Post-Modern & Contemporary Poetry

Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones on October 7, 1934 in Newark, New Jersey) is a American writer of poetry, drama, essays, and music criticism. Baraka is today most widely known for the fact that in 2002 the state of New Jersey made him poet laureate, but forced him out of that position a year later because of his poem Somebody Blew Up America.

For the sake of the GRE, you need only know the poem below.

“Poem for Half White College Students”

Who are you, listening to me, who are you listening to yourself? Are you white or black, or does that have anything to do with it? Can you pop your fingers to no music, except those wild monkies go on in your head, can you jerk, to no melody, except finger poppers get it together when you turn from starchecking to checking yourself. How do you sound, your words, are they yours? The ghost you see in the mirror, is it really you, can you swear you are not an imitation greyboy, that the sister you have you hand on is not really so full of Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton is coming out of her ears. You may even have to be Richard with a white shirt and face, and four million negroes think you cute, you may have to be Elizabeth Taylor, old lady,

if you want to sit up in your crazy spot dreaming about dresses, and the say of certain porters' hips. Check yourself, learn who it is speaking, when you make some ultrasophisticated point, check yourself, when you find yourself gesturing like Steve McQueen, check it out, ask in your black heart who it is you are, and is that image black or white,

you might be surprised right out the window, whistling dixie on the way in

John Berryman

an American poet, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and often considered one of the founders of the Confessional school of poetry. He is one of the figures acting as a bridge between the formally loose, socially aware poetry of the Beats and the personal, grieving poetry of Sylvia Plath. He was the author of The Dream Songs, which are playful, witty, and morbid. Berryman died by suicide in 1972.

For the sake of the GRE, all you need know is that his poems often feature a character named “Henry” and one named “Mr. Bones.” Be able to identify those names with Berryman.

Elizabeth Bishop (1911 –1979)

An American poet and writer, increasingly regarded as one of the finest 20th century poets writing in English.

A disciple of Marianne Moore, and a good friend of poets Robert Lowell and James Merrill, Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Early in her career, Bishop was regarded (and perhaps dismissed) as a "miniaturist," a master of small poetic structures and descriptive detail. Careful reading of her work, however, reveals a sharp-edged confessional edge: her life story is told through poems which, though nominally addressing and describing other subject matter (including paintings, tourist destinations, etc.), in fact speak to true events (and to her, and the reader's, underlying existential states). She was far from prolific: her Complete Poems is a relatively slim volume.

"In the Waiting Room"

"One Art"

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

an award-winning African American woman poet. Although she also wrote a novel, an autobiography and some other prose works, she was noted primarily as a poet. Her 1949 book of poetry, Annie Allen, received a Pulitzer Prize, the first won by an African American.

Her poetry is rooted in the poor and mostly African-American South Side of Chicago. Although her poems range in style from traditional ballads and sonnets to using blues rhythms in free verse, her characters are often drawn from the poor inner city. Her bluesy poem "We Real Cool" is a favorite of the GRE.

“The Mother”

Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get, The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair, The singers and workers that never handled the air. You will never neglect or beat Them, or silence or buy with a sweet. You will never wind up the sucking-thumb Or scuttle off ghosts that come. You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh, Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children. I have contracted. I have eased My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck. I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized Your luck And your lives from your unfinished reach, If I stole your births and your names, Your straight baby tears and your games, Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths, If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths, Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate. Though why should I whine, Whine that the crime was other than mine?-- Since anyhow you are dead. Or rather, or instead, You were never made. But that too, I am afraid, Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said? You were born, you had body, you died. It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all. Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you All.

“Gay Chaps at the Bar” ...and guys I knew in the States, young officers, return from the front crying and trembling. Gay chaps at the bar in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York... --Lt. William Couch in the South Pacific

We knew how to order. Just the dash Necessary. The length of gaiety in good taste. Whether the raillery should be slightly iced And given green, or served up hot and lush. And we knew beautifully how to give to women The summer spread, the tropics of our love. When to persist, or hold a hunger off. Knew white speech. How to make a look an omen. But nothing ever taught us to be islands. And smart, athletic language for this hour Was not in the curriculum. No stout Lesson showed how to chat with death. We brought No brass fortissimo, among our talents, To holler down the lions in this air.

“We Real Cool”

THE POOL PLAYERS. SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We Left school. We

Lurk late. We Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We Die soon.

Robert Lowell (1917-1977)

An American Confessionalist poet known for inspiring and teaching several literary superstars of the 1950s and 1960s, including Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.

With his 1959 volume Life Studies, however, he moved firmly into the confessionalist mode. Life Studies is best known for the oft-reprinted poem "Skunk Hour," a poem that is primarily a description of a fading New England town, punctuated by two stanzas of what was, at the time, shocking personal confession, such as the declaration that "My mind's not right." Life Studies is widely viewed as one of the most influential and important books of poetry in the 20th century. The main theme of this work before publication was reputed by one wag to have centered around the uncommon behavior of inserting a wad of toilet paper into the groove of one's anus after a particularly messy bowel movement and walking around the bathroom with underpants around the ankles making "quack-quack" sounds like a duck, although this may very well be an exaggeration.

He followed Life Studies with For the Union Dead, which was also widely praised, particularly for its title poem. Following this book, however, Lowell's poetry became less and less popular and noticed. A minor controversy erupted when he incorporated private letters from his ex-wife into his poems. He was particularly criticized by his friend Elizabeth Bishop for this.

