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Modern and Postmodern Poetry

Gaithersburg High School Summer Reading Program 2014

Ms. BourqueMs. BourqueMs. BourqueMs. Bourque

To complete your summer reading assignment, follow these instructions:

1. Read all of the following poems.

2. Select four poems that you like the best.

3. Complete one poetry response form for each of the four poems you select.

4. Find one additional poem on your own, read it, and fill out a poetry response form for that poem. The fifth

poem can be one from this packet, one you already know and love, or a new one that you find through

independent reading.

5. Bring this packet, including your five completed poetry response forms, to the summer reading seminars in

September.

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Contents

“A Girl Ago” ………………………………………………………………….……………………….. Lucie Brock-Broido ……………………………… 3

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/246818

“Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town”……………………………………………………. e.e. cummings ……………………………………. 4

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15403

“Blood” ………………………………………………………………………………………………….. Naomi Shihab Nye ………………………………. 5


“Boy at the Window”……………………………………………………………………………… Richard Wilbur…………………………………….. 6

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/boy-at-the-window/

“Cartoon Physics, Part 1”……………………………………………………………………….. Nick Flynn……………………………………………. 7

http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/038.html

“Did I Miss Anything?”……………………………………………………………………………. Tom Wayman………………………………………. 8


“Facing It”………………………………………………………………………………………………. Yusef Komunyakaa………………………………. 9


“For My Daughter”…………………………………………………………………………………. David Ignatow……………………………………… 10


“I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land”……………………………………………. Rita Dove ……………………………………………. 11

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/30842

“Introduction to Poetry”………………………………………………………………………… Billy Collins………………………………………….. 12


“My Dad, In America”…………………………………………………………………………….. Shann Ray……………………………………………. 12


“Near the Wall of a House”……………………………………………………………………. Yehuda Amichai ………………………………….. 13


“Remora, Remora” ………………………………………………………………………………… Thomas Lux …………………………………………. 13


“Tendency Toward Vagrancy”………………………………………………………………… Philip Nikolayev …………………………………… 14


“The Rolling Saint”…………………………………………………………………………………. Aimee Nezhukumatathil………………………. 15


“The Taxi”………………………………………………………………………………………………. Amy Lowell …………………………………………. 16


“To The One Who Is Reading Me”………………………………………………………….. Jorge Luis Borges…………………………………. 16


“Tombo”………………………………………………………………………………………………… W.S. Di Piero ………………………………………. 17


“Watching the Mayan Women” ……………………………………………………………. Luisa Villani …………………………………………. 18


“Your World”…………………………………………………………………………………………..Georgia Douglas Johnson…………………….. 19


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“A Girl Ago” Lucie Brock-Broido

No feeding on wisteria. No pitch-burner traipsing

In the nettled woods. No milk in metal cylinders, no

Buttering. No making small contusions on the page

But saying nothing no one has not said before.

No milkweed blown across your pony-coat, no burrs.

No scent of juniper on your Jacobean mouth. No crush

Of ink or injury, no lacerating wish.

Extinguish me from this.

I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost

And flickering in unison with all the other fireflies in Appalachia,

Blinking in the swarm of it, and all at once, above

And on a bare branch in a shepherd's sky. No Dove.

There is no thou to speak of.

Lucie Brock-Broido, "A Girl Ago" from Stay, Illusion. Copyright © 2013 by Lucie Brock-Broido. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Published with arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC.

Source: Stay, Illusion (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013)

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“Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town” e.e. cummings

anyone lived in a pretty how town

(with up so floating many bells down)

spring summer autumn winter

he sang his didn’t he danced his did

Women and men(both little and small)

cared for anyone not at all

they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same

sun moon stars rain

children guessed(but only a few

and down they forgot as up they grew

autumn winter spring summer)

that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf

she laughed his joy she cried his grief

bird by snow and stir by still

anyone’s any was all to her

someones married their everyones

laughed their cryings and did their dance

(sleep wake hope and then)they

said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon

(and only the snow can begin to explain

how children are apt to forget to remember

with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess

(and noone stooped to kiss his face)

busy folk buried them side by side

little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep

and more by more they dream their sleep

noone and anyone earth by april

wish by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men(both dong and ding)

summer autumn winter spring

reaped their sowing and went their came

sun moon stars rain

From Complete Poems: 1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used with the permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Copyright © 1923, 1931, 1935, 1940, 1951, 1959, 1963, 1968, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1976, 1978, 1979 by

George James Firmage.

