Fifty Years of American Poetry

by ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS

• ISBN13: 9780440218777
• ISBN10: 0440218772
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 1995-08-01
• Publisher: Laurel
• More Book Details

Summary

Seer, critic, lover, madwoman--the poet's sensibility gives us a chance to experience them all. This rich, wide-ranging collection of work by scores of America's contemporary poets brings you both wisdom and entertainment in short verse. In it are represented, with one poem each, the chancellors, fellows, and award winners of the Academy of American Poets since 1934. The result is a unique sampler of the various literary styles and themes that have left their marks on the past five decades. Fifty Years of American Poetrygives readers the opportunity to hear familiar voices and new ones--and encounter the great American poems that have captured both our minds and our hearts. The Academy of American Poets has as its stated purpose ''To encourage, stimulate, and foster the production of American poetry..." This was never limited to poets of any particular school, method, or category of poetry so this anthology is as representative a cross-section of American poetry in the last 50 years as any of its kind. The Academy is not a stodgy eastem provincial institution. It encourages young poets, recognizes the importance of change and growth in the poetry of America, and believes that poetry is not for poets only. This anthology was compiled on this basis.Fifty Years Of American Poetryis not only educational, but also inspirational, hopefully imbuing everyone who reads it with a sense of the dynamic and development of American poetry in the last half century. The Academy of American Poets is the only institution which could compile such a unique anthology because it is the oniy group which has consistently played a large part in the American poetry scene through its patronage to poets and its mission to make poetry an accessible and vital part of the American literary landscape. -->

Author Biography

The Academy of American Poets was founded in 1934 and is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary American poetry. For more than three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, Poets.org, American Poets, Poem-a-Day, and an annual series of poetry readings and events.

