American Poetry Now

by Ochester, Ed

• ISBN13: 9780822943105
• ISBN10: 0822943107
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-03-15
• Publisher: Univ of Pittsburgh Pr

Summary

American Poetry Nowis a comprehensive collection of the best work from the renowned Pitt Poetry Series. Since its inception in 1967, the series has been a vehicle for America's finest contemporary poets. The series list includes Poet Laureate Billy Collins, Toi Derricotte, Denise Duhamel, Lynn Emanuel, Bob Hicok, Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Kooser, Larry Levis, Sharon Olds, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Virgil Suaacute;rez, Afaa Michael Weaver, David Wojahn, Dean Young, and many others.Throughout its forty-year history, the Pitt Poetry Series has provided a voice for the diversity that is American poetry, representing poets from many backgrounds without allegiance to any one school or style. American Poetry Now is a true representation of contemporary American poetry.Ed Ochester, series editor for nearly thirty years, has assembled a quintessential selection-along with biographies and photos, an enlightening introduction, and a suggested list for further reading, all in a highly accessible format. American Poetry Nowis a sweeping anthology that will delight poetry fans, students, teachers, and general readers alike.

Author Biography

Ed Ochester has been editor of the Pitt Poetry Series since 1978. He is former director of the creative writing program at the University of Pittsburgh, and is professor emeritus of English there. Currently, Ochester is a core faculty member of the Bennington College MFA Writing Seminars. He has twice served as president of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, and recently received the organization's George Garrett. Ochester is the author of over fourteen volumes of poetry, including Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New (2007), The Land of Cockaigne, Cooking in Key West, and Changing the Name to Ochester. He is founding editor of the literary magazine 5 AM.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. xix
Spitting in the Leaves	p. 2
Heart Fire	p. 2
Long Story	p. 3
Black Dog Goes to Art Colony	p. 6
Self-Portrait	p. 6
The Post-Rapture Diner	p. 9
The Nude Detective, A Complaint	p. 9
Sock Hop with the New Critics	p. 11
Glass Dress	p. 12
Body Says	p. 14
The exiled (from "child of the enemy")	p. 17
Intermurals	p. 18
Tradition	p. 19
Crossing the South China Sea as analgesia	p. 20
Emmett Till's Open Casket as La Pieta	p. 21
Doug Flutie's 1984 Orange Bowl Hail Mary as Water into Fire	p. 21
Mad River	p. 24
Ravenous Blue	p. 24
A Waitress' Instructions on Tipping or Get the Cash Up and Don't Waste My Time	p. 25
After sex on a train	p. 26
My Father Teaches Me to Dream	p. 26
Going Deep for Jesus	p. 27
Zen of Tipping	p. 28
Machine Shop of Love	p. 29
The New Egypt	p. 32
Now	p. 32
OK, Tucker	p. 33
Adult Child	p. 34
Why We Fear the Amish	p. 34
Spiritual Morning	p. 35
The Bath	p. 36
The Story I Like to Tell	p. 36
America	p. 39
The Silver Sands	p. 41
El Cucubano	p. 42
Tia Olivia Serves Wallace Stevens a Cuban Egg	p. 43
Dr. Livingstone, I Presume	p. 46
The Barbarians	p. 47
One Nation, Indivisible, Under God	p. 48
The World of Business	p. 49
Blue Movie	p. 52
Eros and Thanatos	p. 53
Trying to Be Human	p. 54
Forgiveness	p. 55
Heritage	p. 6
Emplumada	p. 59
Meeting Mescalito at Oak Hill Cemetery	p. 59
Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway	p. 60
Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person Could Believe in the War Between Races	p. 63