5

“Blood” Naomi Shihab Nye

“A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,"

my father would say. And he’d prove it,

cupping the buzzer instantly

while the host with the swatter stared.

In the spring our palms peeled like snakes.

True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways.

I changed these to fit the occasion.

Years before, a girl knocked,

wanted to see the Arab.

I said we didn’t have one.

After that, my father told me who he was,

“Shihab”—“shooting star”—

a good name, borrowed from the sky.

Once I said, “When we die, we give it back?”

He said that’s what a true Arab would say.

Today the headlines clot in my blood.

A little Palestinian dangles a toy truck on the front page.

Homeless fig, this tragedy with a terrible root

is too big for us. What flag can we wave?

I wave the flag of stone and seed,

table mat stitched in blue.

I call my father, we talk around the news.

It is too much for him,

neither of his two languages can reach it.

I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,

to plead with the air:

Who calls anyone civilized?

Where can the crying heart graze?

What does a true Arab do now?

From 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East by Naomi Shihab Nye, published by Greenwillow Books (2002). Originally published in

Yellow Glove by Naomi Shihab Nye, published by Breitenbush Books. Copyright © 1986 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Reprinted by permission of the

author. All rights reserved.

6

“Boy at the Window” Richard Wilbur

Seeing the snowman standing all alone

In dusk and cold is more than he can bear.

The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepare

A night of gnashings and enormous moan.

His tearful sight can hardly reach to where

The pale-faced figure with bitumen eyes

Returns him such a God-forsaken stare

As outcast Adam gave to paradise.

The man of snow is, nonetheless, content,

Having no wish to go inside and die.

Still, he is moved to see the youngster cry.

Though frozen water is his element,

He melts enough to drop from one soft eye

A trickle of the purest rain, a tear

For the child at the bright pane surrounded by

Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear.

7

“Cartoon Physics, Part 1” Nick Flynn

Children under, say, ten, shouldn't know

that the universe is ever-expanding,

inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies

swallowed by galaxies, whole

solar systems collapsing, all of it

acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning

the rules of cartoon animation,

that if a man draws a door on a rock

only he can pass through it.

Anyone else who tries

will crash into the rock. Ten-year-olds

should stick with burning houses, car wrecks,

ships going down -- earthbound, tangible

disasters, arenas

where they can be heroes. You can run

back into a burning house, sinking ships

have lifeboats, the trucks will come

with their ladders, if you jump

you will be saved. A child

places her hand on the roof of a schoolbus,

& drives across a city of sand. She knows

the exact spot it will skid, at which point

the bridge will give, who will swim to safety

& who will be pulled under by sharks. She will learn

that if a man runs off the edge of a cliff

he will not fall

until he notices his mistake.

from Some Ether, 2000

Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minn.

Copyright 2000 by Nick Flynn.

All rights reserved.

Reproduced with permission.

8

“Did I Miss Anything?” Tom Wayman

Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here

we sat with our hands folded on our desks

in silence, for the full two hours

Everything. I gave an exam worth

40 percent of the grade for this term

and assigned some reading due today

on which I’m about to hand out a quiz

worth 50 percent

Nothing. None of the content of this course

has value or meaning

Take as many days off as you like:

any activities we undertake as a class

I assure you will not matter either to you or me

and are without purpose

Everything. A few minutes after we began last time

a shaft of light suddenly descended and an angel

or other heavenly being appeared

and revealed to us what each woman or man must do

to attain divine wisdom in this life and

the hereafter

This is the last time the class will meet

before we disperse to bring the good news to all people

on earth.

Nothing. When you are not present

how could something significant occur?

Everything. Contained in this classroom

is a microcosm of human experience

assembled for you to query and examine and ponder

This is not the only place such an opportunity has been

gathered

but it was one place

And you weren’t here

From Did I Miss Anything? Selected Poems 1973-1993, 1993

Harbour Publishing

Copyright 1993 Tom Wayman.



9

“Facing It” Yusef Komunyakaa

My black face fades,

hiding inside the black granite.

I said I wouldn’t,

dammit: No tears.

I’m stone. I’m flesh.

My clouded reflection eyes me

like a bird of prey, the profile of night

slanted against morning. I turn

this way--the stone lets me go.

I turn that way--I’m inside

the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

again, depending on the light

to make a difference.