Table of Contents

Introduction	xiii
Robert Penn Warren
Preface	xxi
Marie Bullock
THE POEMS
(Dates in parentheses indicate when poems were initially published in a full-length collection. More recent uncollected poems carry magazine publication date.)
For a Dead Lady (1910)	1	(1)
E.A. Robinson
The Hill (1915)	2	(2)
Edgar Lee Masters
The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter (1915)	4	(2)
Ezra Pound
An Old Woman of the Roads (1916)	6	(1)
Padraic Colum
Driftwood (1917)	7	(1)
Witter Bynner
Preludes for Memnon, II (1918)	8	(2)
Conrad Aiken
Interval (1924)	10	(1)
Joseph Auslander
Judith of Betbulia (1924)	11	(2)
John Crowe Ransom
Jesse James (A Design in Red and Yellow for a Nickel Library (1927)	13	(4)
William Rose Benet
Hurt Hawks (1928)	17	(2)
Robinson Jeffers
The Cameo (1928)	19	(1)
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Anacbronism (1929)	20	(1)
Oliver St. John Gogarty
You, Andrew Marvell (1930)	21	(2)
Archibald MacLeish
Aeneas at Washington (1932)	23	(2)
Allen Tate
The Third Wonder (1932)	25	(1)
Edwin Markham
Text (1934)	26	(1)
Audrey Wurdemann
The Jerboa (1935)	27	(6)
Marianne Moore
Effort at Speech Between Two People (1935)	33	(2)
Muriel Rukeyser
The People, Yes, 11 (1936)	35	(2)
Carl Sandburg
Ya Se Van Los Pastores (1937)	37	(1)
Dudley Fitts
After Tempest (1938--40)	38	(1)
Percy MacKaye
Swans (1939)	39	(1)
Leonora Speyer
e.e. cummings my father moved through dooms of love (1940)	40	(3)
Animal (1940)	43	(1)
Max Eastman
From The Song of Jed Smith (1941)	44	(3)
John Neihardt
Adam's Dying (1941)	47	(2)
Ridgely Torrence
Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same (1942)	49	(1)
Robert Frost
90 North (1942)	50	(2)
Randall Jarrell
Flyfisherman in Wartime (1943)	52	(1)
Leonard Bacon
The Fury of Aerial Bombardment (1944)	53	(1)
Richard Eberhart
Strength Through Joy (1944)	54	(2)
Kenneth Rexroth
Speaks the Whispering Grass (1944)	56	(1)
Jesse Stuart
The Seven Sleepers (1944)	57	(1)
Mark Van Doren
In Praise of Limestone (1948)	58	(4)
W. H. Auden
The Offering of the Heart (1949)	62	(1)
Rolfe Humphries
Squash in Blossom (1950)	63	(1)
Robert Francis
Now Blue October (1950)	64	(1)
Robert Nathan
Evening in the Sanitarium (1953)	65	(2)
Louise Bogan
Cigar Smoke, Sunday, After Dinner (1953)	67	(1)
Louise Townsend Nicholl
Grapes Making (1954)	68	(2)
Leonie Adams
The Mental Hospital Garden (1954)	70	(5)
William Carlos Williams
History (1956)	75	(2)
Robert Fitzgerald
The Beautiful Ruined Orchard (1957)	77	(1)
Daniel Berrigan
Earliness at the Cape (1957)	78	(1)
Babette Deutsch
Nocturne (1957)	79	(1)
Robert Hillyer
The Kiss (1959)	80	(1)
Ned O'Gorman
Advice to a Prophet (1959)	81	(2)
Richard Wilbur
In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus One Day (1961)	83	(2)
X. J. Kennedy
Hippopotamothalamium (1961)	85	(2)
John Hall Wheelock
Telephone Poles (1963)	87	(1)
John Updike
Dream Song #48 (1964)	88	(1)
John Berryman
For the Union Dead (1964)	89	(3)
Robert Lowell
Ants and Others (1964)	92	(1)
Adrien Stoutenberg
The Shooting of John Dillinger Outside the Biograph Theater, July 22, 1934 (1966)	93	(6)
David Wagoner
Bus Stop (1967)	99	(1)
Donald Justice
Some Small Shells from the Windward Islands (1967)	100	(2)
May Swenson
The Minneapolis Poem (1968)	102	(3)
James Wright
Salute (1969)	105	(1)
James Schuyler
For John Clare (1970)	106	(2)
John Ashbery
Locus (1970)	108	(1)
Robert Hayden
Last Words (1971)	109	(1)
Sylvia Plath
The Testing-Tree (1971)	110	(4)
Stanley Kunitz
The Brother (1972)	114	(1)
Peter Everwine
Report from a Planet (1972)	115	(1)
Richmond Lattimore
Transformation Scene (1973)	116	(2)
Constance Carrier
The Guard at the Binh Thuy Bridge (1974)	118	(1)
John Balaban
Family (1974)	119	(1)
Josephine Miles
The Center of Attention (1974)	120	(4)
Daniel Hoffman
Plans for Altering the River (1975)	124	(2)
Richard Hugo
Singing Death (1975)	126	(2)
Stan Rice
Poem (1976)	128	(3)
Elizabeth Bishop
Stove (1976)	131	(2)
Philip Booth
Elegy and Flame (1976)	133	(2)
Horace Gregory
Lost in Translation (1976)	135	(8)
James Merrill
Rent (1977)	143	(1)
Jane Cooper
The Two-Headed Calf (1977)	144	(1)
Laura Gilpin
Couplets, XX (1977)	145	(1)
Robert Mezey
Mae West (1978)	146	(2)
Edward Field
Ox Cart Man (1978)	148	(1)
Donald Hall
Violet (1978)	149	(5)
John Hollander
American Portrait Old Style (1978)	154	(6)
Robert Penn Warren
A I Ice (1979)	160	(2)
Old Apple Trees (1979)	162	(3)
W. D. Snodgrass
Saint Francis and the Sow (1980)	165	(1)
Galway Kinnell
At the Sign-Painter's (1980)	166	(3)
Jared Carter
The Delicate, Plummeting Bodies (1980)	169	(2)
Stephen Dobyns
The Transparent Man (1980)	171	(4)
Anthony Hecht
The Makers (1980)	175	(1)
Howard Nemerov
La Fontaine de Vaucluse (1980)	176	(4)
Marilyn Hacker
Parents (1980)	180	(2)
William Meredith
My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer (1980)	182	(2)
Mark Strand
These Green-Going-to-Yellow (1981)	184	(2)
Marvin Bell
Beginning by Example (1981)	186	(1)
Christopher Gilbert
For the Sleepwalkers (1981)	187	(2)
Edward Hirsch
On My Own (1981)	189	(2)
Philip Levine
For Zbigniew Herbert, Summer, 1971, Los Angeles (1981)	191	(2)
Larry Levis
I Remember Galileo (1981)	193	(1)
Gerald Stern
Driving into Enid (1981)	194	(2)
Michael Van Walleghen
The Money Cry (1982)	196	(1)
Peter Davison
The Visitor (1982)	197	(1)
Carolyn Forche
Angel (1982)	198	(2)
Brad Leithauser
October Elegy (1982)	200	(2)
Margaret Gibson
A Dawn Horse (1982)	202	(2)
William Harmon
Monet Refuses the Operation (1982)	204	(2)
Lisel Mueller
Tide Turning (1982)	206	(2)
John Frederick Nims
Definition (1982)	208	(1)
Lauren Shakely
Lost on September Trail, 1967 (1982)	209	(3)
Alberto Rios
The Living Room (1982)	212	(2)
Gjertrud Schnackenberg
Old Mountain Road (1982)	214	(1)
Charles Simic
The Spell Against Spelling (1982)	215	(4)
George Starbuck
Letters from a Father (1982)	219	(4)
Mona Van Duyn
In a U-Haul North of Damascus (1983)	223	(3)
David Bottoms
Night Thoughts (1983)	226	(2)
Henri Coulette
Nightsong (1983)	228	(1)
Louis Coxe
To Whom It May Concern (1983)	229	(1)
J. V. Cunningham
Lighting the Night Sky (1983)	230	(3)
Kenneth O. Hanson
Degli Sposi (1983)	233	(1)
Rika Lesser
Jurgis Petraskas, the Workers' Angel, Organizes the First Miners' Strike in Exeter, Pennsylvania (1983)	234	(1)
Anthony Petrosky
A Winter Without Snow (1983)	235	(3)
J. D. McClatchy
Yesterday (1983)	238	(2)
W. S. Merwin
The Fifth Season (1983)	240	(2)
Reg Saner
First Love (1983)	242	(2)
Sharon Olds
What is Poetry (1983)	244	(4)
James Scully
Gifts (1983)	248	(5)
Karen Snow
A Dimpled Cloud (1983)	253	(3)
Frederick Seidel
Two Stories (1984)	256	(4)
Charles Wright
Acknowledgments	260	(1)
Credits and Permissions	261	(14)
Index	275

