last cigarette,
and one red swallow
of wine in a lipsticked
glass beside her chair.

Finally, a blue Bic
on a couple of downs
and acrosses left blank
in the Sunday crossword,
which actually had the audacity
to look a little smug
at having, for once, won.

Robert Lee Brewer is the poetry columnist for Writer’s Digest Magazine. He has just published his first chapbook, Enter. He read his poems at the recent Blue Ridge Writers Conference and was a National Featured Poet at the Austin International Poetry Festival. He lives with his family in suburban Atlanta, Georgia.

Brewer blogs at My Name is Not Bob. This poem is from his chapbook.

Father’s shoes

After midnight. Your legs
and right ankle are sore.
You’ve been running along
the river again. You saw
two new things. First,
a toy soldier. Which reminded
you of your father after
he returned from the casinos
in Atlantic City. Gone
a whole week once. So that
you began to wonder. Then,
there was the time he left
on his 10-speed. Later,
he called on a pay phone
in Indiana. Near a park
wanting picjed up. You
remember your mother packing
you and your brothers
in the car. Pretending
nothing was wrong, not
a damn thing missing,
all the while waiting
for the other shoe to drop.

For National Poetry Month, we’re giving away a copy of Neruda’s Memoirs: Poems by Maureen Doallas. Leave a comment by April 20 and your name is automatically entered for the random drawing.

Marianne Moore (1887 – 1972), a Modernist poet known for her irony and wit (so says Wikipedia), was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. Her first poems were published in 1915, and she came to the attention of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. She became editor of The Dial literary journal, and helped launch the careers of poets Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashberry and James Merrill.

Her Collected Poems (1951) won the Pulizer Prize, the National Book Award and the Bollingen Prize. She died in 1972 in New York City.

Her most famous poem is “Poetry” (1919), which is included in the Colelcted Poems.

Poetry

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important
                  beyond all this fiddle.
    Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it,
                  one discovers that there is in
    it after all, a place for the genuine.
        Hands that can grasp, eyes
        that can dilate, hair that can rise
             if it must, these things are important not be-
                    cause a

high sounding interpretation can be put upon them
                 but because they are
   useful; when they become so derivative as to
                  become unintelligible, the
   same thing may be said for all of us – that we
       do not admire what
      we cannot understand. The bat,
           holding on upside down or in quest of some-
                    thing to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll,
                 a tireless wolf under
    a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a
                horse that feels a flea, the base-
    ball fan, the statistician – case after case
         could be cited did
         one wish it; nor is it valid
             to discriminate against “business documents
                      and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important.
                   One must make a distinction
    however: when dragged into prominence by half
                       poets,
             the result is not poetry,
nor till the autocrats among us can be
     “literalists of
     the imagination” – above
          insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads
                   in them, shall we have
   it. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand,
                 in defiance of their opinion –
       the raw material of poetry in
   all its rawness, and
   that which is on the other hand,
       genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

For National Poetry Month, we’re giving away a copy of Neruda’s Memoirs: Poems by Maureen Doallas. Leave a comment by April 20 and your name is automatically entered for the random drawing.

L.L. Barkat, a co-editor here at TweetSpeak Poetry (and a lot of other stuff, too), is interviewed via podcast at Becoming Who We Are. She talks about writing and poetry, a little of her background, how her daughters are becoming talented writers themselves, and some her own work.

The podcast has introductory music for about the first two minutes, and then an introduction to the interview. The discussion begins at about five minutes into the podcast.

One of the marvelous things about the internet is how it has upended the publishing status quo, brought all kinds of new writers to the fore, and brought all kinds of writing to the attention of people all over the world. This is as true for poetry as it is for any other kind of writing and literature, and there is a wealth of sites dedicated to poetry that we particularly like and visit frequently.

The Poetry Foundation publishes Poetry magazine, and is “an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience.” The foundation was established in 2003 with a major gift from philanthropist Ruth Lilly; its predecessor organization was the Modern Poetry Association, founded in 1941. The Poetry Foundation is one of the largest literary foundations in the world. At its web site, you can find articles, resources, links, podcasts, news, poets and poems.

American Life in Poetry is managed by former poet Laureate Ted Kooser, and is focused on finding and publishing poems about all elements of American life and providing them to newspapers and online publications. It’s sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and the Library of Congress, and a new poem is posted weekly.

Poet Brian Brodeur hosts the How a Poem Happens blog, where he regularly features a poem and an interview with the poet as to how it came to be written. There are currently more than 140 posts in the archive, and it’s already a wealth of information and insight.

The Academy of American Poets has a wonderful web site at Poets.org. It had regularly changing feature articles, a large archive of pomes and poets, and features like Poem-A-Day that you can subscribe to by email. It also published the American Poet magazine.

Poem Hunter is a search site for find poems, poets, lines from poems and a lot of other things. (Can’t quite remember where than line came from? Poem Hunter can help you find it.)

A feature at Information Please provides a list of poet laureates of the United States and links to most of them.

A Poetry Feed is a blog of poetry recordings managed by Karsten Piper, who teaches college writing and literature classes. Poems can be submitted for Pipe to record and post on the site.

If you have favorite poetry sites you’d like to share, please leave the links in the comment section.

And don’t forget the giveaway we have for Neruda’s Memoirs: Poems by Maurren Doallas. Just leave a comment by April 20 and you name will be automatically added to the random drawing.