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Top 10 Poems of All Time - Sort of
Tell Us Something You've Done Our Facebook Friends Have Not! A Cento
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SoFloPoJo & The Betsy Hotel's Poet-in-Residence Mary Galvin
What Saves Us - Very Possibly It's Poetry by Francine Witte
Humanism and the Question of Identity in Hungarian Poetry by Peter Hargitai
A Poetry Visit to the Rio Grande Valley by George Wallace
In Memoriam John Arndt
Click here for excerpts from Omar Pimienta's Album of Fences
Translated by Jose Antonio Villarán with review by Arturo Desimone
What's on Your List?
We asked poets to send us their list of the "Top 10 Poems of All Time."
We know they would choose different poems on any given day.
Perhaps our friend Silvia Curbelo expressed it best--
Well, this was a tough one. I started by making a list of my 10 favorite poets (which in itself was incredibly hard to narrow down), and then tried to figure out a favorite poem from each. But that didn’t work at all. Along the way I discovered while I might love and admire a poet’s entire oeuvre, it was often the case there would not be ONE poem by that poet I could call a top-10 favorite. But it was a start, and I came up with four poems from the list that way. Interestingly, I also quickly discovered the inverse is true. There are many many poems I love written by people whose books and overall work I generally don’t find that compelling.
So… in the end, this is what floated to the top of my head. I was dying to include a few runners up, but resisted the temptation.
We have selected a poem from each list—highlighted as a link—for you to read should you care to.
Silvia Curbelo
Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías by Federico García Lorca
To Go to Lvov by Adam Zagajewski
Lentes (Lenses) by Delfin Prats
Tear It Down by Jack Gilbert
Trowbridge Street by Octavio Paz
The River of Bees by W.S. Merwin
Refugees by Beckian Fritz Goldberg
My President by Danez Smith
Our Dust by C. D. Wight
Without by Donald Hall
Linda Pastan
I am NOT going to list the ten top poems "of all time" but ten of "my favorite" poems, at the moment.
73rd sonnet, That time of year… by Shakespeare
Jerusalem, by William Blake
Spring and Fall by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold
The Cricket sang and set the sun... by Emily Dickinson
Musee Des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden
The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
Heroic Simile by Robert Hass
Denise Duhamel
Shooter by Jan Beatty
Rape by Jane Cortez
A Small Needful Fact by Ross Gay
The Closet by Bill Knott
Facts About the Moon by Dorianne Laux
The Race by Sharon Olds
Ringing the Bells by Ann Sexton
Incendiary Art by Patricia Smith
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower by Dylan Thomas
The Past by David Trinidad
David Kirby
The Metamorphoses, Book 4 ("The Transformation of Cadmus”) by Ovid
The Inferno, Canto I ("The Dark Wood of Error”) by Dante
Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats
Be Drunk by Baudelaire
The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
Failing and Falling by Jack Gilbert
What I Want by George Bilgere
Fubar by Lucia Perillo
Mambo Cadillac by Barbara Hamby
Babara Hamby
Metamorphoses by Ovid
The Song of Solomon
Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats
Hamlet's "What a Piece of Work is Man" speech or the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
Wild Nights by Emily Dickinson
A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud
Bee Poems by Sylvia Plath
Dear Lovely Death by Langston Hughes
Ode to the Maggot by Yusef Komunyakaa
Jim Daniels
Feeling Fucked Up by Etheridge Knight
Did I Miss Anything? by Tom Wayman
Gate A-4 by Naomi Shihab Nye
At the Reading by John Woods
Bless Their Hearts by Richard Newman
Ode to My Socks by Pablo Neruda
Selecting a Reader by Ted Kooser
The Plum Trees by Mary Oliver
The Republic of Poetry by Martin Espada
Jesus on a Tortilla by Lee Upton
Shiva Bhusal
Boast of Quietness by Jorge Luis Borges
If by Rudyard Kipling
The Second Coming by W.B Yeats
If you forget me by Pablo Neruda
Paagal, a Nepali poem by Laxmi Prasad Devkota
Mero Chowk, a Nepali poem by Bhupi Sherchan
The end and the beginning by Wisława Szymborska
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
The Genius of the Crowd by Charles Bukowski
No man is an island by John Donne
Ilhem Issaoui
Rain Song by Badr Shakir Al-sayyab
I shall not live in vain by Emily Dickinson
The Wasteland by T.S Eliot
Down by the Salley Gardens by William Butler Yeats
Autobiographia Literaria by Frank O'hara
The Moon by Joseph Fasano
Style by Charles Bukowski
Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People are Dying by Noor Hindi
I lied and said I was Busy by Brittin Oakman
The Melting Star Anatoly Molotov
Peter Meinke
An impossible list for a poet and teacher, but this evening these burn brightly in my memory—in my heart and brain. Tomorrow there certainly will be others, but let’s go with these.
Sonnet XVIII, Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day? by William Shakespeare
The Sun Rising by John Donne
The Tyger by William Blake
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth
Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats
Because I Could Not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson
Lullaby by W. H. Auden
The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot
We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks
Ann Pedone
Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth
A by Louis Zukofsky
Sea Rose by H. D.
The Rain by Robert Creeley
Canto XIII by Ezra Pound
The Albertine Workout by Anne Carson
I’m Reading Your Mind by Jorie Graham
Dream by Eileen Myles
46 by Sappho
37 by Catullus
Fleda Brown
The Windhover by Gerald Manly Hopkins
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
I Heard a Fly Buzz by Emily Dickinson
Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold
Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
Let Me Not to the Marriage by William Shakespeare
The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Easter 1916 by W.B. Yeats
The Oven Bird by Robert Frost
Brendan Walsh
Ode To Kanye West In Two Parts, Ending In A Chain Of Mothers Rising From The River by Hanif Abdurraqib
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
The City in Which I Love You by Li-Young Lee
Standing on Earth, Among the Cows by Malena Morling
How to Like It by Stephen Dobyns
Otherwise by Jane Kenyon
Late Fragment by Raymond Carver
Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass
Questions of Travel by Elizabeth Bishop
A Blessing by James Wright
Alison Stone
The Duino Elegies by Rilke
Snapshots of a Daughter in Law by Adrienne Rich
Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart
A Dedication to Hunger by Louise Gluck
Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath
After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes by Emily Dickinson
The Art of Losing by Elizabeth Bishop
Motown Crown by Patricia Smith
Brutal Imagination by Cornelius Eady
Not Waving But Drowning by Stevie Smith
Arturo Deslomen
Poem of the Deep Song (Poema del Cante Jondo) by Federico García Lorca
Shir HaShirim (Song of Songs) for Belle-Kiss, by/from Shlomo Ha-Melech
Nerve-snowfall of Angst by César Vallejo
Daddy by Sylvia Plath
Poetry is a Destructive Force by Wallace Stevens
Preface to a 21 vol. Suicide Note by LeRoi Jones
The Night of Santiago by Leonard Cohen
Lamentation for the turtledove of Butch Buchanan, by Sidney West
The Age by Osip Mandelstam
Amazing Eyes of Rita by Mahmoud Darwish
Lola Haskins
Sonnet on his Blindness by Milton
Batter my Heart by John Donne
Because I could not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson
Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight by Vachel Lindsay
The Second Coming by WB Yeats
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
My Last Duchess by Robert Browning
The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes
The Ballad of William Sycamore by Stephen Vincent Benet
Julie Marie Wade
Splittings by Adrienne Rich
wishes for sons by Lucille Clifton
Bay Poem from Berkeley by Sandra Cisneros
I Go Back to May 1937 by Sharon Olds
Persimmons by Li-Young Lee
In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver
Ellen West by Frank Bidart
Deepstep, Come Shining by C.D. Wright
When I Was a Lesbian by Denise Duhamel
Sleeping with the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen
Jennifer Martelli
Poem by Elizabeth Bishop
Carrowmore by Lucie Brock-Broido
Victoria Chang—died unwillingly on by Victoria Chang
jasper texas 1998 by Lucille Clifton
It Was the Animals by Natalie Diaz
Low Tide, Late August by Marie Howe
Kitchen by Laura Jensen
Dothead by Amit Majmudar
The Bee Meeting or The Hanging Man by Sylvia Plath
Gods by Anne Sexton
Michael Hathaway
if there are any heavens by E.E. Cummings
Domination of Black by Wallace Stevens
His Necessary Darkness by Nancy Sullivan
Renascence by Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Bells by Edgar Allen Poe
Four Little Foxes by Lew Sarett
Wuthering Heights by Sylvia Plath
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note by Leroi Jones
Interlude III by Karl Shapiro
Taught Me Purple by Evelyn Tooley Hunt
Bruce Bond
At the Fishhouses by Elizabeth Bishop
The Peacock Room by Robert Hayden
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven by Wallace Stevens
Trilogy by H.D.