Excerpts

X.J. KENNEDY (1929-)

In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus One Day (1961)
To the tune of "The Old Orange Flute" or the tune of "Sweet Betsy from Pike"
In a prominent bar in Secaucus one day
Rose a lady in skunk with a topheavy sway,
Raised a knobby red finger--all turned from their beer--
While with eyes bright as snowcrust she sang high and clear:

'Now who of you'd think from an eyeload of me
That I once was a lady as proud as could be?
Oh I'd never sit down by a tumbledown drunk
If it wasn't, my dears, for the high cost of junk.

'All the gents used to swear that the white of my calf
Beat the down of the swan by a length and a half.
In the kerchief of linen I caught to my nose
Ah, there never fell snot, but a little gold rose.

'I had seven gold teeth and a toothpick of gold,
My Virginia cheroot was a leaf of it rolled
And I'd light it each time with a thousand in cash--
Why the bums used to fight if I flicked them an ash.

'Once the toast of the Biltmore, the belle of the Taft,
I would drink bottle beer at the Drake, never draft,
And dine at the Astor on Salisbury steak
With a clean tablecloth for each bite I did take.

'In a car like the Roxy I'd roll to the track,
A steel-guitar trio, a bar in the back,
And the wheels made no noise, they turned over so fast,
Still it took you ten minutes to see me go past.

'When the horses bowed down to me that I might choose,
I bet on them all, for I hated to lose.
Now I'm saddled each night for my butter and eggs
And the broken threads race down the backs of my legs.

'Let you hold in mind, girls, that your beauty must pass
Like a lovely white clover that rusts with its grass.
Keep your bottoms off barstools and marry you young
Or be left--an old barrel with many a bung.

'For when time takes you out for a spin in his car
You'll be hard-pressed to stop him from going too far
And be left by the roadsite, for all your good deeds,
Two toadstools for tits and a face full of weeds.'

All the house raised a cheer, but the man at the bar
Made a phonecall and up pulled a red patrol car
And she blew us a kiss as they copped her away
From that prominent bar in Secaucus, NJ.



ROBERT NATHAN (1894-)

Now Blue October (1950)

Now blue October, smoky in the sun,
Must end the long, sweet summer of the heart.
The last brief visit of the birds is done;
They sing the autumn songs before they part.
Listen, how lovely--there's the thrush we heard
When June was small with roses, and the bending
Blossom of branches covered nest and bird,
Singing the summer in, summer unending--
Give me your hand once more before the night;
See how the meadows darken with the frost,
How fades the green that was the summer's light.
Beauty is only altered, never lost
And love, before the cold November rain,
Will make its summer in the heart again.