I go down the 58,022 names,

half-expecting to find

my own in letters like smoke.

I touch the name Andrew Johnson;

I see the booby trap’s white flash.

Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse

but when she walks away

the names stay on the wall.

Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s

wings cutting across my stare.

The sky. A plane in the sky.

A white vet’s image floats

closer to me, then his pale eyes

look through mine. I’m a window.

He’s lost his right arm

inside the stone. In the black mirror

a woman’s trying to erase names:

No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.

From Dien Cai Dau by Yusef Komunyakaa. Copyright © 1988 by Yusef Komunyakaa. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. All rights

reserved.

10

“For My Daughter” David Ignatow

When I die choose a star

and name it after me

that you may know

I have not abandoned

or forgotten you.

You were such a star to me,

following you through birth

and childhood, my hand

in your hand.

When I die

choose a star and name it

after me so that I may shine

down on you, until you join

me in darkness and silence

together.

from Against the Evidence: Selected Poems 1934-1994

Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Conn.

Copyright 1993 by David Ignatow.



11

“I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land” Rita Dove

Life's spell is so exquisite, everything conspires to break it. - Emily Dickinson

It wasn't bliss. What was bliss

but the ordinary life? She'd spend hours

in patter, moving through whole days

touching, sniffing, tasting . . . exquisite

housekeeping in a charmed world.

And yet there was always

more of the same, all that happiness,

the aimless Being There.

So she wandered for a while, bush to arbor,

lingered to look through a pond's restive mirror.

He was off cataloging the universe, probably,

pretending he could organize

what was clearly someone else's chaos.

That's when she found the tree,

the dark, crabbed branches

bearing up such speechless bounty,

she knew without being told

this was forbidden. It wasn't

a question of ownership—

who could lay claim to

such maddening perfection?

And there was no voice in her head,

no whispered intelligence lurking

in the leaves—just an ache that grew

until she knew she'd already lost everything

except desire, the red heft of it

warming her outstretched palm.

Source: Poetry (October 2002).

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“Introduction to Poetry” Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

from The Apple that Astonished Paris, 1996

University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, Ark.

Permissions information.

Copyright 1988 by Billy Collins.



“My Dad, In America” Shann Ray Source: Poetry (January 2013).

Your hand on my jaw

but gently

and that picture of you

punching through snow

to bring two deer, a gopher,

and a magpie

to the old Highwalker woman

who spoke only Cheyenne

and traced our footprints

on leather she later chewed to soften.

We need to know in America there is still blood

for forgiveness.

Dead things for the new day.

13

“Near the Wall of a House” Yehuda Amichai

Near the wall of a house painted

to look like stone,

I saw visions of God.

A sleepless night that gives others a headache

gave me flowers

opening beautifully inside my brain.

And he who was lost like a dog

will be found like a human being

and brought back home again.

Love is not the last room: there are others

after it, the whole length of the corridor

that has no end.

from Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai.

Edited and translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell (1986).

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., New York, NY

Copyright 1986 by Yehuda Amichai.



“Remora, Remora” Thomas Lux

Clinging to the shark

is a sucker shark,

attached to which

and feeding off its crumbs

is one still tinier,

inch or two,

and on top of that one,

one the size of a nick of gauze;

smaller and smaller

(moron, idiot, imbecile, nincompoop)

until on top of that

is the last, a microdot sucker shark,

a filament’s tip – with a heartbeat – sliced off,

and the great sea

all around feeding

his host and thus him.

He’s too small

to be eaten himself

(though some things swim

with open mouths) so

he just rides along in the blue current,

the invisible point of the pyramid,

the top beneath all else.

From The Cradle Place

Houghton Mifflin, 2004

Copyright 2004 Thomas Lux.



14

“Tendency Toward Vagrancy” Philip Nikolayev

I’ve long had what Soviet psychiatrists

called “a tendency toward vagrancy.”

At four I would run away from home

repeatedly for a whole day, alone

or sometimes with a friend named Boris

of like age. Knew full well we “just can’t do this,”

but nudge for nudge and wink for wink,

we’d board the trolleybus #10, I think,

buy tickets at four kopeks each

from our gleanings and savings of the week,

stick them into the ticket punch on the wall,

watch the chad fall as you pulled,

and ride all across Kishinev in half an hour

to get off near that unforgettable restaurant

built in the likeness of a huge wine barrel.

We peered inside, it was cool.