For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell
Midsummerby Derek Walcott
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery
The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley
The Last One by W.S. Merwin
Saint Judas by James Wright
Doug Ramspeck
Averno by Louise Glück
Song by Brigit Pegeen Kelly
The History of the American West by Kevin Prufer
summer, somewhere by Danez Smith
Winter Stars by Larry Levis
Scheherazade by Richard Siken
Religion by Robert Wrigley
Bowl of Lilacs by Henri Cole
Telemachus by Ocean Vuong
A Story About the Body by Robert Hass
Molly Peacock
Concerning a Young Woman by Sappho, 700-323 BC
Adonis in the Underworld by Praxilla, 700-323 BC
Epitaph on a Bride's Tomb by Erinna, 323-31 BC
Wulf and Edwacer (Anglo Saxon), by Anonymous,10th Century
To the Tune Cutting a Flowering Plum Branch by Li Ch'ing Chao, 10th century
I Picked an Azalea by Izumi Shikibu, 10th century
Idleness by Lu Yu, 12th century
Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare, 16th century
Whoso List to Hunt by Thomas Wyatt, 16th century
Love III by George Herbert, 17th century
Steve Kronen
To Autumn by John Keats
There's a Certain Slant of Light by Emily Dickinson
Desert Places by Robert Frost
A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy's Day by John Donne
The Moose by Elizabeth Bishop
This Anxious Pleasing Being by Richard Wilbur
Psalm and Lament by Donald Justice
A Birthday Poem by Anthony Hecht
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
To Postumus - ii.14 by Horace (the David Ferry translation)
Holly Iglesias
New Year’s Eve Letter to Friends by Jean Follain
Signs for Travelers by David Clewell
St. Kevin and the Blackbird by Seamus Heaney
The Gift by Li-Young Lee
When Giving Is All We Have by Alberto Ríos
Para Hablar con los Muertos (To Talk with the Dead) by Jorge Teillier
Sorrow’s Flower by Christian Wiman
The Box This Comes In by C.D. Wright
A Cradle Song by William Butler Yeats
A Flame by Adam Zagajewski
Stephen Gibson
By W. H. Auden:
Musée des Beaux Arts
In Memory of W.B. Yeats
In Praise of Limestone
The Shield of Achilles
September 1, 1939
Woods
Volcanoes (from the Russian of Akhmadulina)
By John Keats:
Ode to a Nightingale
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Sailing to Byzantium
Peter Grandbois
The Envoy by Jane Hirshfield
Keeping Things Whole by Mark Strand
The Infinities by Joanna Klink
Like an Angel by Nin Andrews
Animism by Joshua McKinney
Dancing by Robert Hass*
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
Daybreak by Galway Kinnel
Seen from Above by Wislawa Szymborska
The Same Inside by Anna Stir
* Click here to see Robert Hass read "Dancing" during the SoFloPoJo Miami Book Fair interview
Ernesto Cepeda
Gate A-4 by Naomi Shiab Nye’
She Being Brand by e.e. cummings
The Journey Has Always Been by Jimmy Santiago Baca
Mexican American Sonnet by Iliana Rocha
What Do Women Want by Kim Adonnizio
Nashville by Tiana Clark
Half Mexican by Juan Felipe Herrera
The Wild Divine by Ada Limón
Drought by Sandra Cisneros
Anthem with Emerald and Gold by Jessica Abughattas
Virgil Suarez
Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich
Death of the Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrel
Howl by Alen Ginsburg
Warnings by Nicanor Parra
Walking Around by Pablo Neruda
O Taste & See by Denise Levertov
We Be Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks
The Colonel by Carolyn Forche
Adultery by James Dickey
The Raven by Edgar A. Poe
Terese Svoboda
Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich
Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold
Musée des Beaux Arts by Auden
Meeting the British, Madoc: A Mystery by Paul Muldoon
Sun-up by Lola Ridge
Crucifixion by Langston Hughes
black herman’s last asrah levitation at magic city, Atlanta 2010 by Latasha Nevada Diggs
MDCCCL by Caroline Knox
Red by Anne Carson
I Love to Singa by Paul Beatty
Amy Poague
Famous by Naomi Shihab Nye
The Gate by Marie Howe
Aerialists by Mary Oliver
Fragment Thirty-Six by H.D.
Alla Tha's All Right, but by June Jordan
To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall by Kim Addonizio
won't you celebrate with me by Lucille Cliffton
Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars) by Muriel Rukeyser
In the Morning, Before Anything Bad Happens by Molly Brodak
To Be Posted on 21st Street, Between Eye and Pennsylvania by Minnie Bruce Pratt
Carmine Di Biase
Hero and Leander by Christopher Marlowe
The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray
The Deserted Village by Oliver Goldsmith
Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking by Walt Whitman
Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
Night Mail by W. H. Auden
Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen
Summoned by Bells by John Betjeman
Alan Catlin
Haydn’s Skull Returning by David Chorlton
The Colonel by Carolyn Forche
Howl by Allen Ginsberg
A Valedictory: Forbidding Mourning by John Donne
The Incantation of Frieda K by Kate Braverman
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner- by Randall Jarrell
Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London by Dylan Thomas
A Bummer by Michael Casey
Adonais: An Elegy on the death of John Keats by Percy B. Shelley
Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen
Sarah White
Safe in their alabaster chambers by Emily Dickinson
I'll tell you how the sun rose by Emily Dickinson
The American Sublime by Wallace Stevens
As Kingfishers catch fire by G.M. Hopkins
In Beauty Bright by Gerald Stern
The Farewel (for Philip Levine) by Gerald Stern
Filling Station by Elizabeth Bishop
The Good Morrow by John Donne
Things Shouldn't be So Hard by Kay Ryan
Zone by Guillaume Appolonaire
Hillary Sideris
Musee des Beaux Arts by WH Auden
Dream Song 14 by John Berryman
American Sonnet 61 and American Sonnet 70 by Wanda Coleman
Dockery & Son by Philip Larkin
The Rain Streaked Avenues of Central Queens by D. Nurske
The Dead Remember Brooklyn by D. Nurkse
My Weariness of Epic Proportions by Charles Simic
Prodigy by Charles Simic
Listen, Daisy, When I'm Dead, Although by Fernando Pessoa
Laurie Byro
Traveling Through the Dark and A ritual to read to one another by William Stafford
Making a Fist by Naomi Nye
From a Window by Christian Wiman
The Lammas Hireling by Ian Duhig
A Blessing by James Wright
Daddy by Sylvia Plath
The Tempest by William Shakespeare
The Love Song of J. A . Prufrock by TS Eliot
The River Merchant’s Wife by Ezra Pound
Jesse Glass
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
The Mental Traveler by William Blake
The Grey Monk by William Blake
The Book of Urizen byWilliam Blake
Milton by William Blake
Jerusalem by William Blake
The Four Zoas by William Blake
Jubilate by Agno Smart
In Parentheses by David Jones
Thunder, The Perfect Mind by Anon.
Norman “Buzz” Minnick
The Merchant's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer,
Sonnet 23 (As an unperfect actor on the stage) by William Shakespeare
Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats
Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
76 (Exultation is the Going…) by Emily Dickinson
We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Second Coming by W. B. Yeats
Let American Be America Again by Langston Hughes
High Windows by Philip Larkin
Feeling Fucked Up by Etheridge Knight
Sean Sexton
Loveliest of Trees by A E Houseman
The Harvest Bow by Seamus Heaney
Beauty by BH Fairchild
Anthem (A kind of preamble to his longer poem, “Grass”) by Buck Ramsey
Lilacs In the Dooryard Blooming by Walt Whitman
Asphodel that Greeny Flower by William Carlos Williams
The entire Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnell
Dearest M— by Hayden Carruth
White Egrets by Derek Walcott
Preludes by TS Eliot
Lynne Viti
Sonnet 49 by William Shakespeare
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning by John Donne
Spring and Fall: to a Young Child by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Oven Bird or Design or Birches by Robert Frost
Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens
Church Going by Philiip Larkin
We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks
When all the Others Were Away at Mass by Seamus Heaney
Jumping Off the Mystic Tobin Bridge by Martin Espada
Conflation by Andrea Cohen
Wandajune Bishop-Towle
The Odyssey by Homer
As the sweet apple blushes by Sappho
Odi et Amo (I love and I hate) by Catullus
A charm invests a face by Dickinson
Gato que brincas na rua" (Cat, you tumble down the street) by Fernando Pessoa
L'union Libre" (Free Union) by Andre Breton
To Autumn by Keats
Song of Myself by Whitman
To My Dear and Loving Husband by Anne Bradstreet
And senryu writer Dee Evetts
Jeff Santosuosso
Rime of the Ancient Mariner - by Coleridge
The Deer Lay Down Their Bones by Robinson Jeffers
The Seventh by Attila Jozsef
My Childhood Home I See Again - Abraham Lincoln (yes, that A Lincoln)
(so many by) Edna St. Vincent Millay
Alicante Lullaby by Sylvia Plath
The Raven by EA Poe
Self-Portrait as Mae West One-Liner by Paisley Rekdal
Chicago by Carl Sandberg
Track by Tomas Transtromer
Gianna Russo
A Bird Came Down the Walk by Emily Dickinson
Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
Elegy for Jane by Theodore Roetke
The Truth the Dead Know by Anne Sexton
Facing It by Yusef Komunyakaa
Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Gluck
Incident by Natasha Trethewey
When My Brother was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay
Bruce Weber
Woman From Starlake by Lenny DellaRocca
Naima by Steve Dalachinsjy
Tomatoes by Steven Dobyns
Il Pleut by Guilaume Apollonaire
Almost any of the later poems of Ryuichi Tamura
Crowds by Charles Baudelaire
Drunken Morning by Rimbaud
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d byWalt Whitman
Visions of Johanna by Bob Dylan
Asphodel, That Greeny Flower by William Carlos Williams,
Requiem by Anna Akmatova
Caron Andregg
Be advised, there will be inevitable conflation between "Greatest"
and “Favorite-est.”
Whoso List to Hunt by Thomas Wyatt
Paradise Lost by John Milton
To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell
The Vanity of Human Wishes by Samuel Johnson
Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats
Orpheus Euridyce. Hermes by Rainer Maria Rilke
I Knew a Woman by Theodore Roethke
Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas
Woodchucks by Maxine Kumin*
Study for the World's Body by David St. John
*Definitely a "favorite-est."