Lady Sings the Blues 1969	p. 67
Los Angeles Nocturne	p. 68
Soul Traveler	p. 69
Baptism	p. 70
Exoteric	p. 71
I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of "Three Blind Mice"	p. 73
Shoveling Snow with Buddha	p. 74
This Much I Do Remember	p. 75
Japan	p. 76
Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes	p. 78
The Death of the Hat	p. 79
Pail of Eggs	p. 82
Sill	p. 82
Like a Simile	p. 84
Style	p. 85
Natural Causes	p. 85
After Rain	p. 86
Ashes, Ashes	p. 87
Raw October	p. 89
Digger Pays Off the Mortgage	p. 89
Digger's Territory	p. 90
Still Lives; Sweat	p. 91
Trouble at the Drive-In	p. 92
Blessing the House	p. 93
Raiding the Bees	p. 96
To Hear and Hear	p. 96
Frog	p. 97
Whales	p. 97
Night Mowing	p. 98
Through a Train Window	p. 98
An incident at the Catholic Worker	p. 99
I See Them Now	p. 100
Blackbottom	p. 102
Boy at the Paterson Falls	p. 103
In an Urban School	p. 103
Allen Ginsburg	p. 104
The Struggle	p. 105
Grace Paley Reading	p. 105
When My Father Was Beating Me	p. 106
Kinky	p. 109
Sex with a Famous Poet	p. 110
The Difference between Pepsi and Pope	p. 111
Nick at Nite	p. 113
The Problem with Woody Allen	p. 114
Noah and Joan	p. 115
The Secret Graveyard	p. 118
The Key	p. 118
Baby Pianos	p. 119
The Alfresco Moment	p. 119
The Message	p. 119
The Square Wheel	p. 120
Angels	p. 120
The Bath	p. 121
Thus Spake Polly	p. 121
Wings	p. 121
Inside gertrude stein	p. 124
Halfway Through the Book I'm Writing	p. 125
Homage to Sharon Stone	p. 126
Portrait of the Author	p. 128
Drinking Cold Water	p. 131
Perhaps It's as You Say	p. 132
Sorting the Tools	p. 132
In the Last Days	p. 133
Poem Beginning with a Line from Leonardo Sinisgalli	p. 134
From the Meadow	p. 135
The Heart	p. 136
Frankenstein	p. 138
Nancy	p. 139
Unwanted	p. 141
The Tailspin	p. 142
In Praise of My Prostate	p. 142
The Lost, Dancing	p. 143
Garbo	p. 144
She Didn't Mean to Do It	p. 146
A Story Having to Do with Walt Whitman	p. 146
Whatever Works	p. 148
Aunt Leah, Aunt Sophie and the Negro Painter	p. 148
Ode to American English	p. 153
The Mockingbird on the Buddha	p. 154
Ode to the Potato	p. 155
Fang	p. 155
Ode to Rock 'n' Roll	p. 156
Ode to My 1977 Toyota	p. 157
Egg	p. 160
The Cave	p. 161
Blue Light	p. 162
Moment	p. 165
Twins	p. 168
Team effort	p. 169
My new neighbor	p. 169
Beasts	p. 170
Full flight	p. 174
Pollock's Paintings	p. 177
The Shabby Truth	p. 178
Breasts	p. 180
The Lizard Man	p. 180
What I Learned from My Mother	p. 183
Mennonites	p. 183
When Our Women Go Crazy	p. 184
First Gestures	p. 185
Eve's Striptease	p. 186
The Sun Lover	p. 187
Sinning	p. 188
Enter Mecca	p. 191
Not	p. 192
What Max, Age Two, Remembers about Spain	p. 193
The Great Molasses Flood	p. 195
Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane	p. 198
He Sees Through Stone	p. 199
The Idea of Ancestry	p. 200
The Warden Said to Me the Other Day	p. 201
Feeling Fucked Up	p. 202
Welcome Back, Mr. Knight: Love of My Life	p. 202
Dark Prophecy: I Sing of Shine	p. 203
Rehabilitation & Treatment in the Prisons of America	p. 204
The Game	p. 207
The Pond	p. 207
The End of the Gulf War	p. 208
Tea	p. 209
Write	p. 210
Selecting a Reader	p. 212
A Frozen Stream	p. 212
The Very Old	p. 213
How to Make Rhubarb Wine	p. 214
A Widow	p. 215
Fort Robinson	p. 215
Shooting a Farmhouse	p. 215
Flying at Night	p. 216
Laundry	p. 217
At the Office Early	p. 217
Year's End	p. 218
Winter Stars	p. 220
My Story in a Late Style of Fire	p. 221
The Oldest Living Thing in L.A.	p. 223
The Smell of the Sea	p. 224
Sunset on the Wharf	p. 228
Jamaica, October 18, 1972	p. 228
What my mother taught me	p. 229
Calypso	p. 229
