PolyArchive

Instructions Eavan Boland To write about age you need to take something and break it. (This is an art which has always loved young women. And silent ones.) A branch, perhaps, girlish with blossom. Snapped off. Close to the sap. Then cut through a promised summer. Continue. Cut down to the root. The spring afternoon […]

Memory Siegfried Sassoon (Limerick, 1 February 1918) When I was young my heart and head were light, And I was gay and feckless as a colt Out in the fields, with morning in the may, Wind on the grass, wings in the orchard bloom. O thrilling sweet, my joy, when life was free And all […]

Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets Frank O’Hara From near the sea, like Whitman my great predecessor, I call to the spirits of other lands to make fecund my existence do not spare your wrath upon our shores, that trees may grow upon the sea, mirror of our total mankind in the weather one […]

О, весна без конца и без краю – Без конца и без краю мечта! Узнаю тебя, жизнь! Принимаю! И приветствую звоном щита! Принимаю тебя, неудача, И удача, тебе мой привет! В заколдованной области плача, В тайне смеха – позорного нет! Принимаю бессонные споры, Утро в завесах темных окна, Чтоб мои воспаленные взоры Раздражала, пьянила весна! […]

WHEN I was one-and-twenty I heard a wise man say, ‘Give crowns and pounds and guineas But not your heart away; Give pearls away and rubies But keep your fancy free.’ But I was one-and-twenty, No use to talk to me. When I was one-and-twenty I heard him say again, ‘The heart out of the […]

Wisława Szymborska died yesterday. She was 88. I love Poland for celebrating its poets, finding cultural heroes not only in the past but also the present day cities and villages (and shipyards). Though in Szymborska’s case, perhaps it was the worst thing to happen to her, worsening her agoraphobia. The Nobel she won silenced her […]

Luminism Mark Strand And though it was brief, and slight, and nothing To have been held onto so long, I remember it, As if it had come from within, one of the scenes The mind sets for itself, night after night, only To part from, quickly and without warning. Sunlight Flooded the valley floor and […]

Lines for the Fortune Cookies I think you’re wonderful and so does everyone else. Just as Jackie Kennedy has a baby boy, so will you–even bigger. You will meet a tall beautiful blonde stranger, and you will not say hello. You will take a long trip and you will be very happy, though alone. You […]

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm Wallace Stevens The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. The house was quiet and the world was calm. The words were spoken as if there was no book, […]

Questions of Travel Elizabeth Bishop There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams hurry too rapidly down to the sea, and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion, turning to waterfalls under our very eyes. –For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains, […]

Berryman W.S. Merwin I will tell you what he told me in the years just after the war as we then called the second world war don’t lose your arrogance yet he said you can do that when you’re older lose it too soon and you may merely replace it with vanity just one time […]

Sure on This Shining Night James Agee Description of Elysium There: far, friends: ours: dear dominion: Whole health resides with peace, Gladness and never harm, There not time turning, Nor fear of flower of snow Where marbling water slides No charm may halt of chill, Air aisling the open acres, And all the gracious trees […]

Introduction to Collected Poems (1938) E.E. Cummings (wrenched from a geocities site in the depths of the Wayback Machine) I N T R O D U C T I O N The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople– it’s no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and […]

I have been writing. Just in very small form. 7-7-10: Raw temptation of sprinklers never fades with age… Wet grass loves bare feet 7-1-10: Red-winged blackbird dreams, Bicycles, reeds in ditches, was this history? 6-16-10: Blame music, you could never live up to sacred memories of you June 3, 2010: ‘Late submission’ Priorities change. Scarlett […]

I had the first couple of lines, with their curious, beautiful syntax, stuck in my head today. I struggled to recall where they were from. Shakespeare, obviously, but where? One of the plays with end-rhymed soliloquies? That narrows it, but contextually, they could fit in many places. Shakespeare is full of suitable matches. I had […]