Steve Klepetar
The Spring Song from the prologue to The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Sonnet 130 My Mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun by Shakespeare
Sailing to Byzantium by Yeats
Wild Nights by Emily Dickinson
Riddle by Sylvia Plath
The World is too much with us by William Wordsworth
The Twelve Dancing Princesses by Anne Sexton
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
Saturday’s Child by Countee Cullen
The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens
Catherine Mazodier
Digging by Seamus Heaney
Le bateau ivre by Rimbaud
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
Atemwende by Paul Celan
Advice to Myself by Adrienne Rich
The Waking by Theodore Roethke
This Be the Verse by Phillip Larkin
Eclats d'Août by Philippe Jaccottet
Als das Kind Kind war by Peter Handke
Snow by Archibald MacNeice
Melissa Fite Johnson
I Go Back to May 1937 by Sharon Olds
Daystar by Rita Dove
Loading a Boar by David Lee
Gate A-4 by Naomi Shihab Nye
A Small Needful Fact by Ross Gay
25th High School Reunion by Linda Pastan
Tea by Leila Chatti
moonchild by Lucille Clifton
For Eleanor Boylan Talking with God by Anne Sexton
The Yellow Dot by Robert Bly
Kathleen Helen
Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke
Spring and Fall by Gerald Manly Hopkins
jasper texas 1998 by Lucille Clifton
The Tomb At Akr Çaar by Ezra Pound
A Winter Night by Tomas Tranströmer
The Night of the Shirts by W.S. Merwin
The Idea of Ancestry by Etheridge Knight
Under One Small Star by Wislawa Szymborka
Romance Sonámbulo by Federico Garcia Lorca
The Anactoria Poemby Sappho
Angela Torres
A Brief for the Defense by Jack Gilbert
First Thanksgiving by Sharon Olds
When I Am Asked by Lisel Mueller
Poetry by Pablo Neruda
Persimmons by Li Young Lee
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt by Ross Gay
When You Are Old by W.B. Yeats
The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry
Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem by Matthew Olzman
Yaddyra Peralta
The Bight by Elizabeth Bishop
This Morning I Pray for My Enemies by Joy Harjo
Wigphrastic by Terrance Hayes
Samurai Song by Robert Pinsky
Candelabra with Heads by Nicole Sealey
Ode to Eating Pomegranates in Brooklyn by Patrick Rosal
My Music by Campbell McGrath
Rain Effect by Mary Ruefle
Ending the Estrangement by Ross Gay
Our Lady of Suyapa by Roy G. Guzman
John King
The Manor Garden by Sylvia Plath
Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk by Charles Simic
Pegasus by Joy Priest
Ourselves or Nothing by Carolyn Forché
Looking for the Gulf Motel by Richard Blanco
Layover by Ericka Dawson
Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins
The Rape Joke by Patricia Lockwood
Poem to the Reader by Sharon Olds
Deaf Girl Playing by James Tate
David Trinidad
At the Fishhouses by Elizabeth Bishop
I watched the Moon around the House by Emily Dickinson
G-9 by Tim Dlugos,
On My Way Out I Passed Over You and the Verrazano Bridge by Audre Lorde
Ode to the Dead Millionaire (trans. Ilan Stavans) by Pablo Neruda,
A Step Away from Them by Frank O’Hara
The Moon and the Yew Tree by Sylvia Plath
This Dark Apartment by James Schuyler
Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound by Anne Sexton
The Pink Locust by William Carlos Williams
Yvonne Zipter
The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop
In Each Other's Arms, Lightning by Minnie Bruce Pratt
Morning Song by Sylvia Plath
Do You Love Me? by Robert Wrigley
History Lesson by Natasha Trethewey
When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving by Reginald Dwayne Betts
My Life by Somebody Else by Mark Strand
The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
Bullet Points by Jericho Brown
The Kingfisher by Mary Oliver
Some SoFloPoJo Editors List Their picks for the Top 10 Poems of All Time
Stacie Kiner
The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
Ash Wednesday by T.S. Eliot
From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning by John Donne
The Sensual World by Louise Gluck
Daffodils by Ted Hughes
For My Lover Returning to His Wife by Anne Sexton
What Work Is by Philip Levine
I Am On My Way to Oklahoma to Bury the Man I Nearly Left My Husband For by Sandra Cisneros
Susannah Simpson
Sonnet 17 by PabloNeruda
Now Is The Time by Hafiz
The Panther by Rainer Maria Rilke
Eagle Poem by Joy Harjo
The Guest House by Rumi
Otherwise by Jane Kenyon
Ah, Ah by Joy Harjo
Wild Swans at Coole by W.B. Yeats
The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry
Lenny DellaRocca
Soldier Asleep at the Tomb by Gjertrud Schnackenberg
Black Mare by Lynda Hull
Mistral by John Koethe
Prayer for Sunlight and Hunger by Traci Brimhall
The Sheep Child by James Dickey
High Windows by Philip Larkin
Howl by Allen Ginsberg
Bulimia by Denise Duhamel
Waiting for the Barbarians by Constantine P. Cafavy
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Goodnight by Dylan Thomas
Nicole Tallman
Her Kind by Anne Sexton
Tulips by Sylvia Plath
Les roses sont entrées by Renee Vivien
Chanson d’automne by Paul Verlaine
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
What the Living Do by Marie Howe
Je t’aime by Paul Eluard
Rain by Jack Gilbert
Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda
The Snowman by Wallace Stevens
Barbra Nightingale
The Colonel by Carolyn Forche
Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
The Man with the Blue Guitar by Wallace Stevens
The Idea of Order in Key West by Wallace Stevens
Tonight I Write the Saddest Lines by Pablo Neruda
Daddy by Sylvia Plath
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
Song of the Shirt by Thomas Hood
Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich
Caridad Moro Gronliere
The River Merchant’s Wife by Li Po (Translated by Pound)
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
Daffodils by Ted Hughes
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
Double Image by Anne Sexton
Warming Her Pearls by Carol Ann Duffy
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
To The Harbormaster by Frank O’Hara
Michael Mackin O'Mara
Dinosaurs in the Hood by Danez Smith
Have You Prayed by Li Young Lee
Thinking of the Lost World by Randall Jarrell
When the Burning Begins by Patricia Smith
When I Have Fears by John Keats
Magdalene – The Seven Devils by Marie Howe
Order No 2 to the Army of the Arts by Vladimir Mayakovsky
Harmonie Du Soir by Charles Baudelaire
Fugue of Death by Paul Celan
Of the Dark Doves by Federico Garcia Lorca
Jennifer Greenberg
By Fire by Sharon Olds
For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash by Joy Harjo
So Penseroso by Ogden Nash
How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This by Hanif Abdurraqib
Listen by e e cummings
The Cows on Killing Day by Les Murray
The Sounds of the Universe Coming in my Window by Jack Kerouac
Ode to My Socks by Pablo Neruda
Duende by Tracy K Smith
Berck-Plage by Sylvia Plath
Gary Kay
Dream Song #5 by John Berryman
I Knew a Woman by Theodore Roethke
Emperor of Ice Cream by Wallace Stevens
The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens
Leda and the Swan by W.B. Yeats
The Art of Losing by Elizabeth Bishop
My Last Duchess by Robert Browning
Harlot's House by Oscar Wilde
Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy
Aunt Jennifer's Tigers by Adrienne Rich
Patricia Whiting
The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats
Easter 1916 by W.B. Yeats
Under Ben Bulben by W.B. Yeats
The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
Digging by Seamus Heaney
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
A Book Full of Pictures by Charles Simic
The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins
No Man Is an Island by John Donne
Meryl Stratford
Sestina by Elizabeth Bishop:
note, passed to superman by Lucille Clifton
My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun by Emily Dickinson
Rant by Diane di Prima
Fragment Thirty-six by H.D
The Arrival of the Bee Box by Sylvia Plath
Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich
Not Waving, but Drowning by Stevie Smith
In Praise of My Sister by Wislawa Szymborska
We Shall Not Escape Hell by Marina Tsvetaeva
Don Burns
The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats
After a Journey by Thomas Hardy
Ithaca by C. P. Cavafy
Deception Island by W. S. Merwin
The Laughing Thrush by W. S. Merwin
The Lost Land by Eavan Boland
Any and all by by Matsuo Basho
The Gift by Li-Young Lee
Poetry Reading by Anna Swir
Sonnet 116 (Let me not...) by William Shakespeare
Stacie Kiner
The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
Ash Wednesday by T.S. Eliot
From Blossoms by Li-Young Lee
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning by John Donne
The Sensual World by Louise Gluck
Daffodils by Ted Hughes
For My Lover Returning to His Wife by Anne Sexton
What Work Is by Philip Levine
I Am On My Way to Oklahoma to Bury the Man I Nearly Left My Husband For by Sandra Cisneros
Susannah Simpson
Sonnet 17 by PabloNeruda
Now Is The Time by Hafiz
The Panther by Rainer Maria Rilke
Eagle Poem by Joy Harjo
The Guest House by Rumi
Otherwise by Jane Kenyon
Ah, Ah by Joy Harjo
Wild Swans at Coole by W.B. Yeats
The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry
Lenny DellaRocca
Soldier Asleep at the Tomb by Gjertrud Schnackenberg
Black Mare by Lynda Hull
Mistral by John Koethe
Prayer for Sunlight and Hunger by Traci Brimhall
The Sheep Child by James Dickey
High Windows by Philip Larkin
Howl by Allen Ginsberg
Bulimia by Denise Duhamel
Waiting for the Barbarians by Constantine P. Cafavy
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Goodnight by Dylan Thomas
Nicole Tallman
Her Kind by Anne Sexton
Tulips by Sylvia Plath
Les roses sont entrées by Renee Vivien
Chanson d’automne by Paul Verlaine
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
What the Living Do by Marie Howe
Je t’aime by Paul Eluard
Rain by Jack Gilbert
Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda
The Snowman by Wallace Stevens
Barbra Nightingale
The Colonel by Carolyn Forche
Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
The Man with the Blue Guitar by Wallace Stevens
The Idea of Order in Key West by Wallace Stevens
Tonight I Write the Saddest Lines by Pablo Neruda
Daddy by Sylvia Plath
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
Song of the Shirt by Thomas Hood
Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich
Caridad Moro Gronliere
The River Merchant’s Wife by Li Po (Translated by Pound)
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
Daffodils by Ted Hughes
One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
Double Image by Anne Sexton
Warming Her Pearls by Carol Ann Duffy
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
To The Harbormaster by Frank O’Hara
Michael Mackin O'Mara
Dinosaurs in the Hood by Danez Smith
Have You Prayed by Li Young Lee
Thinking of the Lost World by Randall Jarrell
When the Burning Begins by Patricia Smith
When I Have Fears by John Keats
Magdalene – The Seven Devils by Marie Howe
Order No 2 to the Army of the Arts by Vladimir Mayakovsky
Harmonie Du Soir by Charles Baudelaire
Fugue of Death by Paul Celan
Of the Dark Doves by Federico Garcia Lorca
Jennifer Greenberg
By Fire by Sharon Olds
For Anna Mae Pictou Aquash by Joy Harjo
So Penseroso by Ogden Nash
How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This by Hanif Abdurraqib
Listen by e e cummings
The Cows on Killing Day by Les Murray
The Sounds of the Universe Coming in my Window by Jack Kerouac
Ode to My Socks by Pablo Neruda
Duende by Tracy K Smith
Berck-Plage by Sylvia Plath
Gary Kay
Dream Song #5 by John Berryman
I Knew a Woman by Theodore Roethke
Emperor of Ice Cream by Wallace Stevens
The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens
Leda and the Swan by W.B. Yeats
The Art of Losing by Elizabeth Bishop
My Last Duchess by Robert Browning
Harlot's House by Oscar Wilde
Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy
Aunt Jennifer's Tigers by Adrienne Rich
Patricia Whiting
The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats
Easter 1916 by W.B. Yeats
Under Ben Bulben by W.B. Yeats
The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
Digging by Seamus Heaney
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
A Book Full of Pictures by Charles Simic
The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins
No Man Is an Island by John Donne
Meryl Stratford
Sestina by Elizabeth Bishop:
note, passed to superman by Lucille Clifton
My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun by Emily Dickinson
Rant by Diane di Prima
Fragment Thirty-six by H.D
The Arrival of the Bee Box by Sylvia Plath
Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich
Not Waving, but Drowning by Stevie Smith
In Praise of My Sister by Wislawa Szymborska
We Shall Not Escape Hell by Marina Tsvetaeva
Don Burns
The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats
After a Journey by Thomas Hardy
Ithaca by C. P. Cavafy
Deception Island by W. S. Merwin
The Laughing Thrush by W. S. Merwin
The Lost Land by Eavan Boland
Any and all by by Matsuo Basho
The Gift by Li-Young Lee
Poetry Reading by Anna Swir
Sonnet 116 (Let me not...) by William Shakespeare
Tell Us Something You've Done That Our Facebook Friends Have Not
a cento by Facebook friends
Lauren Had Jimmy Page drive me home from Thee Image (Miami).
