Introduction / Rita Dove --
from Spoon River anthology: Hill ; Fiddler Jones ; Petit, the poet / Edgar Lee Masters --
Miniver Cheevy ; Mr. Flood's party / Edwin Arlington Robinson --
Creation / James Weldon Johnson --
Poet ; Life's tragedy / Paul Laurence Dunbar --
Death of the hired man ; Mending wall ; Birches ; Stopping by woods on a snowy evening ; Tree at my window ; Directive / Robert Frost --
Susie Asado ; from Tender buttons: A box ; A plate / Gertrude Stein --
I sit and sew / Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson --
Grass ; Cahoots / Carl Sandburg --
Peter Quince at the Clavier ; Disillusionment of ten o'clock ; Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird ; Anecdote of the jar ; Emperor of ice-cream ; Of mere being / Wallace Stevens --
Fragment / Angelina Weld Grimké --
Tract ; Danse Russe ; Red wheelbarrow ; Yachts ; from Asphodel, that greeny flower (Book I, lines 1-92) / William Carlos Williams --
Moonlight ; There will come soft rains / Sara Teasdale --
Jewel stairs' grievance ; River-merchants' wife : a letter ; In a station of the metro ; Hugh Selwyn Mauberley ; from Canto LXXXI: (Libretto: "Yet/Ere the season died a-cold") / Ezra Pound --
Sea rose ; Helen ; from Walls do not fall: 1 ("An incident here and there") ; from Hermetic definition: "Red rose and a beggar" : 1 ("Why did you come") ; 2 ("Take me anywhere
Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) --
Gale in April ; Shine, perishing republic ; Clouds at evening ; Credo / Robinson Jeffers --
Fish ; Poetry ; Poetry / Marianne Moore --
Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock ; Preludes ; Waste land / T.S. Eliot --
If we must die ; Harlem dancer / Claude McKay --
Ars poetica / Archibald MacLeish --
First fig ; Recuerdo / Edna St. Vincent Millay --
in Just- ; Buffalo Bill's ; Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls ; next to of course god america i ; somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond ; r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r / E.E. Cummings --
Reapers ; November cotton flower ; Portrait in Georgia / Jean Toomer --
Medusa ; New moon / Louise Bogan --
Dark symphony ; from Harlem gallery: Psi ("Black boy, / let me get up from the white man's table
from Bridge: [excerpts] : Proem : to Brooklyn Bridge ; from II: Powhatan's daughter: The river / Hart Crane --
Silent poem / Robert Francis --
Negro speaks of rivers ; I, too ; Dream boogie ; Harlem / Langston Hughes --
Incident ; To John Keats, poet, at spring time ; Yet do I marvel ; From the dark tower / Countee Cullen --
Father and son ; Portrait ; Touch me / Stanley Kunitz --
Musée des Beaux Arts ; Epitaph on a tyrant / W.H. Auden --
My papa's waltz ; Waking ; In a dark time / Theodore Roethke --
from The Maximus poems : I, Maximus of Gloucester, to you ; Distances / Charles Olson --
Fish ; Sestina ; First death in Nova Scotia ; Visits to St. Elizabeths ; One art / Elizabeth Bishop --
Mourning poem for the queen of Sunday ; Those winter Sundays ; Frederick Douglass ; Middle passage / Robert Hayden --
Effort at speech between two people ; Then I saw what the calling was ; Poem as mask / Muriel Rukeyser --
Heavy bear who goes with me / Delmore Schwartz --
from The dream songs: 4 ("Filling her compact & delicious body") ; 14 ("Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so") ; 29 ("There sat down, once") ; 149 ("This world is gradually becoming a place") ; Henry's understanding / John Berryman --
90 north ; Death of the ball turret gunner ; Woman at the Washington Zoo ; Next day / Randall Jarrell --
For my daughter / Weldon Kees --
Different image / Dudley Randall --
Traveling through the dark ; At the bomb testing site / William Stafford --
For my people / Margaret Walker.