JOHN UPDIKE (1932-)

Telephone Poles (1963)

They have been with us a long time.
They will outlast the elms.
Our eyes, like the eyes of a savage sieving the trees
In his search for game,
Run through them. They blend along small-town streets
Like a race of giants that have faded into mere mythology.
Our eyes, washed clean of belief,
Lift incredulous to their fearsome crowns of bolts, trusses, struts, nuts, insulators, and such
Barnacles as compose
These weathered encrustations of electrical debris--
Each a Gorgon's head, which, seized right,
Could stun us to stone.

Yet they are ours. We made them.
See here, where the cleats of linemen
Have roughened a second bark
Onto the bald trunk. And these spikes
Have been driven sideways at intervals handy for human legs.
The Nature of our construction is in every way
A better fit than the Nature it displaces.
What other tree can you climb where the birds' twitter,
Unscrambled, is English? True, their thin shade is negligible,
But then again there is not that tragic autumnal
Casting-off of leaves to outface annually.
These giants are more constant than evergreens
By being never green.



SYLVIA PLATH (1932-1963)

Last Words (1961)

I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up.
I want to be looking at them when they come
Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots.
I see them already--the pale, star-distance faces.
Now they are nothing, they are not even babies.
I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods.
They will wonder if I was important.
I should sugar and preserve my days like fruit!
My mirror is clouding over--
A few more breaths, and it will reflect nothing at all.
The flowers and the faces whiten to a sheet.

I do not trust the spirit. It escapes like steam
In dreams, through mouth-hole or eye-hole. I can't stop it.
One day it won't come back. Things aren't like that.
They stay, their little particular lusters
Warmed by much handling. They almost purr.
When the soles of my feet grow cold,
The blue eye of my turquoise will comfort me.
Let me have my copper cooking pots, let my rouge pots
Bloom about me like night flowers, with a good smell.
They will roll me up in bandages, they will store my heart
Under my feet in a neat parcel.
I shall hardly know myself. It will be dark,
And the shine of these small things sweeter than the face of Ishtar.




JOHN ASHBERY (1927-)

For John Clare (1970)

Kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the earth gets to its feet and salutes the sky. More of a success at it this time than most others it is. The feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone's mind. Then there is no telling how many there are. They grace everything--bush and tree--to take the roisterer's mind off his caroling--so it's like a smooth switch back. To what was aired in their previous conniption fit. There is so much to be seen everywhere that it's like not getting used to it, only there is so much it never feels new, never any different. You are standing looking at that building and you cannot take it all in, certain details are already hazy and the mind boggles. What will it all be like in five years' time when you try to remember? Will there have been boards in between the grass part and the edge of the street? As long as that couple is stopping to look in that window over there we cannot go. We feel like they have to tell us we can, but they never look our way and they are already gone, gone far into the future--the night of time. If we could look at a photograph of it and say there they are, they never really stopped but there they are. There is so much to be said, and on the surface of it very little gets said.

There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like. Being immersed in the details of rock and field and slope--letting them come to you for once, and then meeting them halfway would be so much easier--if they took an ingenuous pride in being in one's blood. Alas, we perceive them if at all as those things that were meant to be put aside--costumes of the supporting actors or voice trilling at the end of a narrow enclosed street. You can do nothing with them. Not even offer to pay.

It is possible that finally, like coming to the end of a long, barely perceptible rise, there is mutual cohesion and interaction. The whole scene is fixed in your mind, the music all present, as though you could see each note as well as hear it. I say this because there is an uneasiness in things just now. Waiting for something to be over before you are forced to notice it. The pollarded trees scarcely bucking the wind--and yet it's keen, it makes you fall over. Clabbered sky. Seasons that pass with a rush. After all it's their time too--nothing says they aren't to make something of it. As for Jenny Wren, she cares, hopping about on her little twig like she was tryin' to tell us somethin', but that's just it, she couldn't even if she wanted to--dumb bird. But the others--and they in some way must know too--it would never occur to them to want to, even if they could take the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness east of the sun and west of the moon. So their comment is "No comment." Meanwhile the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.