Jennifer: I stole cocaine!
James: Sutured lacerations on inmates.
Scott: Performed acupuncture.
Jennifer L: When I was an au pair in London, I took care of Prime Minister Callahan’s granddaughter, Tamsin Jay.
Jonathan: Drank beer with Lightnin' Hopkins, Walter Shakey Horton, Willie Dixon & Muddy Waters at War Memorial Auditorium in Ft Lauderdale circa 1970-71.
Wanda: Was seriously electrocuted.
Laura: Got married in Bora Bora.
Leah: Volunteered for the Jerry Lewis Telethon for Muscular Dystrophy in NYC. Patty Duke hosted.
Tricia: Rode a pregnant cow.
Betsy: Was on Kids Say the Darndest Things back in Art Linkletter's day.
Shelly: Had lunch with Hank Aaron.
Cara: Sat and talked to Penny Marshall at a Barbra Streisand concert.
Leslie: Worked as an usher for the Jackie Gleason show in Miami Beach, and lived with you!
Ruth: Threatened a bear with a cast iron skillet, and swam in John Wayne’s swimming pool.
Lynda: “Made out” with Chuck in a hearse in RC parking lot (a burger joint).
Francine: Snuck backstage at a Ritchie Haven's concert at Central Park. He autographed my tee-shirt.
Maria: I helped write a speech for the Pope.
Jay: Got lost in the Gaza Strip at midnight.
Pamela: I acted as a courier for a trip from Florida to Indonesia with stops to deliver packages in Tokyo and Singapore and back.
Stacie: Ran a Nationwide, coast to coast, marijuana distribution.
Mary Jane: Survived seven rifle shots sent in my direction!
Gillian: Walked with lions in South Africa.
Pamela G: Slept with boyfriend in a convent.
Victor: At 8 years old, I played sax with Jr. Walker and the All Stars while my Dad was on the drums.
Jeff: I impersonated Tim McGraw under hypnosis.
Lynne: Asked Dustin Hoffman directions in the NYC Broadway theater district.
Laurie: Physically built our house like Rosie the Riveter
Janet: Had a high-speed malfunction while skydiving and landed under a reserve chute in Miami-Dade Correctional Institution in Florida City.
a cento by Facebook friends
Lauren Had Jimmy Page drive me home from Thee Image (Miami).
Jennifer: I stole cocaine!
James: Sutured lacerations on inmates.
Scott: Performed acupuncture.
Jennifer L: When I was an au pair in London, I took care of Prime Minister Callahan’s granddaughter, Tamsin Jay.
Jonathan: Drank beer with Lightnin' Hopkins, Walter Shakey Horton, Willie Dixon & Muddy Waters at War Memorial Auditorium in Ft Lauderdale circa 1970-71.
Wanda: Was seriously electrocuted.
Laura: Got married in Bora Bora.
Leah: Volunteered for the Jerry Lewis Telethon for Muscular Dystrophy in NYC. Patty Duke hosted.
Tricia: Rode a pregnant cow.
Betsy: Was on Kids Say the Darndest Things back in Art Linkletter's day.
Shelly: Had lunch with Hank Aaron.
Cara: Sat and talked to Penny Marshall at a Barbra Streisand concert.
Leslie: Worked as an usher for the Jackie Gleason show in Miami Beach, and lived with you!
Ruth: Threatened a bear with a cast iron skillet, and swam in John Wayne’s swimming pool.
Lynda: “Made out” with Chuck in a hearse in RC parking lot (a burger joint).
Francine: Snuck backstage at a Ritchie Haven's concert at Central Park. He autographed my tee-shirt.
Maria: I helped write a speech for the Pope.
Jay: Got lost in the Gaza Strip at midnight.
Pamela: I acted as a courier for a trip from Florida to Indonesia with stops to deliver packages in Tokyo and Singapore and back.
Stacie: Ran a Nationwide, coast to coast, marijuana distribution.
Mary Jane: Survived seven rifle shots sent in my direction!
Gillian: Walked with lions in South Africa.
Pamela G: Slept with boyfriend in a convent.
Victor: At 8 years old, I played sax with Jr. Walker and the All Stars while my Dad was on the drums.
Jeff: I impersonated Tim McGraw under hypnosis.
Lynne: Asked Dustin Hoffman directions in the NYC Broadway theater district.
Laurie: Physically built our house like Rosie the Riveter
Janet: Had a high-speed malfunction while skydiving and landed under a reserve chute in Miami-Dade Correctional Institution in Florida City.
Palm Beach Poetry Festival's Art Couture Ekphrastic Poetry Contest winners 2020
First Place:
Erika Michael
Erika Michael
Adhesif, by Caroline Dechambay
Shtick, A Riff on Adhesif
French for glue, the picture sticks to the mind’s recollection of
collecting, those black-framed rectangles on the white stucco
walls of Dutch rooms, Vermeer’s interiors with maps and bricks
and such, old spatial tricks like seeing through a darkened box,
how Piet the painter morphed branches and trunks into webs like
leaded edges of stained glass in churches around Paris when he
lived in the digs of the Theosophical Society, Mme. Blavatsky’s
psychic order of occult spiritual views inspiring his theory on the
use of hues that can’t be mixed from others — put a lid on green --
and were not to drift beyond their grid. Some dodged those picky
rules, no mentor’s such a fool they don’t occasionally push the
edge of self-restraint and break the code, but only when their Shtick
sustains the neoplastic look of it. Oh, Broadway Boogie Woogie
killed it with those bits of tape applied in rhythm rows — all that
frenzied beat of drums from Broadway clubs & shows. The tape
suspended from the artist’s fingertip, what role d’you think it plays
as she surveys her wall. Rebirth of Montparnasse? Not a bad call!
This Mondrian thing flows — nifty rigor of her tresses, outfit’s hot,
a twenties take on sixties Saint Laurent. De Stijl still rocks. I like
the flawless fit around her derriere. Neo-neoplastic bonding there.
About the winning poem Contest Judge Stephen Gibson says, “What a riff this is, taking us through works by Mondrian, segments of his life, places, art, influences—those on him and him on others—the lines in this poem sticking like adhesif, “French for glue” (line 1), as the picture by Caroline Dechambay sticks, “to the mind’s recollection of collecting” (lines 1-2), as we, like the model, regard art, and then us regarding her as part of that, as being that, those “black-framed rectangles on the white stucco/walls of Dutch rooms” (lines 2-3), that are “Vermeer’s interiors with maps and bricks/ and such” (lines 3-4), Mondrian’s beginnings, the “old spatial tricks like seeing through a darkened box” (line 4). The poem spills forward, textured and rich in sound and image, like “how Piet the painter morphed branches and trunks into webs like/leaded edges of stained glass in the churches around Paris when he/lived in the digs of the Theosophical Society”( lines 5-7), the poem enriched with Mondrian biography, and then enriching us with more of it, “Oh, Broadway Boogie Woogie/ killed it with those bits of tape applied in rhythm rows” (line 13), and then at the end returning to Mondrian as Dechambay’s Adhesif, “De Stijl still rocks. I like/the flawless fit around her derriere. Neo-neoplastic bonding there.” Style in that closing couplet does still rock. Wonderful.
Erika Michael is an art historian and poet living in Woodway, Wash. With a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, she’s taught at Trinity University, Oregon State and the University of Puget Sound. She has participated in workshops with Thomas Lux, Carolyn Forché, Linda Gregerson, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Tim Siebles, and Major Jackson. Her work has appeared in Poetica Magazine, Cascade: Journal of the Washington Poets’ Association, Drash: Northwest Mosaic, Mizmor l’David Anthology, Bracken Magazine, Bracken Anthology, The Winter Anthology, The Princeton Institute For Advanced Study Letter, Belletrist Magazine, and elsewhere. She received honorable mention in the 2018 Palm Beach Poetry Festival's Looking Glass Ekphrastic Poetry Contest.
French for glue, the picture sticks to the mind’s recollection of
collecting, those black-framed rectangles on the white stucco
walls of Dutch rooms, Vermeer’s interiors with maps and bricks
and such, old spatial tricks like seeing through a darkened box,
how Piet the painter morphed branches and trunks into webs like
leaded edges of stained glass in churches around Paris when he
lived in the digs of the Theosophical Society, Mme. Blavatsky’s
psychic order of occult spiritual views inspiring his theory on the
use of hues that can’t be mixed from others — put a lid on green --
and were not to drift beyond their grid. Some dodged those picky
rules, no mentor’s such a fool they don’t occasionally push the
edge of self-restraint and break the code, but only when their Shtick
sustains the neoplastic look of it. Oh, Broadway Boogie Woogie
killed it with those bits of tape applied in rhythm rows — all that
frenzied beat of drums from Broadway clubs & shows. The tape
suspended from the artist’s fingertip, what role d’you think it plays
as she surveys her wall. Rebirth of Montparnasse? Not a bad call!
This Mondrian thing flows — nifty rigor of her tresses, outfit’s hot,
a twenties take on sixties Saint Laurent. De Stijl still rocks. I like
the flawless fit around her derriere. Neo-neoplastic bonding there.
About the winning poem Contest Judge Stephen Gibson says, “What a riff this is, taking us through works by Mondrian, segments of his life, places, art, influences—those on him and him on others—the lines in this poem sticking like adhesif, “French for glue” (line 1), as the picture by Caroline Dechambay sticks, “to the mind’s recollection of collecting” (lines 1-2), as we, like the model, regard art, and then us regarding her as part of that, as being that, those “black-framed rectangles on the white stucco/walls of Dutch rooms” (lines 2-3), that are “Vermeer’s interiors with maps and bricks/ and such” (lines 3-4), Mondrian’s beginnings, the “old spatial tricks like seeing through a darkened box” (line 4). The poem spills forward, textured and rich in sound and image, like “how Piet the painter morphed branches and trunks into webs like/leaded edges of stained glass in the churches around Paris when he/lived in the digs of the Theosophical Society”( lines 5-7), the poem enriched with Mondrian biography, and then enriching us with more of it, “Oh, Broadway Boogie Woogie/ killed it with those bits of tape applied in rhythm rows” (line 13), and then at the end returning to Mondrian as Dechambay’s Adhesif, “De Stijl still rocks. I like/the flawless fit around her derriere. Neo-neoplastic bonding there.” Style in that closing couplet does still rock. Wonderful.
