Josephine Jacobsen (NPC 1971-73): https://www.britannica.com/biography/Josephine-Jacobsen
Daniel Hoffman (NPC 1973-4) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Daniel-Hoffman
Stanley Kunitz (NPC 1974-6-- first time; again in 2000-01)https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stanley-Kunitz
Robert Hayden (NPC 1976) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Hayden
William Meredith (NPC 1978-80) https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Meredith
A Dream of Games by Josephine Jacobsen
I. A Game of Scrabble
His fingers hesitate over
his row-it is stammering
with i i i. Here nothing can stand
alone. let alone i.
Insipid he finally puts
and judgment
leaps on the board with a sweep.
The tall child makes gory, doubled.
The smooth tiles spell
relationships, accidents.
. . . eath, . . .eath. Fingering
a d, one pauses there. A d
would do; br would be better.
Beyond the balcony the sea
flees in long quivers. Now here is the q
Friday before Crusoe-he has used his u
in ruins.
Below, slick and lovely, the frangipani
boughs, black as snakes and bare, spring
into pink at the top. Has anyone ever made
frangipani?
She has . .. ight; the sea suggests
an I —the sailboats shed it, the mango shines it back,
br the mango says. She has only an n
and the whole island disappears: where is the moon?
Not one thin star? Delight's chance is los
(There are more sections, but I can't access them. In the poem below, I can't find the formatting.)
The Poem Itself[1]
From the ripe silence it exploded silently. When the bright debris subsided it was there. Invisible, inaudible; only the inky shapes betrayed it. Betrayed, is the word. Thence it moved into squalor, a royal virgin in a brothel improbably whole. It had its followers, pimps, even its lovers. The man responsible died, eventually. When the dust of his brain left the bones the bond snapped, it escaped to itself. It no longer answered. On the shelf, by the clock's tick, in the black stacks of midnight: it is. A moon to all its tides.
Benediction by Stanley Kunitz
God banish from your house
The fly, the roach, the mouse
That riots in the walls
Until the plaster falls;
Admonish from your door
The hypocrite and liar;
No shy, soft, tigrish fear
Permit upon your stair,
Nor agents of your doubt.
God drive them whistling out.
Let nothing touched with evil,
Let nothing that can shrivel
Heart's tenderest frond, intrude
Upon your still, deep blood.
Against the drip of night
God keep all windows tight,
Protect your mirrors from
Surprise, delirium,
Admit no trailing wind
Into your shuttered mind
To plume the lake of sleep
With dreams. If you must weep
God give you tears, but leave
You secrecy to grieve,
And islands for your pride,
And love to nest in your side.
More poems: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/stanley-kunitz
Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday by Robert Hayden[2]
Lord’s lost Him His mockingbird,
His fancy warbler;
Satan sweet-talked her,
four bullets hushed her.
Who would have thought
she’d end that way?
Four bullets hushed her. And the world a-clang with evil.
Who’s going to make old hardened sinner men tremble now
and the righteous rock?
Oh who and oh who will sing Jesus down
to help with struggling and doing without and being colored
all through blue Monday?
Till way next Sunday?
All those angels
in their cretonne clouds and finery
the true believer saw
when she rared back her head and sang,
all those angels are surely weeping.
Who would have thought
she’d end that way?
Four holes in her heart. The gold works wrecked.
But she looks so natural in her big bronze coffin
among the Broken Hearts and Gates-Ajar,
it’s as if any moment she’d lift her head
from its pillow of chill gardenias
and turn this quiet into shouting Sunday
and make folks forget what she did on Monday.
Oh, Satan sweet-talked her,
and four bullets hushed her.
Lord’s lost Him His diva,
His fancy warbler’s gone.
Who would have thought,
who would have thought she’d end that way?
More poems here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-hayden - tab-poems
Consequences by William Meredith (--from Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1997)
I. Of Choice
Despair is big with friends I love,
Hydrogen and burning jews.
I give them all the grief I have
But I tell them, friends, I choose, I choose,
Don’t make me say against my glands
Or how the world has treated me.
Though gay and modest give offense
And people grieve pretentiously,
More than I hoped to do, I do
And more than I deserve I get;
What little I attend, I know
And it argues order more than not.
My desperate friends, I want to tell
Them, you take too delicate offense
At the stench of time and man’s own smell,
It is only the smell of consequence.
II. Of Love
People love each other and the light
Of love gilds but doesn’t alter,
People don’t change one another, can scarcely
By taking will and thought add a little
Now and then to their own statures
Which, praise them, they do,
So that here we are in all our sizes
Flooded in the impartial daylight sometimes,
Spotted sometimes in a light we make ourselves,
Human, the beams of attention
Of social animals at their work
Which is loving; and sometimes all dark.
The only correction is
By you of you, by me of me.
People are worth looking at in this light
And if you listen what they are saying is,
Love me sun out there whoever you are,
Chasing me from bed in the morning,
Spooking me all day with shadow,
Surprising me whenever you fall;
Make me conspicuous as I go here,
Spotted by however many beams,
Now light, finally dark. I fear
There is meant to be a lot of darkness,
You hear them say, but every last creature
Is the one it meant to be.
III. My Acts
The acts of my life swarm down the street like Puerto Rican kids,
Foreign but small and, except for one, unknived.
They do no harm though their voices slash like reeds;
All except one they have evidently been loved.
And down the hill where I’ve planted spruce and red pine
In a gang of spiked shadows they slouch at night.
I am reasonably brave. I have been, except on one occasion,
Myself: it is no good trying to be what you are not.
We live among gangs who seem to have no stake
In what we’re trying to do, no sense of property or race,
Yet if you speak with authority they will halt and break
And sullenly, one by one, show you a local face.
I dreamt once that they caught me and, holding me down,
Burned my genitals with gasoline;
In my stupid terror I was telling them names
So my manhood kept and the rest went up in flames.
‘Now, say the world is a fair place,’ the biggest one said,
And because there was no face worse than my own there
I said it and got up. Quite a lot of me is charred.
By our code it is fair. We play fair. The world is fair.
Here the pure poem escapes to speak of and for itself. It is. Pure energy. In a lecture called "The Instant of Knowing" delivered in Washington in 1973 while Josephine Jacobsen was Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, she commented that one must not "veer from the core of the job ... As I see it, the cause, the purpose, and the end of the position of Consultant in Poetry is poetry itself, as poetry is the poet's own job.... The center of everything is the poem. Nothing is important in comparison to that. Anything which in some valid way is not directly connected with that current of energy which is the poem is dispensable."
"A poem need not have power as its overt subject in order to concern itself with that issue. The "current of energy which is the poem" conspires with and enhances whatever subject it ignites. This is certainly true in "The Poem Itself," ... https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE|A133025686&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=00183644&p=LitRC&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7Eef015fc3
[2] In August, I was biking on a Sunday with my son behind a Gospel church-- it was so moving to hear the whole church rocking with song—so when I saw this poem, I hope you can imagine the power of this kind of singing. One commentary mentioned that whether the Queen took her own life, or was murdered, the poem goes beyond that.
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