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Poetry Packet
Part I: Tone
Randall Jarrell
The Death of a Ball Turret Gunner
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flack and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Judith Ortiz Cofer
Back When All Was Continuous Chuckles
Doris and I were helpless on the Beeline Bus
laughing at what was it? “What did the
moron
who killed his mother and father eat
at the orphan’s picnic? “Crow?” Har-har.
The bus was grinding towards Hempstead,
past the cemetery whose stones Doris
and I found hilarious. Freaky ghouls and
skeletons.
“What did the dead man say to the ghost?”
“I like the movie better than the book.”
Even “I don’t get it” was funny.
The war was on, rationing, sirens.
Silly billies, we poked each other’s arms
with balled fists, held hands and howled
at crabby ladies in funny hats, dusty
feathers,
fake fruit. Doris’ mom wore this headgear
before she got the big C which no one said
out loud.
In a shadowy room her skin seemed gray
as moon dust on Smith Street, as Doris’
house
where we tiptoed down the hall.
Sometimes we heard moans from the back
room
and I helped wring out cloths while Doris
brought water in a glass held to her mother’s
lips.
But soon we were flipping through joke
books
and writhing on the floor, war news shut off
back when we pretended all was continuous
chuckles,
and we rode the bus past Greenfield’s rise
where stones, trumpeting angels,
would bear names we later came to
recognize.
Katharyn Howd Machan
Hazel Tells LaVerne
last night
im cleanin out my
howard johnsons ladies room
when all of a sudden
up pops this frog
musta come from the sewer
swimmin aroun an tryin ta
climb up the sida the bowl
so i goes ta flushm down
but sohelpmegod he starts talkin
bout a golden ball
an how i can be a princess
me a princess
well my mouth drops
all the way to the floor
an he says
kiss me just kiss me
once on the nose
well i screams
ya little green pervert
an i hitsm with my mop
an has ta flush
the toilet down three times
me
a princess
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Martin Espada
Latin Night at the Pawnshop
The apparition of a salsa band
Gleaming in the Liberty Loan
Pawnshop window:
Golden trumpet,
silver trombone,
congas, maracas, tambourine,
all with price tags dangling
like the city morgue ticket
on a dead man’s toe.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
To a Captious Critic
Dear critic, who my lightness so deplores,
Would I might study to be prince of bores,
Right wisely would I rule that dull estate—
But, sir, I may not; till you abdicate.
Part II: Diction/ Figurative Language
Philip Levine and Terry Allen
Corporate Head
They said I had a head for business
They said to get ahead
I had to lose my head.
They said
be concrete
& I became concrete.
They said,
go, my son,
multiply,
divide, conquer.
Dorothy Parker
Unfortunate Coincidence
By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying—
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
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Carl Sandburg
Window
Night from a railcar window is a great, dark soft thing
Broken across with slashes of light.
Philip Larkin
A Study of Reading Habits
When getting my nose in a book
Cured most things short of school,
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size.
Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my cloak and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.
Don’t read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who’s yellow and keeps the store,
Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.
Sharon Olds
Sex Without Love
How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they
are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardiovascular health—just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.
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Part III: Title
Peter Meinke
(Untitled)
This is a poem to my son Peter
whom I have hurt a thousand times
whose large and vulnerable eyes
have glazed in pain at my ragings
thin wrists and fingers hung
boneless in despair, pale freckled back
bent in defeat, pillow soaked
by my failure to understand.
I have scarred through weakness
and impatience your frail confidence forever
because when I needed to strike
you were there to hurt and because
I thought you knew
you were beautiful and fair
your bright eyes and hair
but now I see that no one knows that
about himself, but must be told
and retold until it takes hold
because I think anything can be killed
after awhile, especially beauty
so I write this for life, for love, for
you, my oldest son Peter, age 10,
going on 11.
John Updike
Dog’s Death
She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, "Good dog! Good dog!”
We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin
And her heart was learning to lie down forever.
Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest's bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet's, on my lap, she tried
To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.
Back home, we found that in the night her frame,
Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame
Of diarrhoea and had dragged across the floor
To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.
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Sharon Olds
The Fish
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled and barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly-I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
--if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
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Ronald Wallace
Dogs
When I was six years old I hit one with
a baseball bat. An accident, of course,
and broke his jaw. They put that dog to
sleep,
a euphemism even then I knew
could not excuse me from the lasting wrath
of memory’s flagellation. My remorse
could dog me as it would, it wouldn’t keep
me from the life sentence that I drew:
For I’ve been barked at, bitten, nipped,
knocked flat,
slobbered over, humped, sprayed, beshat,
by spaniel, terrier, retriever, bull and Dane.
But through the years what’s given me most
pain
of all the dogs I’ve been the victim of
are those whose slow eyes gazed at me, in
love
Robert Frost
The Mending Wall
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a
stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of
hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I
mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them
made,
But at spring mending-time we find them
there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to
each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly
balls
We have to use a spell to make them
balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are
turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling
them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good
neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors?
Isn't it Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows. Before I built a
wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to
him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage
armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good
neighbors."
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Part IV: Sound
Anonymous
Western Wind
Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!