Erika Michael is an art historian and poet living in Woodway, Wash. With a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, she’s taught at Trinity University, Oregon State and the University of Puget Sound. She has participated in workshops with Thomas Lux, Carolyn Forché, Linda Gregerson, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Tim Siebles, and Major Jackson. Her work has appeared in Poetica Magazine, Cascade: Journal of the Washington Poets’ Association, Drash: Northwest Mosaic, Mizmor l’David Anthology, Bracken Magazine, Bracken Anthology, The Winter Anthology, The Princeton Institute For Advanced Study Letter, Belletrist Magazine, and elsewhere. She received honorable mention in the 2018 Palm Beach Poetry Festival's Looking Glass Ekphrastic Poetry Contest.
Second Place:
Vivian Shipley
Vivian Shipley
Meghan, by Rick Lazes
An Old Husband’s Tale
Daedalus was not a man, Icarus no boy. That’s a myth.
Without a husband to bind her, Daedalus turned nature
inside out, taught her daughter to fly from earth; after all,
men couldn’t fence air. Feathering Icarus in sequence
as a panpipe rises, Daedalus twined quills to mold two sets
of wings sealed in an icing of white wax, stiff as bridal lace.
Daedalus hovered, warning: Keep mid-way; water weights
and sun burns. Always follow me. Icarus rose or was pulled
up, casting her shadow on a ploughman, head lifted from
his rut, who grumbled, A woman’s place is in the home.
The mother tried to lift her arms higher to buffer her daughter
but blue enveloped Icarus who cried, Let’s fly all the way
to Trinacria. Knowing Samos was north and Calymne east,
Icarus ignored the earth’s warning being traced out for her
by the sharded coast of Crete. Unlike the moon that eclipses
the sun, filial duty cannot blot desire. Hopefully, the joy
gleaming in Icarus’ green eyes flashed, mercifully blinding,
and blocking the sight for Daedalus: her only child encircling
wings, writhing like a corn snake carried aloft by a hawk.
Imagine the girl, her mother’s support failing, the aerial lift
and impulse spent. Dripping to the sea, only the wax
hissed, floating as islands do. Daedalus did not fly again.
Unused, feathers yellowed; wax stiffened in her wings
that stretched out more like a shroud than a swan in flight.
Says Contest Judge Stephen Gibson, “It’s easy to see how Rick Lazes’s Meghan inspired “An Old Husband’s Tale.” This narrative is a wonderful, and chilling, retelling of the Daedalus-Icarus myth, this time with both characters being female, mother-daughter rather than father-son, and, with this version, though being perhaps more liberating initially, is, in the end, as with the original, cautionary.”
Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor, Vivian Shipley teaches at SCSU. She was awarded a 2020-21 COA Artist’s Fellowship for Poetry. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, her 12 book, An Archaeology of Days, was published by Negative Capability Press in 2019 and was named The 2020-21 Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist. The Poet (SLU) and Perennial (Negative Capability Press, Mobile, AL) were published in 2015. All of Your Messages Have Been Erased, (2010. SLU) won 2011 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement, NEPC’s Sheila Motton Book Award , and CT Press Club’s Prize for Best Creative Writing. Shipley won 2018’s Steve Kowit Poetry Award for “Cargo” and has also won Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Prize, Robert Frost Foundation’s Poetry Prize, University of Southern California’s Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, Marble Faun Poetry Prize from the William Faulkner Society, New England Poetry Club’s Daniel Varoujan Prize and Kent State’s Hart Crane Prize.
Daedalus was not a man, Icarus no boy. That’s a myth.
Without a husband to bind her, Daedalus turned nature
inside out, taught her daughter to fly from earth; after all,
men couldn’t fence air. Feathering Icarus in sequence
as a panpipe rises, Daedalus twined quills to mold two sets
of wings sealed in an icing of white wax, stiff as bridal lace.
Daedalus hovered, warning: Keep mid-way; water weights
and sun burns. Always follow me. Icarus rose or was pulled
up, casting her shadow on a ploughman, head lifted from
his rut, who grumbled, A woman’s place is in the home.
The mother tried to lift her arms higher to buffer her daughter
but blue enveloped Icarus who cried, Let’s fly all the way
to Trinacria. Knowing Samos was north and Calymne east,
Icarus ignored the earth’s warning being traced out for her
by the sharded coast of Crete. Unlike the moon that eclipses
the sun, filial duty cannot blot desire. Hopefully, the joy
gleaming in Icarus’ green eyes flashed, mercifully blinding,
and blocking the sight for Daedalus: her only child encircling
wings, writhing like a corn snake carried aloft by a hawk.
Imagine the girl, her mother’s support failing, the aerial lift
and impulse spent. Dripping to the sea, only the wax
hissed, floating as islands do. Daedalus did not fly again.
Unused, feathers yellowed; wax stiffened in her wings
that stretched out more like a shroud than a swan in flight.
Says Contest Judge Stephen Gibson, “It’s easy to see how Rick Lazes’s Meghan inspired “An Old Husband’s Tale.” This narrative is a wonderful, and chilling, retelling of the Daedalus-Icarus myth, this time with both characters being female, mother-daughter rather than father-son, and, with this version, though being perhaps more liberating initially, is, in the end, as with the original, cautionary.”
Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor, Vivian Shipley teaches at SCSU. She was awarded a 2020-21 COA Artist’s Fellowship for Poetry. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, her 12 book, An Archaeology of Days, was published by Negative Capability Press in 2019 and was named The 2020-21 Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist. The Poet (SLU) and Perennial (Negative Capability Press, Mobile, AL) were published in 2015. All of Your Messages Have Been Erased, (2010. SLU) won 2011 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement, NEPC’s Sheila Motton Book Award , and CT Press Club’s Prize for Best Creative Writing. Shipley won 2018’s Steve Kowit Poetry Award for “Cargo” and has also won Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Prize, Robert Frost Foundation’s Poetry Prize, University of Southern California’s Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, Marble Faun Poetry Prize from the William Faulkner Society, New England Poetry Club’s Daniel Varoujan Prize and Kent State’s Hart Crane Prize.
Third Place:
Sheila Kelly
Sheila Kelly
Expensive Taste, by Becky Rosa
Skin
after “Expensive Taste” by Becky Rosa
Supple voluptuous sac I put my vitals in.
Consummate suit.
See me strip to a syncopated rhythm.
All hail, drool, salute.
Tuesday’s torture is Wednesday’s delight.
Make captive. Skin is elegant bait.
Moan spells pleasure/pain alike.
Eviscerate.
Hermes, Fendi: Fat me.
Shear then stretch me.
Dry me. Dye me. Pattern, cut me.
Stitch & praise me.
Better than some, my luxurious fate.
Swallow, wallow in. Spend till you sate.
In the words of Contest Judge Stephen Gibson, “Becky Rosa’s Expensive Taste gives us a woman in close up, actually not a woman but a mouth with its tongue licking a melting shopping-bag dripping like a scoop of ice cream atop a cone, the shopping-bag-ice-cream dripping over the slender, curled fingers and polished fingernails holding the cone. The poem “Skin,” a sonnet, is a terrific response to and exploration of that work. The “expensive taste,” of course, is not the dripping cone but the woman, the mouth, and so the sonnet gives voice to that mouth, to what it craves, and to tell us what we crave, wanting it.”
Sheila Kelly leads generative writing workshops in libraries, community centers, art galleries, and the University of Pittsburgh’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. A retired psychotherapist, she believes in the healing power of writing in a supportive group setting where writers can connect, experiment and develop their uninhibited voices. Kelly’s poems have been published in journals, anthologies and a book of craft; most recently in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicineand Diane Lockward’s The Practicing Poet.
after “Expensive Taste” by Becky Rosa
Supple voluptuous sac I put my vitals in.
Consummate suit.
See me strip to a syncopated rhythm.
All hail, drool, salute.
Tuesday’s torture is Wednesday’s delight.
Make captive. Skin is elegant bait.
Moan spells pleasure/pain alike.
Eviscerate.
Hermes, Fendi: Fat me.
Shear then stretch me.
Dry me. Dye me. Pattern, cut me.
Stitch & praise me.
Better than some, my luxurious fate.
Swallow, wallow in. Spend till you sate.
In the words of Contest Judge Stephen Gibson, “Becky Rosa’s Expensive Taste gives us a woman in close up, actually not a woman but a mouth with its tongue licking a melting shopping-bag dripping like a scoop of ice cream atop a cone, the shopping-bag-ice-cream dripping over the slender, curled fingers and polished fingernails holding the cone. The poem “Skin,” a sonnet, is a terrific response to and exploration of that work. The “expensive taste,” of course, is not the dripping cone but the woman, the mouth, and so the sonnet gives voice to that mouth, to what it craves, and to tell us what we crave, wanting it.”
Sheila Kelly leads generative writing workshops in libraries, community centers, art galleries, and the University of Pittsburgh’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. A retired psychotherapist, she believes in the healing power of writing in a supportive group setting where writers can connect, experiment and develop their uninhibited voices. Kelly’s poems have been published in journals, anthologies and a book of craft; most recently in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicineand Diane Lockward’s The Practicing Poet.
Fourth Place:
Michelle Winkler
Michelle Winkler
Dorian Gray, by Sonia Sanchez Arias
Sonnet for 2020
Will you speak for us all, dear Dorian?
Of days gone by, of now… and what comes next…
For you, too, perfect attic mannequin
Enveloped in the grays of time and sex.
Beneath the resilient bow of hope and fears
Headdress of femininity and fields-
Behemoth shadow of lecherous jeers
And all the cold-weighted chains history yields.
Linked maille bodice, slight antebellum waist,
O keeper of secrets, millennials’ muse,
Your sultry slit will be slut-shamed in haste
But your daughter is heir to sensible shoes.
To be clear: backhand equity will be fought
And pride reclaimed… whether you tell or not.