Then we had options:

go and splash in the local artificial lake

(I couldn’t swim yet),

wonder in between along the banks,

catching frogs to take home in a glass jar

to populate a small construction pond (why

did we always use my shirt to do this?),

or go and explore the local flea market,

which was not at all safe to do,

but even at four it’s nice to have options.

(One guy sold what we thought was a gun,

we asked him and he confirmed it.)

Those were days of cholera epidemics

in Moldova. We’d buy peasant-cooked

fodder corn on the cob when we got hungry,

haggled with old ladies over pennies.

We wouldn’t catch the return trolley until sunset.

Then it’s always the same picture:

the wicket creaks open, the landlord’s mutant

barks through froth, my wet shirt clings.

I step out of the dark

toward my mother waiting by the door

of our “temporary house” on Kaluga Street,

which was a bit of a dirt road, probably still is.

She has been crying, takes me inside.

Room and kitchen (no bathroom

or running water): the room

had a brick stove, the kitchen

a dirt floor (with mice and sometimes grass)

and a white washstand — these lines

are all that has survived of them.

There was great beauty in their squalor.

She has been crying, takes me inside,

says she will scold me later.

I know it will be soon. First she must call

the cops to tell them I’ve been found.

Of course, back then I didn’t understand anything:

neither how a poet harms his mother,

nor how alienated (thank you, Marx, for that term)

one can be from the start, and free

in the grip of that greatest paradox of all —

a happy Soviet childhood.

Philip Nikolayev, “Tendency Toward Vagrancy” from Letters from Aldenderry. Copyright © 2006 by Philip Nikolayev. Reprinted by permission of

Philip Nikolayev.

Source: Letters from Aldenderry (Salt Publishing, 2006)

15

“The Rolling Saint” Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Lotan Baba, a holy man from India, rolled on his side for four thousand kilometers across the country in his quest for world peace and eternal salvation. —Reuters

He started small: fasting here and there,

days, then weeks. Once, he stood under

a banyan tree for a full seven years, sitting

for nothing—not even to sleep. It came

to him in a dream: You must roll

on this earth, spin your heart in rain,

desert, dust. At sunrise he’d stretch, swab

any cuts from the day before, and lay prone

on the road while his twelve men swept

the ground in front of him with sisal brooms.

Even monkeys stopped and stared at this man

rolling through puddles, past storefronts

where children would throw him pieces

of butter candy he’d try and catch

in his mouth at each rotation. His men

swept and sang, swept and sang

of jasmine-throated angels

and pineapple slices in kulfi cream.

He rolled and rolled. Sometimes

in his dizzying spins, he thought

he heard God. A whisper, but still.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, "The Rolling Saint" from Miracle Fruit. Copyright © 2003 by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Reprinted by permission of Tupelo

Press.

Source: Miracle Fruit (Tupelo Press, 2003)

16

“The Taxi”

Amy Lowell

When I go away from you

The world beats dead

Like a slackened drum.

I call out for you against the jutted stars

And shout into the ridges of the wind.

Streets coming fast,

One after the other,

Wedge you away from me,

And the lamps of the city prick my eyes

So that I can no longer see your face.

Why should I leave you,

To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the

night?

Amy Lowell, “The Taxi” from The Complete Poetical Works of Amy

Lowell. Copyright © 1955 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Copyright

© renewed 1983 by Houghton Mifflin Company, Brinton P. Roberts,

and G. D'Andelot, Esquire. Reprinted with the permission of

Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Source: Selected Poems of Amy Lowell (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,

2002)

“To The One Who Is Reading Me” Jorge Luis Borges

You are invulnerable. Didn’t they deliver

(those forces that control your destiny)

the certainty of dust? Couldn’t it be

your irreversible time is that river

in whose bright mirror Heraclitus read

his brevity? A marble slab is saved

for you, one you won’t read, already graved

with city, epitaph, dates of the dead.

And other men are also dreams of time,

not hardened bronze, purified gold. They’re dust

like you; the universe is Proteus.

Shadow, you’ll travel to what waits ahead,

the fatal shadow waiting at the rim.

Know this: in some way you’re already dead.

Translated from the Spanish by Tony Barnstone

Source: Poetry (March 2012).

17

“Tombo” W.S. Di Piero

In Safeway yesterday, a young man sat on the floor,

pulled off his shoes, granted audience to us,

his fellow seekers, and picked his naked feet.

