PolyArchive

Coda Dorothy Parker There’s little in taking or giving, There’s little in water or wine; This living, this living, this living Was never a project of mine. Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is The gain of the one at the top, For art is a form of catharsis, And love is a permanent […]

Discordants Conrad Aiken I. (Bread and Music) MUSIC I heard with you was more than music, And bread I broke with you was more than bread; Now that I am without you, all is desolate; All that was once so beautiful is dead. Your hands once touched this table and this silver, And I have […]

Infirmity Theodore Roethke In purest song one plays the constant fool As changes shimmer in the inner eye. I stare and stare into a deepening pool And tell myself my image cannot die. I love myself: that’s my one constancy. Oh, to be something else, yet still to be! Sweet Christ, rejoice in my infirmity; […]

pity this busy monster, manunkind E. E. Cummings pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness –electrons deify one razorblade into a mountainrange; lenses extend unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish returns on its unself. A world of […]

Of Mere Being Wallace Stevens The palm at the end of the mind, Beyond the last thought, rises In the bronze distance. A gold-feathered bird Sings in the palm, without human meaning, Without human feeling, a foreign song. You know then that it is not the reason That makes us happy or unhappy. The bird […]

Forgetfulness Billy Collins The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern […]

…May whatever holds you up stay forever beneath you, and may the robin find many a worm, and our cruelties abate, and may you be well and happy and full of mischief as I am, and may all your nothings, too, hold something up and sing –From ‘And the Cantilevered Inference Shall Hold the Day’ […]

Advice to My Son Peter Meinke (For Tim) The trick is, to live your days as if each one may be your last (for they go fast, and young men lose their lives in strange and unimaginable ways) but at the same time, plan long range (for they go slow; if you survive the shattered […]

Hate Poem Julie Sheehan I hate you truly. Truly I do. Everything about me hates everything about you. The flick of my wrist hates you. The way I hold my pencil hates you. The sound made by my tiniest bones were they trapped in the jaws of a moray eel hates you. Each corpuscle singing […]

Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish A poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit, Dumb As old medallions to the thumb, Silent as the sleeve-worn stone Of casement ledges where the moss has grown— A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds. * A poem should be motionless in time As […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]