Contest Judge Stephen Gibson says, “This work, as the gown-on-mannequin construction that it responds to, is formal to the point of mannerism, with that formalism-mannerism, as in Sonya Sanchez Arias’s piece, undercutting each other. The gown is late 19th century, as is the Dorian Gray title and Oscar Wilde allusion, but the material of it is not. So too, the poem: a conventional-looking sonnet that strikes at the conventional: the past may try to hide but will give up its secrets.”
Michelle Winkler is a Professor of English at Palm Beach State College. She holds an MA in English and a Doctorate in Education.
Will you speak for us all, dear Dorian?
Of days gone by, of now… and what comes next…
For you, too, perfect attic mannequin
Enveloped in the grays of time and sex.
Beneath the resilient bow of hope and fears
Headdress of femininity and fields-
Behemoth shadow of lecherous jeers
And all the cold-weighted chains history yields.
Linked maille bodice, slight antebellum waist,
O keeper of secrets, millennials’ muse,
Your sultry slit will be slut-shamed in haste
But your daughter is heir to sensible shoes.
To be clear: backhand equity will be fought
And pride reclaimed… whether you tell or not.
Contest Judge Stephen Gibson says, “This work, as the gown-on-mannequin construction that it responds to, is formal to the point of mannerism, with that formalism-mannerism, as in Sonya Sanchez Arias’s piece, undercutting each other. The gown is late 19th century, as is the Dorian Gray title and Oscar Wilde allusion, but the material of it is not. So too, the poem: a conventional-looking sonnet that strikes at the conventional: the past may try to hide but will give up its secrets.”
Michelle Winkler is a Professor of English at Palm Beach State College. She holds an MA in English and a Doctorate in Education.
Fifth Place:
Django Bisous
Django Bisous
Adhesif, by Caroline Dechambay
Modern Masque for Mondrian
Piet indeed
No piety here.
Her soft edges layered
On hard edge technique.
Abstraction of abstraction
So representational.
The artist with the art,
in the art, the fiction complete.
The photographic reflection,
One dimension, two dimension,
Three dimension, four.
Primary colors
Primal desires.
According to Contest Judge Stephen Gibson, “This spare, brief, thirteen-line poem delightfully engages the art work—and the reader’s ear, with its slant rhyme use used to slant meaning in relating its sly view of Dechambay’s equally sly piece.”
Django Bisous is a Canadian and divides his time between Toronto, Europe and Key West. Poetry is a relatively new pursuit for him, with most of his creative time usually focused on writing creative non-fiction or fiction in the short story format and keeping a blog for his friend. His current major undertaking is the completion of a book in the epistolary style. His work can be read at djangobisous.com
While submitting his prose for publication and to various contests has been an active pursuit over the last several years, this is the first ekphrastic poem he has written, the first poem acknowledged by a judge and first publication of any kind for Django. Accordingly, he cannot stop grinning.
Piet indeed
No piety here.
Her soft edges layered
On hard edge technique.
Abstraction of abstraction
So representational.
The artist with the art,
in the art, the fiction complete.
The photographic reflection,
One dimension, two dimension,
Three dimension, four.
Primary colors
Primal desires.
According to Contest Judge Stephen Gibson, “This spare, brief, thirteen-line poem delightfully engages the art work—and the reader’s ear, with its slant rhyme use used to slant meaning in relating its sly view of Dechambay’s equally sly piece.”
Django Bisous is a Canadian and divides his time between Toronto, Europe and Key West. Poetry is a relatively new pursuit for him, with most of his creative time usually focused on writing creative non-fiction or fiction in the short story format and keeping a blog for his friend. His current major undertaking is the completion of a book in the epistolary style. His work can be read at djangobisous.com
While submitting his prose for publication and to various contests has been an active pursuit over the last several years, this is the first ekphrastic poem he has written, the first poem acknowledged by a judge and first publication of any kind for Django. Accordingly, he cannot stop grinning.
Honorable Mentions
Five HONORABLE MENTIONS were selected: henry 7. reneau, jr., “Jackie Kennedy in Pink Chanel” and Susan Carroll Jewell, “Georgia O’Keeffe Buys a Pink Suit” (both inspired by Timo Weill’s Pink Suit); Victoria Otto Franzese, “DGS” and Amalia Mavrafrides, “The Dress” (both inspired by Sonia Sanchez Arias’s Dorian Gray); and Stephen Mead, “Yum” (inspired by Becky Rosa’s Expensive Taste).
SoFloPoJo & The Betsy Hotel's Poet-in-Residence Mary Galvin
Mary Galvin lives in Lake Worth, Florida, and has been reading and writing poetry since she was a child. Her poetry has been published in Southern Women’s Review, Homestead Review, and East Coast Literary Review. In addition to being a poet, she is the author of Queer Poetics (Greenwood/Praeger, 1999), a critical study of Modernist women poets. Mary holds a Doctor of Arts from the State University of New York at Albany, and is currently a Professor of English at Palm Beach State College in Lake Worth.
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The first partnership between SoFloPoJo and The Betsy Hotel took place Sunday, February 16, 2020. The Betsy Hotel's Writer's Room offers residences for poets, writers, musicians and artists. Mary Galvin spent about a week working on her poetry and enjoying the spectacular ambience of the The Betsy.
Fans and poets from Palm Beach County came down to South Beach to listen to Galvin read new work as well as older poems. Among the poets were: Judy Ireland, Cara Nusinov, Jennifer Greenberg, Margie Schnabel, Jennifer Litt, Stephen Gibson, Holly Jaffee, and Lucia Leao. The Betsy's showrunner Sandra Rovira was our gracious host. (Pictured with Galvin above left). The Betsy is a cultural treasure in South Florida hosting poetry readings and books signings in association with SWWIM Everyday, O, Miami and The Academy of America Poets. https://www.thebetsyhotel.com/explore/about-us
Fans and poets from Palm Beach County came down to South Beach to listen to Galvin read new work as well as older poems. Among the poets were: Judy Ireland, Cara Nusinov, Jennifer Greenberg, Margie Schnabel, Jennifer Litt, Stephen Gibson, Holly Jaffee, and Lucia Leao. The Betsy's showrunner Sandra Rovira was our gracious host. (Pictured with Galvin above left). The Betsy is a cultural treasure in South Florida hosting poetry readings and books signings in association with SWWIM Everyday, O, Miami and The Academy of America Poets. https://www.thebetsyhotel.com/explore/about-us
February 2020 issue 16
What Saves Us - Very Possibly It's Poetry
by Francine Witte All photos by Mark Strodl
by Francine Witte All photos by Mark Strodl
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Martin Espada & Gabriel Ramírez
Kathy Engel & Rich Villar
George Wallace & Audience
Readers at the Lincoln Center’s David Rubinstein Atrium
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What does it mean to live in a country that won’t call you a citizen? A country at odds with its own symbol of welcome in New York Harbor? A country whose president throws rolls of paper towels in response to a hurricane? These were just some of the questions asked in the form of poetry on November 8, 2019 at the launch reading for What Saves Us published by Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press and edited by Martin Espada.
The reading took place in Lincoln Center’s David Rubinstein Atrium to a standing room only crowd. Hosted by New York City Poet, Rich Villar, one by one, poets ascended the stage to ask difficult, searing questions, each reading their entry in the anthology. Lincoln Center seems an odd choice for a reading of dissident poetry, when you consider it is one of America’s foremost symbols of wealth and privilege. The Atrium was on 62nd street, but a mere block or two away, the well-heeled were dropping upwards of 200 dollars to listen to a three-hour opera, or watch ballet. How can the questions of a handful of poets share the same air, much less rise above it loud enough to be heard? Simple. It’s the roar. It’s the roar of poems spectacularly crafted and sharp. The lion himself, Martin Espada, bookended the reading with two such poems. Ending the reading with “Letter to my Father,” he remembers his father and the hard lessons he learned from him, “you taught me there is no God, no life after this life.” This poem was met with a well-deserved standing ovation. Denice Frohman elegantly read her poem “Puertopia,” speaks of Puerto Rico after Maria. “now/the beaches are gated & no one knows the names of the dead.” She goes on in this poem to talk about the vulture-like nature of investors who, like with Katrina, swoop in to buy the land cheap. This poem’s roar was a bit quieter, but no less heard. Another standout performance was given by George Wallace, who delivered his “I am sorry Diane Di Prima,” with his special combination of soft growl and rising incantation. This poem apologizes for the revolution we did not have, how “we cleaned things up just/enough to carry on.” A poem like this crystalizes the whole mission of the evening, to rebel in words. It says yes, we have it good, but is that a good thing? And the audience got it. The audience got it. Poets continued throughout the event poking and challenging with their words, their voices. Poems about absent fathers, and living in Section 8 housing and revolutions that didn’t happen, but should have. This beautiful space, this seat of luxury suddenly became an arena for what needs to be talked about, a symphony of grit and reflection. And, of course, the book itself only continues this. What Saves Us features the work of many notable poets, but what was clear on this chilly night in November, was how ideas and powerful words have a voice no one can silence. |
Humanism and the Question of Identity in Hungarian Poetry
by Peter Hargitai
Peter Hargitai "addresses nationalism, xenophobia, homophobia, etc. and all the shit going on in the World According to Orban and Trump" in his eye-opening essay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLaSmb7wUV0
Peter Hargitai is the first Poet Laureate of Gulfport, Florida, senior lecturer, and retired professor at Florida International University in Miami.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLaSmb7wUV0
Peter Hargitai is the first Poet Laureate of Gulfport, Florida, senior lecturer, and retired professor at Florida International University in Miami.
A POETRY VISIT TO THE RIO GRANDE VALLEY by George Wallace
SLIDE SHOW: (3 men) Edward Vidaurre, Octavio Quintanilla and George Wallace ; (Group at table) Viktoria Valenzuela, Alexandra Van De Camp, Sheila Fiona Black, George Wallace, Edward Vidaurre, Harold Rodinsky, Wendy Barker and Natalie Trevino; George Wallace on Los ebanos ferry.
In time history will no doubt recall 2018 as one year in a terrible sequence of years for America, with deep threats to human dignity and progress, and callousness in its corridors of power.
With efforts by the current administration in Washington to dismantle progressive policies affecting everything from civil rights and protection of the environment to immigration and refugee issues – not to mention attacks on a free and independent press, an independent judiciary, and the right to vote -- what more appropriate time to huddle with and see where leading American poets of conscience stand on these matters?
In this case, that process began at a gathering in San Antonio, Gemini Ink's 2018 Writing The New Century July 2018 conference. Close to the borderlands, which are in some ways at the heart of America’s current zero-tolerance immigration policies -- notorious and draconian practices that include forced family separations, internment of refugee children and blanket criminalization of the displaced, the asylum-seeker, and the refugee as a pretext.
