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Excerpts

Table of Contents

Introduction

[organized chronologically by year of poet's birth]

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882
"Woods, A Prose Sonnet"

Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849
"Shadow -- A Parable"

Emma Lazarus, 1849-1887
"The Exodus (August 3, 1492)"

Amy Lowell, 1874-1925
"Red Slippers"

Gertrude Stein, 1874-1946
22 "Objects" from Tender Buttons

William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963
Three Improvisations from Kora in Hell

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 1886-1961
"Strophe"
"Antistrophe"
"Epode"

T. S. Eliot, 1888-1965
"Hysteria"

e. e. cummings, 1894-1962
"i was sitting in mcsorley's"

Jean Toomer, 1894-1967
"Calling Jesus"

Thornton Wilder, 1897-1975
"Sentences"

Hart Crane, 1899-1932
"Havana Rose"

Ernest Hemingway, 1899-1961
"Montparnasse"

Ruth Krauss, 1901-1993
"News"

Edwin Denby, 1903-19832 "Aaron"

W. H. Auden, 1907-1973
"Vespers"

Elizabeth Bishop, 1911-19792 "12 O'Clock News"

Czeslaw Milosz, 1911-
"Esse" "Be Like Others"

Kenneth Patchen, 1911-1972
"In Order To"
"Delighted with Bluepink"
"The Famous Boating Party"

Delmore Schwartz, 1913-1966
"Justice"

David Ignatow, 1914-1997
"I sink back upon the ground..."
"The Story of Progress"

Barbara Guest, 1920-
"Color"

James Schuyler, 1923-1991
"Two Meditations"
"Wonderful World"
"Footnote"

Kenneth Koch, 1925-2002
"On Happiness"
"The Allegory of Spring"
"The Wish to Be Pregnant"

Robert Bly, 1926-
"The Hockey Poem"
"Warning to the Reader"
"A Rusty Tin Can"
"One Day at a Florida Key"

Allen Ginsberg, 1926-1997
"A Supermarket in California"

James Merrill, 1926-1995
Three Poems from "Prose of Departure"

Frank O'hara, 1926-1966
"Meditations in an Emergency"
"Schoenberg"

John Ashbery, 1927-
"Whatever It Is, Wherever You Are"
"Haibun 6"
"A Nice Presentation"
"Disagreeable Glimpses"
"Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland"

W. S. Merwin, 1927-
"Humble Beginning"
"The Dachau Shoe"
"Our Jailer"
"The Lonely Child"

James Wright, 1927-1980
"On Having My Pocket Picked in Rome"
"Honey"

John Hollander, 1929-
"The Way We Walk Now"
"Crocus Solus"
"Not Something for Nothing"

Harry Mathews, 1930-
Three Entries from 20 Lines a Day

Mark Strand, 1934-
"In the Privacy of the Home"
"Success Story"
"From a Lost Diary"
"Chekhov: A Sestina"

Michael Benedikt, 1935-
"The Doorway of Perception"

Russell Edson, 1935-
"A Performance at Hog Theater"
"The Pilot"
"The Taxi"
"The Rat's Tight Schedule"
"The Canoeing Trip"
"The New Father"

Rosmarie Waldrop, 1935-
Five Poems from The Reproduction of Profiles

Charles Simic, 1938-
Three Poems from The World Doesn't End
"The Magic Study of Happiness"
"Contributor's Note"

Margaret Atwood, 1939-
"Women's Novels"
"In Love with Raymond Chandler"

Frank Bidart, 1939-
"Borges and I"

Fanny Howe, 1940-
"Everything's a Fake"
"Doubt"

Tom Clark, 1941-
"Death, Revenge and the Profit Motive"

Billy Collins, 1941-
"Five Fondly Remembered Passages from My Childhood Reading"

Robert Hass, 1941-
"A Story About the Body"
"In the Bahamas"
"Tall Windows"

Lyn Hejinian, 1941-
Three Sections From My Life

Joe Brainard, 1942-1994
"Freud"
"History"

Louis Jenkins, 1942-
"Football"
"Appointed Rounds"
"The Prose Poem"

Ron Padgett, 1942-
"Light as Air"
"Album"

Michael Palmer, 1943-
"A word is coming up on the screen..."

