Maxine Kumin (NPC 1981-2 https://www.britannica.com/biography/Maxine-Kumin
Anthony Hecht (NPC 1982-84) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anthony-Hecht
Robert Fitzgerald (NPC 1984-5, limited due to health) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Fitzgerald
Whittemore, second term: 1984-
Gwendolyn Brooks (NPC 1985-6)https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gwendolyn-Brooks
National Poetry consultant now National Poet Laureate: 1986 (Robert Penn Warren-- see Sept. 7; NPC 1944)
Richard Wilbur (NPL 1987-8) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Richard-Wilbur
Nemerov, second term as NPL (1963) for two terms 1988-90)
Mark Strand (NPL 1990-91) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mark-Strand
Almost Spring, Driving Home, Reciting Hopkins by Maxine Kumin
"A devout but highly imaginative Jesuit,"
Untermeyer says in my yellowed
college omnibus of modern poets,
perhaps intending an oxymoron, but is it?
Shook foil, sharp rivers start to flow.
Landscape plotted and pieced, gray-blue, snow-pocked
begins to show its margins. Speeding back
down the interstate into my own hills
I see them fickle, freckled, mounded fully
and softened by millennia into pillows.
The priest's sprung metronome tick-tocks,
repeating how old winter is. It asks
each mile, snow fog battening the valleys,
what is all this juice and all this joy?
for more poems: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/maxine-w-kumin
Death Sauntering About by Anthony Hecht
The crowds have gathered here by the paddock gates
And racing silks like the flags of foreign states
Billow and snap in the sun,
And thoroughbreds prance and paw the turf, the race
Is hotly contested, for win and show and place,
Before it has yet begun.
The ladies' gowns in corals and mauves and reds,
Like fluently-changing variegated beds
Of a wild informal garden,
Float hither and yon where gentlemen advance
Questions of form, the inscrutable ways of chance,
As edges of shadow harden.
Among these holiday throngs, a passer-by,
Mute, unremarked, insouciant, saunter I,
One who has placed
Despite the tumult, the pounding of hooves, the
sweat,
And the urgent importance of everybody's bet-
No premium on haste.
more poems: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/anthony-hecht - tab-poems
Lightness in Autumn by Robert Fitzgerald
The rake is like a wand or fan,
With bamboo springing in a span
To catch the leaves that I amass
In bushels on the evening grass.
I reckon how the wind behaves
And rake them lightly into waves
And rake the waves upon a pile,
Then stop my raking for a while.
The sun is down, the air is blue,
And soon the fingers will be, too,
But there are children to appease
With ducking in those leafy seas.
So loudly rummaging their bed
On the dry billows of the dead,
They are not warned at four and three
Of natural mortality.
Before their supper they require
A dragon field of yellow fire
To light and toast them in the gloom.
So much for old earth’s ashen doom.
more poems: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-fitzgerald - tab-poems
An Aspect of Love, Alive in the Ice and Fire
by Gwendolyn Brooks
LaBohem Brown
In a package of minutes there is this We.
How beautiful.
Merry foreigners in our morning,
we laugh, we touch each other,
are responsible props and posts.
A physical light is in the room.
Because the world is at the window
we cannot wonder very long.
You rise. Although
genial, you are in yourself again.
I observe
your direct and respectable stride.
You are direct and self-accepting as a lion
in Afrikan velvet. You are level, lean,
remote.
There is a moment in Camaraderie
when interruption is not to be understood.
I cannot bear an interruption.
This is the shining joy;
the time of not-to-end.
On the street we smile.
We go
in different directions
down the imperturbable street.
from Blacks, 1987
More poems: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gwendolyn-brooks
The Beautiful Changes by Richard Wilbur
One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.
The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.
Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.
for more poems: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/richard-wilbur - tab-poems
Coming to This by Mark Strand
We have done what we wanted.
We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry
of each other, and we have welcomed grief
and called ruin the impossible habit to break.
And now we are here.
The dinner is ready and we cannot eat.
The meat sits in the white lake of its dish.
The wine waits.
Coming to this
has its rewards: nothing is promised, nothing is taken away.
We have no heart or saving grace,
no place to go, no reason to remain.
Keeping Things Whole by Mark Strand
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