He smiled, our brother, at the story he told

of deliverance at the hand of Master Tombo,

lord and creator, whose round energy

lives in us surrounds us surrounds our milk

our butter our eggs: see Him there,

in the Slurpee glaze upon the freezer case?

In that elder by the yogurt shelves?

I believed his happiness and coveted

a tidy universe. He picked his feet

while a child whimpered by the melons, her nanny’s

mango aura made the cold blown air

touch my brain, I smelled myself in my aging body

and felt my silly bones collapse again.

I wanted Tombo’s dispensation to save

this faint believer and the indifferent world

that rivers through and past me. Down my aisle

lavender respired from the flower stall

and Security spoke kind words to our prophet.

Oh I love and hate the fickle messy wash

of speech and flowers and winds and the tides

and crave plain rotund stories

to justify our continuity. To the Maya corn was god,

spilled blood made corn grow,

the blood gods shed watered needy ground

and became People who worshipped the corn.

Tombo’s grace carries us, convinced, from one

inarticulate incoherent moment to the next.

Tonight the wet streets and their limelight sigh.

Orion turns, burning, unchanged again.

Bread rises somewhere and its ovens scent the trees.

My poor belief lives in the only and all

of the slur of what these are, and what these are

streams toward loss in moments we live through.

As children we were lost in our opaque acts

but fresh and full in time. I remember

how I touched a girlish knee, how one boy

broke another’s face, how we all stood

in hard gray summer rain so it would run

down the tips of noses to our tongues.

Source: Poetry (September 2013).

18

“Watching the Mayan Women”

Luisa Villani

I hang the window inside out “Selva” means forest or jungle

like a shirt drying in a breeze

and the arms that are missing come to me

Yes, it's a song, one I don't quite comprehend

although I do understand the laundry.

White ash and rain water, a method

my aunt taught me, but I'll never know

how she learned it in Brooklyn. Her mind

has gone to seed, blown by a stroke,

and that dandelion puff called memory

has flown far from her eyes. Some things remain.

Procedures. Methods. If you burn

a fire all day, feeding it snapped

branches and newspapers—

the faces pressed against the print

fading into flames-you end up

with a barrel of white ash. If

you take that same barrel and fill it

with rain, let it sit for a day,

you will have water

that can bring brightness to anything.

If you take that water,

and in it soak your husband's shirts,

he'll pause at dawn when he puts one on,

its softness like a haunting afterthought.

And if he works all day in the selva,

he'll divine his way home

in shirtsleeves aglow with torchlight.

from Hayden's Ferry Review, Issue 26, Spring / Summer 2000

Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ

Copyright 2000 by Luisa Villani.



19

“Your World”

Georgia Douglas Johnson

Your world is as big as you make it.

I know, for I used to abide

In the narrowest nest in a corner,

My wings pressing close to my side.

But I sighted the distant horizon

Where the skyline encircled the sea

And I throbbed with a burning desire

To travel this immensity.

I battered the cordons around me

And cradled my wings on the breeze,

Then soared to the uttermost reaches

With rapture, with power, with ease!

Source:

Words with Wings: A Treasury of African-American Poetry and Art

(HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 2001)

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Poetry Poetry Poetry Poetry ResponseResponseResponseResponse FormFormFormForm 1111 Name _________________________________

Title of Poem _____________________________________ Name of Poet _____________________________________

Topic

What is the poem about?

Speaker

Who is the speaker / narrator?

Message

What is the main idea being

conveyed?

Diction

Which words or brief phrases

most effectively convey the

poem’s meaning?

Tone

What is the speaker’s attitude

toward the topic or message

of the poem?

Reflection

Why do I like this poem?

What does it remind me of?

How does it make me feel?

How does it relate to my life?

What does it make me think

about?

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Poetry Poetry Poetry Poetry ResponseResponseResponseResponse FormFormFormForm 2 2 2 2 Name _________________________________


Topic


Speaker


Message


conveyed?

Diction



poem’s meaning?

Tone



of the poem?

Reflection






about?

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Topic


Speaker


Message


conveyed?

Diction



poem’s meaning?

Tone



of the poem?

Reflection






about?

23



Topic


Speaker


Message


conveyed?

Diction



poem’s meaning?

Tone



of the poem?

Reflection






about?

24



Topic


Speaker


Message


conveyed?

Diction



poem’s meaning?

Tone



of the poem?

Reflection






about?

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