James Tate, 1943-
"The Second Greatest Story Ever Told"
"Same Tits"
"The List of Famous Hats"
"Distance from Loved Ones"
"Rapture"
"Bernie at the Pay Phone"

Paul Violi, 1944-
"Triptych"
"Acknowledgments"

John Godfrey, 1945-
"So Let's Look At It Another Way"

Bernadette Mayer, 1945-
"Visions or Desolation"

Alice Notley, 1945-
"Untitled"

Ira Sadoff, 1945-
"Seurat"

Anne Waldman, 1945-
"Stereo"

Terence Winch, 1945-
"Shoot the Horse"

B.J. Atwood-Fukuda, 1946-
"The Wreck of the Platonic"

Andrei Codrescu, 1946-
"De Natura Rerum"
"Secret Training"
"Power"

Rae Armantrout, 1947-
"Bases"
"Middle Men"
"Imaginary Places"

Michael Burkard, 1947-
"A Conversation About Memory"

Lydia Davis, 1947-
"The Thirteenth Woman"
"In the Garment District"
"Agreement"

Aaron Fogel, 1947-
"The Chessboard Is on Fire"

Yusef Komunyakaa, 1947-
"Nude Interrogation"
"The Hanoi Market"
"A Summer Night in Hanoi"

Maureen Seaton, 1947-
"Toy Car"
"Lateral Time"

Leslie Scalapino, 1948-
"That They Were at the Beach"

Tom Whalen, 1948-
"Why I Hate the Prose Poem"

Agha Shahid Ali, 1949-2001
"Return to Harmony 3"

Lynn Emanuel, 1949-
"inside gertrude stein"

Kit Robinson, 1949-
"The Person"

Charles Bernstein, 1950-
"Comraderie turns to rivalry..."

Anne Carson, 1950-
"On Waterproofing"
"On Orchids"
"On Hedonism"
"On Shelter"

Carolyn Forché, 1950-
"The Colonel"

James Richardson, 1950-2
"Vectors: Thirty-six Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays"

John Yau, 1950-
"Predella"
"Summer Rental"

Peter Johnson, 1951-
"Pretty Happy!"
"Tex-Mex"

Maxine Chernoff, 1952-
"His Pastime"
"Vanity, Wisconsin"
"The Inner Life"

Rita Dove, 1952-
"Kentucky, 1833"

Carla Harryman, 1952-
"Magic (or Rousseau)"
"Matter"

Mark Jarman, 1952-
"Epistle"

Mary Ruefle, 1952-
"Monument"

Killarney Clary, 1953-
"Because the ones I work for..."
"Life is boundless..."

Fran Carlen, 1954-
"Anna Karenina"
"Anal Nap"

Thylias Moss, 1954-
"An Anointing"

Tyrone Williams, 1954-
"Cold Calls"

Harryette Mullen, ?-
"Variation on a Theme Park,"
"The Anthropic Principle"
"Sleeping with the Dictionary"

Susan Wheeler, 1955-
"Invective: You Should Know"

April Bernard, 1956-
"Exegesis"

Amy Gerstler, 1956-
"Dear Boy George"
"Bitter Angel"
"The Bear-Boy of Lithuania"

Dionisio D. Mart Ínez, 1956-
"Avant-Dernières Pensées"

Catherine Bowman, 1957-
"No Sorry"

Wang Ping, 1957 -
"Of Flesh and Spirit"

Nin Andrews, 1958-
"Notes on the Orgasm"
"Always Have a Joyful Mind"

Michael Friedman, 1960-
"Lecture"
"Death"
"State"

Stephanie Brown, 1961-
"Commencement Address"

Denise Duhamel, 1961-
"A Nap on the Afternoon of My 39th Birthday"

Christopher Edgar, 1961-
"In C"

Campbell Mcgrath, 1962-
"The Prose Poem"

Linh Dinh, 1963-
"Fish Eyes"
"The Most Beautiful Word"

Claudia Rankine, 1963-
"Intermission in Four Acts"

Gabriel Gudding, 1966-
"A Defense of Poetry"

Joe Wenderoth, 1966-
Twelve Epistles from Letters to Wendy's

Lisa Jarnot, 1967-
"Still Life"
"Ode"

Karen Volkman, 1967-
"It Could Be a Bird"
"When Kiss Spells Contradiction"

Mark Bibbins, 1968-
Two Poems from "Blasted Fields of Clover Bring Harrowing and Regretful Sighs"

Richard Blanco, 1968-
"Mango, Number 61"

Jennifer L. Knox, 1968-
"Hot Ass Poem"

Richard Deming, 1970-
"Requiem"

Anselm Berrigan, 1972-
"The Page Torn Out"

Katherine Lederer, 1972-
"According to the Appetites"

Andrew Zawacki, 1972-
Two Poems from Masquerade

Jamey Dunham, 1973-
"An American Story"

Matthea Harvey, 1973-
"The Crowds Cheered as Gloom Galloped Away"308

Sarah Manguso, 1974-
"Nepenthe" "What We Miss"

Jenny Boully, 1976 --
"He appeared then..."

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgments

Index of Poems

Index of Poets

Copyright © 2003 by David Lehman