Marge Piercy
The Secretary Chant
My hips are a desk.
From my ears hang
chains of paper clips.
Rubber bands form my hair.
My breasts are wells of mimeograph ink.
My feet bear casters.
Buzz. Click.
My head
is a badly organized file.
My head is a switchboard
where crossed lines crackle.
My head is a wastebasket
of worn ideas.
Press my fingers
William Hathaway
Oh, Oh
My girl and I amble a country lane,
moo cows chomping daisies, our own
sweet saliva green with grass stems.
“Look, look,” she says at the crossing,
“the choo-choo's light is on.” And sure
enough, right smack dab in the middle
of maple dappled summer sunlight
is the lit headlight – so funny.
An arm waves to us from the black window.
We wave gaily to the arm. “When I hear
trains at night I dream of being president,”
I say dreamily. “And me first lady,” she
says loyally. So when the last boxcars,
named after wonderful, faraway places,
and the caboose chuckle by we look
eagerly to the road ahead. And there,
poised and growling, are fifty Hell's Angels
and in my eyes appear
credit and debit.
Zing. Tinkle.
My naval is a reject button.
From my mouth issue canceled reams.
Swollen, heavy, rectangular
I am about to be delivered
of a baby
xerox machine.
File me under W
because I wonce
was
a woman.
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Robert Francis
Catch
Two boys uncoached are tossing a poem together,
Overhand, underhand, backhand, sleight of hand, every hand,
Teasing with attitudes, latitudes, interludes, altitudes,
High, make him fly off the ground for it, low, make him stoop,
Make him scoop it up, make him as-almost-as possible miss it,
Fast, let him sting from it, now, now fool him slowly,
Anything, everything tricky, risky, nonchalant,
Anything under the sun to outwit the prosy,
Over the tree and the long sweet cadence down,
Over his head, make him scramble to pick up the meaning,
And now, like a posy, a pretty one plump in his hands.
Lisa Parker
Snapping Beans
I snapped beans into the silver bowl
that sat on the splintering slats
of the porch swing between my grandma
and me.
I was home for the weekend,
from school, from the North,
Grandma hummed "What A Friend We Have
In Jesus"
as the sun rose, pushing its pink spikes
through the slant of cornstalks,
through the fly-eyed mesh of the screen.
We didn't speak until the sun overcame
the feathered tips of the cornfield
and Grandma stopped humming, I could feel
the soft gray of her stare
against the side of my face
when she asked, How's school a-going'?
I wanted to tell her about my classes,
the revelations by book and lecture,
as real as any shout of faith
and potent as a swig of strychnine.
She reached the leather of her hand
over the bowl and cupped
my quivering chin; the slick smooth of her
palm
held my face the way she held tomatoes
under the spigot, careful not to drop them,
and I wanted to tell her
about the nights I cried into the familiar
heartsick panels of the quilt she made me,
wishing myself home on the evening star.
I wanted to tell her the evening star was a
planet,
that my friends wore noserings and wrote
poetry
About sex, about alcoholism, about Buddha.
I wanted to tell her how my stomach burned
acidic holes at the thought of speaking in
class,
speaking in an accent, speaking out of turn,
how I was tearing, splitting myself apart
with the slow-simmering guilt of being
happy
despite it all.
I said, School's fine.
We snapped beans into the silver bowl
between us
and when a hickory leaf, still summer green,
skidded onto the porchfront,
Grandma said,
It's funny how things blow loose like that.
Part V: Images
Sheila Wingfield
A Bird
Unexplained
In the salt meadow
Lay the dead bird.
The wind
Was fluttering its wings
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Margaret Atwood
you fit into me
you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye
Janice Townley Moore
To a Wasp
You must have chortled
finding that tiny hole
in the kitchen screen. Right
into my cheese cake batter
you dived.
no chance to swim ashore,
no saving spoon,
the mixer whirring
your legs, wings, stinger,
churching you into such
delicious death.
Never mind the bright April day.
Did you not see
rising out of the cumulus clouds
That fist aimed at both of us?
Ernest Slyman
Lightning Bugs
In my backyard,
They burn peepholes in the night
And take snapshots of my house.
Edwin John Pratt
The Shark
He seemed to know the harbour,
So leisurely he swam;
His fin,
Like a piece of sheet-iron,
Three-cornered,
And with knife-edge,
Stirred not a bubble
As it moved
With its base-line on the water.
His body was tubular
And tapered
And smoke-blue,
And as he passed the wharf
He turned,
And snapped at a flat-fish
That was dead and floating.
And I saw the flash of a white throat,
And a double row of white teeth,
And eyes of metallic grey,
Hard and narrow and slit.
Then out of the harbour,
With that three-cornered fin
Shearing without a bubble the water
Lithely,
Leisurely,
He swam-That strange fish,
Tubular, tapered, smoke-blue,
Part vulture, part wolf,
Part neither-- for his blood was cold.
1. Choose one of the above poems and analyze how the organization (stanzas, sentence length)
attributes to the overall meaning of the poem.
2. Choose one of the poems above and analyze how the rhythm or rhyme contributes to the
overall meaning of the poem.