In between we have our separate ambitions and obligations. Many readers are joining our staff in sharing favorite poems this month. Alba writes:. I could never take Charles Bukowski seriously.
His books always seemed to be props for a certain type of guy I was endlessly attracted to. So Bukowski ended up being shorthand for pretentious guys who wanted to seem cool, and edgy, and arty. I woke up this morning wondering how to keep going today with my responsibilities, with the to-dos, with all the work of a life that feels at this moment so constricted. It was the poem I needed—the poem that told me why and how to be today.
Read the rest here. It goes among things that change. There is something comforting in reading a poem and seeing your fears, irrationalities, questionable choices, anxieties, reflected—seeing a poet articulate what you thought was inexpressible, and in that invaluable moment feeling a little less alone. Regret, like pity, changes nothing really, we say to ourselves and, less often, to each other, each time swimming a bit farther. I must have read this poem a hundred times, yet these lines are still as arresting as the first time I heard Carl Phillips read them.
That rising panic, our conscience, the initial fear—all our natural senses that tell us to stop, go back, to turn around for the love of God—seem to dull when we habitually ignore them.
Read and listen to the full poem here. And if you know a poem that articulates the inexpressible, tell us about it via hello theatlantic. Lincoln even asked to remain anonymous as the author when he sent the third canto.
A sound of danger strikes his ear; He gives the breeze a snuff; Away he bounds, with little fear, And seeks the tangled rough. When I got off, I felt a little woozy—and not because I was reading on a moving vehicle. Schizophrene is a smattering of impressions, in no particular order, from the journey of a migrant.
The images she creates are violently in flux, and heavy with the trauma of constantly leaving and arriving, but never belonging.
This passage, towards the beginning, gave me goosebumps:. The ship docked, and I found my home in the grid system: the damp wooden stool in the bath, a slice of bread with the cheese on it, and so on.
I grew up in New Delhi, and briefly lived in Dallas during middle school, when my parents flirted with the idea of immigrating to America and ultimately decided against it. But I came back to America for college, and now live in Washington, D. I am lucky in that I moved around by choice—a sanctioned choice, affirmed by the documents in my nightstand drawer. That is not a luxury awarded to all migrants.
People walk through deserts to put food on the table, only to be treated like malicious invaders. The answer is not easy. Later that night it rained, washing the country away. A country both dead and living that was not, nor ever would be, my true home. Yet if the antidote to despair is hope, then " Dedications ," the last of the 13 sections, is a kaleidoscopic testament to hope, at once a letter and a prayer.
Rich turns directly to the reader:. I know you are reading this poem late, before leaving your office of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window …. She evokes the image of feeble light against growing darkness throughout the poem, juxtaposing the dim desolation of life with the illumination of resistance. She speaks to different individuals—a mother, a child, an immigrant—and, by directly summoning them as readers, acknowledges their struggles.
Rich writes:. I know you are reading this poem in a room where too much has happened for you to bear…. And she captures the way a country itself can seem like an ever-narrowing room, its barriers increasingly stifling.
Rich maps the lives of those whose voices are not heard, focusing on events or moments often invisible to others. By doing so, she reconstructs the space of her poetry, using it as a vessel to honor them. I know you are reading this poem through your failing sight … because even the alphabet is precious. Here, the very act of reading becomes an act of survival, an endurance of hope despite adversity.
The poem ends as such:. I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else left to read there where you have landed, stripped as you are.
The nakedness of this last image suggests complete vulnerability, yet also hints at a beginning. For me, radical hope is when you find a home in words; when, stripped as you are, there is promise in what comes next. In , the year before my grandmother was born, James Weldon Johnson published a book of poems with the intent of preserving the oral tradition of old-time black preachers.
I like this poem because it gives dignity and gravity to the life and death of Sister Caroline, who would otherwise go quietly and faintly. I could have picked any number of wonderful poems, but the first that popped to mind was one I found five years ago in a poetry book I randomly bought at a used bookstore in Oakland.
Looking back, maybe it was a sign that I would one day write for the same publication as Thoreau It is difficult to say where precisely, or to say how large or small I am: the effect of water on light is a distortion. First: How terrifying is that? The mundane, orderly beginning to the poem feels a bit like a homeowner giving a gentle, if slightly boring, tour of a perfectly nice house: We just got these frosted sconces; the guest bathroom is at the end of the hall on the left; we love the backsplash, too.
It invites the reader to recognize the speaker, who is silent and invisible while making herself both seen and heard. The beauty of the natural landscape the ripple of water, the refraction of sunlight almost totally obscures her—but you nonetheless feel her specter viscerally. But now that I reflect on this poem years after first encountering it, I can also find something curiously tragic in it.
The speaker seems lost, alone, and less ghoulish than I first thought. She introduces herself in parentheses as if whispering for someone to witness, if not the fullness of her life, then at least the fact of her death. Like hundreds of other young women, I turned to Plath, with her pure, fearless authenticity, to ferry me through the tangle of growing up. Composed after a stint in hospital recovering from an appendectomy, the poem finds Plath lying in an all-white room as she considers a bouquet of tulips next to her:.
The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me. Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby. Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds. They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down, Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color, A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck. Nobody watched me before, now I am watched. The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins, And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips, And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen. It was a desire that began creeping up on me too as I passed from girlhood to womanhood and the world, which had once seemed so light and open, started imposing its constraints.
Suddenly, my body was a double-edged weapon; at night, I walked quickly, with my arms crossed over my chest. Suddenly, I entered a world that had been set up without my permission and seemed, sometimes, to whittle my ambitions down. Tulips put into words all the feelings I could not say—portraying the real life of one women, and in doing so, revealing a part of us all.
In the midst of composing Ariel, Plath sensed that she was creating something special. Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! At sixteen, I was captivated by this image: two dazzled lovers clasped in each other's arms, the couple captured just star-sparkled moments before their fateful kiss.
So was Keats. One of my favourite forms of poetry is spoken word, and this poem in particular is amazing! The poem can be watched here:. Spoken word poetry is a form of poetry that is meant to be performed in front of an audience, but even without the performance, the vivid words themselves are still able to get across the purpose of the poem.
She uses the technique of a teaching and supportive tone like that of a mother as she talks about her personal experiences of her life. When you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you wanna save are the ones standing on your cape. And yes, on a scale from one to over-trusting I am pretty damn naive but I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar.
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