San Antonio, only a few hours by car to the lower Rio Grande Valley (RGV), “rooted in its founding in New Spain, it give us another version of the American origin story, born out of Tenochtitlán rather than Plymouth Rock,” notes John Santos, who serves as Distinguished Scholar in Mestizo Cultural Studies to the Honors College at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
The Valley. Gloria Anzaldúa's herida abierta (open wound), where 'the third world grates against the first and bleeds'. But also where long cultural admixture has produced a vibrant new cultural consciousness. Not Mexican or American, but a new and sacred cultural entity— the mestizaje, a mix of ancestry and culture, distinct and rich in ways that render obsolete 'us vs. them' thinking. An indigenous consciousness that, with its notions of decolonization, resistance, identity and migration, flies in the face of the current administration's stoking of nationalist fears and ethnic mistrust in service of their power.
This is the borderlands that Anzaldua, throughout her major works, spoke of, seminally articulating a “borderlands identity.”
At the risk of stating what is fully understood by those who study the border situation or live it, it should be pointed out that the people of the border are distinct from the current flow of refugees and asylum-seekers coming from certain countries in Central America. They are a people whose home has been the Rio Grande Valley—characteristically both sides of it—for generations, a people for whom the border is an artificial construct created by distant nationalistic forces and enforced with the barrel of a gun. A border which crossed them.
Gemini Ink, a literary arts non-profit based in San Antonio, brought in authoritative voices who forcefully addressed issues of migration, assimilation, resistance and identity—figures like Martín Espada, Debra Monroe, Veronica Golos, Norma Cantú, Vijay Seshadri, Anel Flores, and Carmen Tafolla.
Panel presentations, including Writing Resistance/Embodying Diversity and Carolina Cisneros-Hinojosa’s Writing as Liberative Praxis: A Latina Narrative, advanced important ideas on decolonization, diversity in an age of divisiveness, and speaking truth to power.
Presentations and panels are rewarding and necessary methods to promulgate the conversation among writers of conscience coming together anywhere in America, or for that matter beyond US borders, these days. And Gemini Ink's gathering in San Antonio was an estimable opportunity to enlarge that conversation.
But while the process began in San Antonio, my journey of learning ‘found its feet’ with a post-conference road trip to 'la frontera’—the lower Rio Grande Valley—with San Antonio poet laureate Octavio Quintanilla, to meet first hand with some 'on-the-ground' writers of the valley, and experience a little of the multi-layered, dynamic culture in which they work.
To the Valley itself, McAllen, Tx, and a few miles of riverside east and west, where ICE blimps float over the river, and groups like Poets Against Walls organize and rally to speak out against harsh border policies and reclaim the river as a community resource. Where immigration officials set up checkpoints to stop and examine the credentials of travelers on highways. Where local poets organize slams and children's writing anthologies, all in the English and Spanish mix that Anzaldúa hailed as a synthesis of Spanish and the Anglo- American influences, enabling the development of new terms in both.
The Rio Grande Valley, home to a people who first passed through in the 16th century, historically no stranger to terror or the capricious and violent use of power.
A world that Santos notes has been a destination and a platform for migrations for millennia-—indigenous first and later mestizo peoples—the borderlands as a homeland reaching from Mesoamerica to the American Southwest.
The core of the trip, aside from roaring rides up and back through mesquite and scrub, was a performance and poetry gathering at the historic Cine El Rey, in downtown McAllen, a colorful location for a diverse presentation of voices in and of itself, organized by McAllen poet laureate Edward Vidaurre—and the site of many political rallies of late—and as an arts venue.
Being a product of the Valley himself, Quintanilla knows his way around, and took pains to add into my experience some deeply revealing metaphors for the complexity of the border experience. Among them:
—a river crossing at Los Ebanos on the only hand-pulled ferryboat which still crosses the Rio Grande, but one—a quick peek, just downriver, at a bend in the Rio Grande where for years, another poet's father used to swim back and forth, regularly and unimpeded, to visit relatives;
—a second border crossing, by car this time, over an international bridge between Progreso and Nuevo Progreso—(the border guard at this bridge eyed me carefully, asked me my business in the area. When I told him I was reading poetry he went into his booth, checked me out on Google and with a broad smile wished me well, said he was sorry to have missed my reading, and waved us on);
—a visit to the Basilica of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle, but one of many indications of the deep and multifaceted spiritual underpinnings of border culture. The iconic characteristics of the Virgen as they attain functionality in border country is of particular note and are quite specific, notes San Antonio poet Natalia Treviño.
“The role of the sacred in this land has a material, not esoteric value,” she notes. “Guadalupe as the goddess is in the daily lives, the illnesses and the small triumphs of her people—never vengeful or jealous like Hera, not vain or petty like Venus, but a powerful whisperer who gets things done like nobody’s business.”
As I say, a lot to absorb. An understanding of border culture is way beyond a quick visit, or a several book deep reading of the literature of the region. The Valley's history and culture, its sister brotherhood, the intersectionality of gender with multi-layered ethnicities, is nuanced and rich beyond simplistic iteration or quick appraisal.
One example: Quintanilla has this year embarked on daily drawings of visual poems he terms FRONTEXTOS. In one he recently completed we see a triad of women figures iconic to the region—The Virgen of Guadalupe, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Selena. In creating this triad, Quintanilla compiles one group from among the diverse influences on border culture—the amalgamation of Aztec/Spanish religious traditions; the emergence of intellectual giants defining the border culture; and the palpable contributions of a pop culture icon whose meteoric career as the 'Queen of Tejano Music' is but one indication of the dynamism of culture which has emerged.
There are a lot of ways to look at a border. For a person like myself, looking in from the outside—from a privileged position in terms of race, gender, wealth and sexual orientation, and a goal to extend my voice in solidarity with those who live in and call the RGV their home —it is a flashpoint for a political and moral conflict that challenges our devotion to the cause of humanity.
For those who are living ‘the frontera,’ however, there would appear to be more of Anzaldúa's generative admixture at work than some might at first realize.
For sure, it is a complex admixture—the outrages committed against the Mestizo people who preceded what amounts to expropriation by settlement and takeover of the region by Anglo-America, are well documented.
That includes murder and theft by extra-judicial and extra-legal means, on the part of the Texas Rangers. Millions of acres stolen through unethical taxing methods and other expropriatory tactics of early 20th century ‘shoot first and hang the rest’ Anglo-Texan policies —brutal terror, violence and trickery as part of the border legacy.
Tales of such wild west justice are indicative that there are precedents to the current and hotly contested practices of the Department of Justice when it comes to the vicious separation of children from families as a way to control the oppressed. One of them, of course, is no further away than Américo Paredes’ seminal story "The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez," made into a popular film in 1982.
However, as Paredes astutely notes in his anthropological introduction to the ‘With his Pistol in his Hand,’ the 1958 book in which he has retold the Cortez story, there is in border culture a palpable capacity to ignore the overlay of dominant cultures to the north or south when it suits people.
The people of the border, he insists, have a capacity to 'simply ignore strangers, except when disturbed by violence or some other transgression of what he believed (is) 'the right'...the swirl of events and the coming and going of strangers (is) but froth on the surface of life."
Treviño sees this trait in how the people of the region have adapted to the sometimes difficult weather conditions, “the palpable heat and humidity—a presence that the border population deflects, with its righteous power, by late night life prepped by quiet afternoons— slowing down—to be ready to savor the night after a very hard sonofabitche day. (see Anzaldúa‘s poem ‘el sonofabitche’)
A border may be a river or it may be a wall. Sometimes you can get across it by wading, or on a ferryboat you can help pull across a narrow stretch of water. Maybe you have to pass over a bridge with a checkpoint to get somewhere to work for a living or go shopping, take care of your medical needs, or visit with a member of your family.
Giving voice to the conditions of living at ‘la frontera’ is more than confronting the fact that the place you live is, in a very real sense, a flashpoint of national contentions. It is a matter of affirming the rich, unitary, delicately nuanced character of the people you are from— people who live on both sides of the border—and adding your poetic voice to enunciate and interpret the daily experience of living in a place a border runs through.
Because on either side of the border at the Rio Grande, life goes on—lo cotidiano, an 'imperative concept toward understanding the liberation of the oppressed and the subjugated' as noted by San Antonio poet Carolina Cisneros-Hinojosa, referencing Mujerista Theologian Ada Maria Isasi-Díaz.
Or as Natalia Treviño put it, addressing the quotidian is an imperative, “a reminder to all poets and artists about our role to move stones—more important than ever in an age of concrete wall-builders—by our capacity to bind, become water, and sway.”
And particular, the poets of the RGV—not as Americans, or as Mexicans, but as citizens of this historically distinct, emergent, beautiful place. The lower Rio Grande Valley. Anzaldúa's borderlands.
George Wallace is editor of Poetrybay, author of 33 chapbooks of poetry, and writer in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace.
With efforts by the current administration in Washington to dismantle progressive policies affecting everything from civil rights and protection of the environment to immigration and refugee issues – not to mention attacks on a free and independent press, an independent judiciary, and the right to vote -- what more appropriate time to huddle with and see where leading American poets of conscience stand on these matters?
In this case, that process began at a gathering in San Antonio, Gemini Ink's 2018 Writing The New Century July 2018 conference. Close to the borderlands, which are in some ways at the heart of America’s current zero-tolerance immigration policies -- notorious and draconian practices that include forced family separations, internment of refugee children and blanket criminalization of the displaced, the asylum-seeker, and the refugee as a pretext.
San Antonio, only a few hours by car to the lower Rio Grande Valley (RGV), “rooted in its founding in New Spain, it give us another version of the American origin story, born out of Tenochtitlán rather than Plymouth Rock,” notes John Santos, who serves as Distinguished Scholar in Mestizo Cultural Studies to the Honors College at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
The Valley. Gloria Anzaldúa's herida abierta (open wound), where 'the third world grates against the first and bleeds'. But also where long cultural admixture has produced a vibrant new cultural consciousness. Not Mexican or American, but a new and sacred cultural entity— the mestizaje, a mix of ancestry and culture, distinct and rich in ways that render obsolete 'us vs. them' thinking. An indigenous consciousness that, with its notions of decolonization, resistance, identity and migration, flies in the face of the current administration's stoking of nationalist fears and ethnic mistrust in service of their power.
This is the borderlands that Anzaldua, throughout her major works, spoke of, seminally articulating a “borderlands identity.”