GEORGE STARBUCK (1931-)

The Spell Against Spelling (1982)
(a poem to be inscribed in dark places and never to be spoken aloud)
My favorite student lately is the one who wrote about feeling clumbsy.
I mean if he wanted to say how it feels to be all thumbs he
Certainly picked the write language to right in in the first place
I mean better to clutter a word up like the old Hearst place
Than to just walk off the job and not give a dam.

Another student gave me a diagragm.
"The Diagragm of the Plot in Henry the VIIIth."

Those, though, were instances of the sublime.
The wonder is in the wonders they can come up with every time.

Why do they all say heighth, but never weighth?
If chrystal can look like English to them, how come chryptic can't?
I guess cwm, chthonic, qanat, or quattrocento
Always gets looked up. But never momento.
Momento they know. Like wierd. Like differant.
It is a part of their deep deep-structure vocabulary:
Their stone axe, their dark bent-offering to the gods:
Their protoCro-Magnon pre-pre-sapient survival-against-cultural-odds.

You won't get me deputized in some Spelling Constabulary.
I'd sooner abandon the bag-toke-whiff system and go decimal.
I'm on their side. I better be, after my brush with "infinitessimal."

There it was, right where I put it, in my brand-new book.
And my friend Peter Davison read it, and he gave me this look,
And he held the look for a little while and said, "George..."

I needed my students at that moment. I, their Scourge.
I needed them. Needed their sympathy. Needed their care.
"Their their," I needed to hear them say, "their their."

You see, there are Spellers in this world, I mean mean ones too.
They shadow us around like a posse of Joe Btfsplks
Waiting for us to sit down at our study-desks and go shrdlu
So they can pop in at the windows saying "tsk tsk."

I know they're there. I know where the beggars are,
With their flash cards looking like prescriptions for the catarrh
And their mnemnmonics, blast 'em. They go too farrh.
I do not stoop to impugn, indict, or condemn;
But I know how to get back at the likes of thegm.

For a long time, I keep mumb.
I let 'em wait, while a preternatural calmn
Rises to me from the depths of my upwardly opened palmb.
Then I raise my eyes like some wizened-and-wisened gnolmbn,
Stranger to scissors, stranger to razor and coslmbn,
And I fix those birds with my gaze till my gaze strikes hoslgmbn,
And I say one word, and the word that I say is "Oslgmbnh."

"Om?" they inquire. "No, not exactly. Oslgmbnh.
Watch me carefully while I pronounce it because you've got only two more guesses
And you only get one more hint there's an odd number of esses,
And you only get ten more seconds no nine more seconds no eight
And a right answer doesn't count if it comes in late
And a wrong answer bumps you out of the losers' bracket
And disqualifies you for the National Spellathon Contestant jacket
And that's all the time extension you're going to gebt
So go pick up your consolation prizes from the usherebt
And don't be surprised if it's the bowdlerized regularized paperback abridgment of Pepys
Because around here, gentlemen, we play for kepys."

Then I drive off in my chauffeured Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham
Like something out of the last days of Fellini's Rougham
And leave them smiting their brows and exclaiming to each other "Ougham!
O-U-G-H-A-M Ougham!" and tearing their hair.

Intricate are the compoundments of despair.

Well, brevity must be the soul of something-or-other.

Not, certainly, of spelling, in the good old mother
Tongue of Shakespeare, Raleigh, Marvell, and Vaughan.
But something. One finds out as one goes aughan.



"In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus One Day" from Nude Descending a Staircase by X.J. Kennedy (Doubleday), reprinted by permission of the author and Curtis Brown Ltd.  Copyright © 1961 by X.J. Kennedy.

"Now Blue October" by Robert Nathan, from The Green Leaf (Alfred A. Knopf), reprinted by permission of the author.  Copyright © 1950 by Robert Nathan.

"Telephone Poles" from Telephone Poles and Other Poems by John Updike.  Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf.  Copyright © 1963 by John Updike.

"Last Words" from The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes.  Copyright © 1961 by Ted Hughes.  Reprinted by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.

"For John Clare" from The Double Dream of Spring by John Ashbery, reprinted by permission of Ecco Press.  Copyright © 1970 by John Ashbery.

"Spell Against Spelling" from The Argot Merchany Disaster by George Starbuck, copyright © 1970 by George Starbuck.  First appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. By permission of Little, Brown and Company in association with the Atlantic Monthly Press.

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Excerpted from Fifty Years of American Poetry: Over 200 Important Works by America's Modern Masters by Academy of American Poets Staff, Joyce L. Vedral
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.