“The Drunken Fisherman“

Wallowing in this bloody sty, I cast for fish that pleased my eye (Truly Jehovah's bow suspends No pots of gold to weight its ends); Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout Rose to my bait. They flopped about My canvas creel until the moth

Corrupted its unstable cloth. A calendar to tell the day; A handkerchief to wave away The gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm Pouching a bottle in one arm; A whiskey bottle full of worms; And bedroom slacks: are these fit terms To mete the worm whose molten rage Boils in the belly of old age?

Once fishing was a rabbit's foot-- O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot, Let suns stay in or suns step out: Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale's spout-- The fisher's fluent and obscene Catches kept his conscience clean. Children, the raging memory drools Over the glory of past pools.

Now the hot river, ebbing, hauls Its bloody waters into holes; A grain of sand inside my shoe Mimics the moon that might undo Man and Creation too; remorse, Stinking, has puddled up its source; Here tantrums thrash to a whale's rage. This is the pot-hole of old age. Is there no way to cast my hook Out of this dynamited brook? The Fisher's sons must cast about When shallow waters peter out. I will catch Christ with a greased worm, And when the Prince of Darkness stalks My bloodstream to its Stygian term . . . On water the Man-Fisher walks.

“Skunk Hour”

For Elizabeth Bishop

Nautilus Island's hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea. Her son's a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village, she's in her dotage.

Thirsting for the hierarchic privacy of Queen Victoria's century, she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore, and lets them fall.

The season's ill-- we've lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean catalogue. His nine-knot yawl was auctioned off to lobstermen. A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy decorator brightens his shop for fall, his fishnet's filled with orange cork, orange, his cobbler's bench and awl, there is no money in his work, he'd rather marry.

One dark night, my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull, I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull, where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . . My mind's not right. A car radio bleats, 'Love, O careless Love . . . .' I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat . . . . I myself am hell, nobody's here--

only skunks, that search in the moonlight for a bite to eat. They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top of our back steps and breathe the rich air-- a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail She jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, and will not scare.

“Mr. Edwards and the Spider” (note that this poem refers to Jonathan Edwards)

I saw the spiders marching through the air, Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day In latter August when the hay Came creaking to the barn. But where The wind is westerly, Where gnarled November makes the spiders fly Into the apparitions of the sky, They purpose nothing but their ease and die Urgently beating east to sunrise and the sea; What are we in the hands of the great God? It was in vain you set up thorn and briar In battle array against the fire And treason crackling in your blood; For the wild thorns grow tame And will do nothing to oppose the flame; Your lacerations tell the losing game You play against a sickness past your cure. How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure?

A very little thing, a little worm, Or hourglass-blazoned spider, it is said, Can kill a tiger. Will the dead Hold up his mirror and affirm To the four winds the smell And flash of his authority? It's well If God who holds you to the pit of hell, Much as one holds a spider, will destroy Baffle and dissipate your soul. As a small boy On Windsor March, I saw the spider die When thrown into the bowels of fierce fire: There's no long struggle, no desire To get up on its feet and fly-- It stretches out its feet And dies. This is the sinner's last retreat; Yes, and no strength exerted on the heat Then sinews the abolished will, when sick And full of burning, it will whistle on a brick.

But who can plumb the sinking of that soul? Josiah Hawley, picture yourself cast Into a brick-kiln where the blast Fans your quick vitals to a coal-- If measured by a glass, How long would it seem burning! Let there pass A minute, ten, ten trillion; but the blaze Is infinite, eternal: this is death, To die and know it. This is the Black Widow, death.

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

“Daddy” is one of Plath's best-known poems, in part because of its vivid, sometimes brutal imagery. Daddy is perhaps in large part inspired by the early death of Plath's father, when the poet was only ten years old. The poem describes Plath's deep bitterness concerning the death of her father and her unresolved feelings toward him, with hints of her troubled relationship with the poet Ted Hughes. Daddy was posthumously published in Ariel in 1965.

"Daddy"

You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time -- Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off the beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene An engine, an engine, Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You -- Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I'm finally through. The black telephone's off at the root, The voices just can't worm through. If I've killed one man, I've killed two -- The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There's a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

“The Mirror” I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. Whatever I see, I swallow immediately. Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike I am not cruel, only truthful – The eye of a little god, four-cornered. Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall. It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers. Faces and darkness separate us over and over. Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me. Searching my reaches for what she really is. Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon. I see her back, and reflect it faithfully She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands. I am important to her. She comes and goes. Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness. In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Anne Sexton (1928-1974)

The modern model of the confessional poet, one perhaps begun by the publication of Heart's Needle, by W.D. Snodgrass. Sexton helped open the door not only for female poets, but for female issues; Sexton wrote about menstruation, abortion, masturbation, and adultery before such issues were even topics for casual discussion, helping redefine the boundaries of poetry. Sexton modeled for Boston's Hart Agency. She committed suicide in 1974.

“The Truth the Dead Know”

For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959 and my father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church, refusing the stiff procession to the grave, letting the dead ride alone in the hearse. It is June. I am tired of being brave. We drive to the Cape. I cultivate myself where the sun gutters from the sky, where the sea swings in like an iron gate and we touch. In another country people die. My darling, the wind falls in like stones from the whitehearted water and when we touch we enter touch entirely. No one's alone. Men kill for this, or for as much. And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in their stone boats. They are more like stone

than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

“Sylvia’s Death”

it begins:

for Sylvia Plath

O Sylvia, Sylvia, with a dead box of stones and spoons, with two children, two meteors wandering loose in a tiny playroom, with your mouth into the sheet, into the roofbeam, into the dumb prayer, (Sylvia, Sylvia where did you go after you wrote me from Devonshire about rasing potatoes and keeping bees?)