What the Oracle Said	p. 230
An Offering	p. 231
Facing It	p. 232
Sonnet on the Death of the Man Who Invented Plastic Roses	p. 234
(Untitled)	p. 234
The Poet, Trying to Surprise God	p. 235
Liquid Paper	p. 235
Atomic Pantoum	p. 236
Zinc Fingers	p. 237
A Meditation on You and Wittgenstein	p. 238
Preacher, Said the General	p. 239
If There Is Another World	p. 242
Happiness	p. 243
Gone	p. 243
Simply Lit	p. 245
Seemed Pleased	p. 246
In the Yellow Head of a Tulip	p. 248
A Wake	p. 249
Perennials	p. 251
Young Lovers with Pizza	p. 252
Eve of St. Agnes in the High School Gym	p. 253
How I Came to Drink My Grandmother's Piano	p. 254
Afterward	p. 255
Emily in Choir	p. 256
Satan Says	p. 258
Quake Theory	p. 259
Indictment of Senior Officers	p. 260
The Sisters of Sexual Treasure	p. 261
Station	p. 261
The Language of the Brag	p. 262
Seventh Birthday of the First Child	p. 263
The Unjustly Punished Child	p. 264
The Mother	p. 264
The Leaf Pile	p. 266
A Question of Time	p. 267
Everywoman Her Own Theology	p. 269
The Dogs at Live Oak Beach, Santa Cruz	p. 270
What Was Lost	p. 270
Fix	p. 272
The Blue Cup	p. 274
Learning to Write	p. 274
From "Crime Against Nature" (1)	p. 275
From "Crime Against Nature" (6)	p. 276
Walking Back Up Depot Street	p. 277
Chopping Peppers	p. 279
A Pornography	p. 281
Dear Lacuna, Dear Lard	p. 282
Ode	p. 283
The Creep	p. 288
If I Were a Dog	p. 289
The Little Towns of West Texas	p. 290
In Search of History	p. 291
Politics Last Summer	p. 292
Miranda of the Sorrows	p. 293
Maritime	p. 296
A Plague for Kit Marlowe	p. 297
World	p. 299
Semantics at Four P.M.	p. 300
The Day Has Come When My Mother	p. 303
My Beautiful Daughter Calls to Tell Melt's Snowing	p. 303
The Souls We Carry Hunger for Our Light	p. 305
I Hated the Hairy Ones	p. 306
Cloud Moving Hands	p. 308
In the House of White Light	p. 311
Recitative after Rembrandt's "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp"	p. 312
Isla	p. 313
American Drag Rhapsody: J. Edgar Hoover in Havana	p. 314
La Florida	p. 315
Purple Finch	p. 316
The What of Rocks	p. 318
A Hot Property	p. 320
Sestina for the House	p. 320
Nightline: An Interview with the General	p. 322
Fielding	p. 322
The Friday Night Fights	p. 323
Off the Record	p. 323
In the Amish Bakery	p. 324
Pantoum: The Sturdy of Worry	p. 325
Man Sleeping	p. 326
Blessings	p. 326
Ego	p. 329
Sidney Bechet	p. 329
The Picnic, An Homage to Civil Rights	p. 330
The Shaw Brothers	p. 331
19 Pages with No Promotion	p. 332
E-mail (from "Dithyramb and Lamentation")	p. 334
"Mystery Train": Janis Joplin Leaves Port Arthur for Points West, 1964 (from "Mystery Train: A Sequence")	p. 334
"It's Only Rock 'n' Roll but I Like It": The Fall of Saigon, 1975 (from "Mystery Train: A Sequence")	p. 335
The Assassination of John Lennon as Depicted by the Madame Tussaud Wax Museum, Niagara Falls, Ontario, 1987 (from "Mystery Train: A Sequence")	p. 336
Excavation Photo	p. 337
Stammer	p. 338
And the Unclean Spirits Went Out of the Man, and Entered into Swine	p. 339
Homage to Blind Willie Johnson	p. 340
Chapped Lips	p. 343
Dog Toy	p. 344
Sources of the Delaware	p. 346
Lives of the Olympians	p. 348
Lives of the Robots	p. 349
From The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser	p. 351
Poem	p. 353
The Bill (from "The Book of the Dead")	p. 353
Bubble of Air	p. 356
Children, the Sandbar, that Summer	p. 356
The Conjugation of the Paramecium	p. 357
In Our Time	p. 358
Endless	p. 358
What Do We See?	p. 359
Myth	p. 360
From "Breaking Open (Rational Man)"	p. 360
Looking at Each Other	p. 361
Suggestions for Further Reading	p. 363
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