At the risk of stating what is fully understood by those who study the border situation or live it, it should be pointed out that the people of the border are distinct from the current flow of refugees and asylum-seekers coming from certain countries in Central America. They are a people whose home has been the Rio Grande Valley—characteristically both sides of it—for generations, a people for whom the border is an artificial construct created by distant nationalistic forces and enforced with the barrel of a gun. A border which crossed them.
Gemini Ink, a literary arts non-profit based in San Antonio, brought in authoritative voices who forcefully addressed issues of migration, assimilation, resistance and identity—figures like Martín Espada, Debra Monroe, Veronica Golos, Norma Cantú, Vijay Seshadri, Anel Flores, and Carmen Tafolla.
Panel presentations, including Writing Resistance/Embodying Diversity and Carolina Cisneros-Hinojosa’s Writing as Liberative Praxis: A Latina Narrative, advanced important ideas on decolonization, diversity in an age of divisiveness, and speaking truth to power.
Presentations and panels are rewarding and necessary methods to promulgate the conversation among writers of conscience coming together anywhere in America, or for that matter beyond US borders, these days. And Gemini Ink's gathering in San Antonio was an estimable opportunity to enlarge that conversation.
But while the process began in San Antonio, my journey of learning ‘found its feet’ with a post-conference road trip to 'la frontera’—the lower Rio Grande Valley—with San Antonio poet laureate Octavio Quintanilla, to meet first hand with some 'on-the-ground' writers of the valley, and experience a little of the multi-layered, dynamic culture in which they work.
To the Valley itself, McAllen, Tx, and a few miles of riverside east and west, where ICE blimps float over the river, and groups like Poets Against Walls organize and rally to speak out against harsh border policies and reclaim the river as a community resource. Where immigration officials set up checkpoints to stop and examine the credentials of travelers on highways. Where local poets organize slams and children's writing anthologies, all in the English and Spanish mix that Anzaldúa hailed as a synthesis of Spanish and the Anglo- American influences, enabling the development of new terms in both.
The Rio Grande Valley, home to a people who first passed through in the 16th century, historically no stranger to terror or the capricious and violent use of power.
A world that Santos notes has been a destination and a platform for migrations for millennia-—indigenous first and later mestizo peoples—the borderlands as a homeland reaching from Mesoamerica to the American Southwest.
The core of the trip, aside from roaring rides up and back through mesquite and scrub, was a performance and poetry gathering at the historic Cine El Rey, in downtown McAllen, a colorful location for a diverse presentation of voices in and of itself, organized by McAllen poet laureate Edward Vidaurre—and the site of many political rallies of late—and as an arts venue.
Being a product of the Valley himself, Quintanilla knows his way around, and took pains to add into my experience some deeply revealing metaphors for the complexity of the border experience. Among them:
—a river crossing at Los Ebanos on the only hand-pulled ferryboat which still crosses the Rio Grande, but one—a quick peek, just downriver, at a bend in the Rio Grande where for years, another poet's father used to swim back and forth, regularly and unimpeded, to visit relatives;
—a second border crossing, by car this time, over an international bridge between Progreso and Nuevo Progreso—(the border guard at this bridge eyed me carefully, asked me my business in the area. When I told him I was reading poetry he went into his booth, checked me out on Google and with a broad smile wished me well, said he was sorry to have missed my reading, and waved us on);
—a visit to the Basilica of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle, but one of many indications of the deep and multifaceted spiritual underpinnings of border culture. The iconic characteristics of the Virgen as they attain functionality in border country is of particular note and are quite specific, notes San Antonio poet Natalia Treviño.
“The role of the sacred in this land has a material, not esoteric value,” she notes. “Guadalupe as the goddess is in the daily lives, the illnesses and the small triumphs of her people—never vengeful or jealous like Hera, not vain or petty like Venus, but a powerful whisperer who gets things done like nobody’s business.”
As I say, a lot to absorb. An understanding of border culture is way beyond a quick visit, or a several book deep reading of the literature of the region. The Valley's history and culture, its sister brotherhood, the intersectionality of gender with multi-layered ethnicities, is nuanced and rich beyond simplistic iteration or quick appraisal.
One example: Quintanilla has this year embarked on daily drawings of visual poems he terms FRONTEXTOS. In one he recently completed we see a triad of women figures iconic to the region—The Virgen of Guadalupe, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Selena. In creating this triad, Quintanilla compiles one group from among the diverse influences on border culture—the amalgamation of Aztec/Spanish religious traditions; the emergence of intellectual giants defining the border culture; and the palpable contributions of a pop culture icon whose meteoric career as the 'Queen of Tejano Music' is but one indication of the dynamism of culture which has emerged.
There are a lot of ways to look at a border. For a person like myself, looking in from the outside—from a privileged position in terms of race, gender, wealth and sexual orientation, and a goal to extend my voice in solidarity with those who live in and call the RGV their home —it is a flashpoint for a political and moral conflict that challenges our devotion to the cause of humanity.
For those who are living ‘the frontera,’ however, there would appear to be more of Anzaldúa's generative admixture at work than some might at first realize.
For sure, it is a complex admixture—the outrages committed against the Mestizo people who preceded what amounts to expropriation by settlement and takeover of the region by Anglo-America, are well documented.
That includes murder and theft by extra-judicial and extra-legal means, on the part of the Texas Rangers. Millions of acres stolen through unethical taxing methods and other expropriatory tactics of early 20th century ‘shoot first and hang the rest’ Anglo-Texan policies —brutal terror, violence and trickery as part of the border legacy.
Tales of such wild west justice are indicative that there are precedents to the current and hotly contested practices of the Department of Justice when it comes to the vicious separation of children from families as a way to control the oppressed. One of them, of course, is no further away than Américo Paredes’ seminal story "The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez," made into a popular film in 1982.
However, as Paredes astutely notes in his anthropological introduction to the ‘With his Pistol in his Hand,’ the 1958 book in which he has retold the Cortez story, there is in border culture a palpable capacity to ignore the overlay of dominant cultures to the north or south when it suits people.
The people of the border, he insists, have a capacity to 'simply ignore strangers, except when disturbed by violence or some other transgression of what he believed (is) 'the right'...the swirl of events and the coming and going of strangers (is) but froth on the surface of life."
Treviño sees this trait in how the people of the region have adapted to the sometimes difficult weather conditions, “the palpable heat and humidity—a presence that the border population deflects, with its righteous power, by late night life prepped by quiet afternoons— slowing down—to be ready to savor the night after a very hard sonofabitche day. (see Anzaldúa‘s poem ‘el sonofabitche’)
A border may be a river or it may be a wall. Sometimes you can get across it by wading, or on a ferryboat you can help pull across a narrow stretch of water. Maybe you have to pass over a bridge with a checkpoint to get somewhere to work for a living or go shopping, take care of your medical needs, or visit with a member of your family.
Giving voice to the conditions of living at ‘la frontera’ is more than confronting the fact that the place you live is, in a very real sense, a flashpoint of national contentions. It is a matter of affirming the rich, unitary, delicately nuanced character of the people you are from— people who live on both sides of the border—and adding your poetic voice to enunciate and interpret the daily experience of living in a place a border runs through.
Because on either side of the border at the Rio Grande, life goes on—lo cotidiano, an 'imperative concept toward understanding the liberation of the oppressed and the subjugated' as noted by San Antonio poet Carolina Cisneros-Hinojosa, referencing Mujerista Theologian Ada Maria Isasi-Díaz.
Or as Natalia Treviño put it, addressing the quotidian is an imperative, “a reminder to all poets and artists about our role to move stones—more important than ever in an age of concrete wall-builders—by our capacity to bind, become water, and sway.”
And particular, the poets of the RGV—not as Americans, or as Mexicans, but as citizens of this historically distinct, emergent, beautiful place. The lower Rio Grande Valley. Anzaldúa's borderlands.
George Wallace is editor of Poetrybay, author of 33 chapbooks of poetry, and writer in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace.
In Memoriam:
John Arndt
Friend, Playwright, Actor, Poet,
SoFloPoJo Associate Editor
John Arndt
Friend, Playwright, Actor, Poet,
SoFloPoJo Associate Editor
John Arndt was, in all respects, a Renaissance Man. Born to a brick mason in Pipestone, Minnesota, John was his high school's star football player, who later earned a degree in Theater, becoming a playwright and actor, who both studied and drank with, Tennessee Williams. Johnny was also a poker player (whose poker buddies included Bruce Willis,) a sheet-rock schlepper in Portland, MN., a closet installer in N.Y.C., and, my best friend for over half my life.
When Ulysses S. Grant was asked about his friendship with George Tecumseh Sherman, Grant replied, we are friends - I stand by him when he's crazy, he stands by me when I'm drunk. Few friendships have compasses so reliable, they locate and maintain such stable ground. Ours did; and for that, I shall be forever grateful and blessed.
-Stacie M. Kiner
When Ulysses S. Grant was asked about his friendship with George Tecumseh Sherman, Grant replied, we are friends - I stand by him when he's crazy, he stands by me when I'm drunk. Few friendships have compasses so reliable, they locate and maintain such stable ground. Ours did; and for that, I shall be forever grateful and blessed.
-Stacie M. Kiner
The Speed of Light
by John Arndt
I clutch at you like precious bits of tender
Gems fallen into hand by chance
Caught on the sleeve of happenstance
To lose you all at once and forever by simple neglect
In that push through the crippled bones of disappointment
Everything moves on, into distance and gone
You remain apart to fill slack and tattered sails
Gust of laughter, whisper of touch, full blown gale of comprehension
Years pass, moments collide, collect in the shadows
Fester and evolve into monstrous knowledge
Barbed sorrow travels lifetimes, into decadence
Deeper into the drunken darkness of failure
Further still to the dregs of what will never be
You will find me there, in that gloom
With a bottle and a dream
Crying out for what can not be given
Holding on to the thing that was taken
Waiting for light that moves too slow
by John Arndt
I clutch at you like precious bits of tender
Gems fallen into hand by chance
Caught on the sleeve of happenstance
To lose you all at once and forever by simple neglect
In that push through the crippled bones of disappointment
Everything moves on, into distance and gone
You remain apart to fill slack and tattered sails
Gust of laughter, whisper of touch, full blown gale of comprehension
Years pass, moments collide, collect in the shadows
Fester and evolve into monstrous knowledge
Barbed sorrow travels lifetimes, into decadence
Deeper into the drunken darkness of failure
Further still to the dregs of what will never be
You will find me there, in that gloom
With a bottle and a dream
Crying out for what can not be given
Holding on to the thing that was taken
Waiting for light that moves too slow