Name ____________
Date _________________________
Sen. Eng. - Per. B - Mr. Dunn
Hayden, Roethke, Bishop, Brooks Poems
IBM Cmptbl./--/700
Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
My Papa’s Waltz
by Theodore Roethke
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/poetry/waltz_elements/waltz_wordorder.html
Go there to hear the poem read by Roethke
One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15212 for the poem & a link to biog. info.
We Real Cool
THE POOL PLAYERS.
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.
Gwendolyn Brooks
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
© 1960
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15433 to hear the poem & a link to biog…
6.7.08
It's the birthday of the woman who wrote, "We real cool. We / Left school. We / Lurk late. We /
Strike straight." Gwendolyn Brooks, (books by this author) who was born in Topeka, Kansas
(1917), but grew up and spent nearly all her life in the Southside of Chicago. She began writing
poems when she was a child and published her first poem at the age of 13. She said, "Very early in
life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words."
Her parents encouraged her literary ambitions and put her into contact with Langston Hughes, to
whom she wrote and sent her poems. Langston Hughes wrote back to her "You have talent. Keep
writing! You'll have a book published one day."
She published her second collection of poetry, Annie Allen, in 1949, and in it she used an
experimental form that she called the sonnet-ballad. Critics liked it, and a Times book reviewer
praised her work as "full of insight and wisdom and pity, technically dazzling." The next year, in
1950, she became the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize.
She said about her poetry, "I wrote about what I saw and heard in the street. I lived in a small
second-floor apartment at the corner, and I could look first on one side and then the other. There
was my material." And she said, "At times I consider myself a reporter. I look, I see, and then I
report."
She said, "Poetry is life distilled
.