Mother ; Song in the front yard ; Bean eaters ; Lovers of the poor ; We real cool ; Blackstone rangers / Gwendolyn Brooks --
"To speak of woe that is in marriage" ; Skunk hour ; For the Union dead / Robert Lowell --
Often I am permitted to return to a meadow ; My mother would be a falconress / Robert Duncan --
Populist manifesto / Lawrence Ferlinghetti --
Parents / William Meredith --
Because you asked about the line between prose and poetry / Howard Nemerov --
Hyacinth garden in Brooklyn ; August 1945 / Hayden Carruth --
Love calls us to the things of this world ; Cottage Street, 1953 ; Writer / Richard Wilbur --
Sheep child / James Dickey --
Love song : I and thou / Alan Dugan --
"More light! More light!" / Anthony Hecht --
Degrees of gray in Philipsburg ; Freaks at Spurgin Road Field / Richard Hugo --
Poem unwritten ; Caedmon ; Swan in falling snow / Denise Levertov --
American poetry / Louis Simpson --
Muse of water / Carolyn Kizer --
Fresh air ; Permanently / Kenneth Koch --
Morning swim ; How it is / Maxine Kumin --
Behaving like a Jew ; Dancing ; Another insane devotion / Gerald Stern --
City limits ; Corsons Inlet / A.R. Ammons --
Snowfall in the afternoon ; Driving to town late to mail a letter ; Waking from sleep / Robert Bly --
Flower ; I know a man ; Language ; Rain ; Bresson's movies / Robert Creeley --
Victor dog / James Merrill --
Steps ; Poem ("Lana Turner has collapsed!") ; Day Lady died / Frank O'Hara --
Some trees ; Self-portrait in a convex mirror ; What is poetry / John Ashbery --
Bear ; After making love we hear footsteps ; Saint Francis and the sow / Galway Kinnell --
Air ; For the anniversary of my death ; Yesterday ; Chord / W.S. Merwin --
Blessing ; Autumn begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio ; Lying in a hammock at William Duffy's farm in Pine Island, Minnesota ; In response to a rumor that the oldest whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia has been condemned / James Wright --
My son my executioner ; Digging / Donald Hall --
Animals are passing from our lives ; They feed they lion ; You can have it ; Simple truth / Philip Levine --
Her kind ; Abortion ; Wanting to die ; In celebration of my uterus ; Rowing / Anne Sexton --
Orion ; Planetarium ; Valediction forbidding mourning ; from Twenty-one love poems: XIII ("The rules break like a thermometer
Marriage / Gregory Corso --
Hay for the horses ; Riprap ; Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout / Gary Snyder --
Far cry from Africa ; Sea grapes ; from The Schooner : Flight (part 11, After the storm : "There's a fresh light that follows
Light of the world ; from Omeros: Book VII, LXIV, i ("I sang of quiet Achille, Afolabe's son
Let me tell you / Miller Williams --
Idea of ancestry / Etheridge Knight --
Preface to a twenty volume suicide note ; Agony. As now. ; SOS ; Black art / Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) --
Wrong train ; Final sonnet / Ted Berrigan --
poem at thirty / Sonia Sanchez --
Prediction ; Night, the porch / Mark Strand --
Stone is nobody's / Russell Edson --
Singapore ; Summer day / Mary Oliver --
Reunion ; Dead color ; California dreaming / Charles Wright --
homage to my hips ; [at last we killed the roaches] ; death of fred clifton ; to my last period / Lucille Clifton --
Poem about my rights / June Jordan --
1968 / Frederick Seidel --
From my window ; Blades / C.K. Williams --
Mechanic / Diane Wakoski --
Dear John, dear Coltrane ; Last affair : Bessie's blues song ; Grandfather ; Nightmare begins responsibility / Michael S. Harper --
Stone ; Fork ; Classic ballroom dances / Charles Simic --
Grandmother / Paula Gunn Allen --
Ellen West / Frank Bidart --
Spring letter ; Two or three wishes / Carl Dennis --
Allegory of the cave ; Tucson / Stephen Dunn --
History of my heart ; Questions ; Samurai song / Robert Pinsky --
Christmas comes to Moccasin Flat / James Welch.
Introduction to poetry ; Dead / Billy Collins --
Allen Ginsberg ; Weakness / Toi Derricotte --
How to like it ; Lullaby / Stephen Dobyns --
Song ; Pornographer ; Return of Robinson Jeffers / Robert Hass --
from My life: A name trimmed with colored ribbons / Lyn Hejinian --
Machinist, teaching his daughter to play the piano / B.H. Fairchild --
But he was cool, or, He even stopped for green lights ; Poem to complement other poems / Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee) --
In memory of the Utah stars ; The accompanist / William Matthews --
Language of the brag ; Lifting / Sharon Olds --
Barbed wire / Henry Taylor --
Black silk ; Under stars / Tess Gallagher --
I do not / Michael Palmer --
Lost pilot / James Tate --
Elizabeth's war with the Christmas bear ; Funeral / Norman Dubie --
August, Los Angeles, lullaby / Carol Muske-Dukes --
Turtle ; Bestiary / Kay Ryan --
Childhood ideogram ; Winter stars / Larry Levis --
Looking for Judas / Adrian C. Louis --
People of the other village / Thomas Lux --
Ballad of Aunt Geneva ; Star-fix / Marilyn Nelson --
Cuba, 1962 ; Kid ; Finished / Ai --
Thanks ; Tu Do Street ; Facing it ; Nude interrogation / Yusef Komonyakaa --
Song of the Andoumboulou : 21 / Nathaniel Mackey --
Gathering the bones together ; Two lines from the Brothers Grimm ; Origin of the marble forest / Gregory Orr --
Reaching Yellow River / Roberta Hill Whiteman --
Away / Albert Goldbarth --
Language lesson 1976 ; What he thought / Heather McHugh --
In cold storm light / Leslie Marmon Silko --
Calypso / Olga Broumas --
Latin & soul / Victor Hernández Cruz --
Miami heart / Jane Miller --
Why Ralph refuses to dance ; Girl friend poem #3 ; Crescent / C.D. Wright --
Taking off my clothes / Carolyn Forché --
San Sepolcro / Jorie Graham --
What the living do / Marie Howe --
She had some horses ; My house is the red earth / Joy Harjo --
Legend / Garrett Hongo --
Begotten ; We were simply talking / Andrew Hudgins --
Imagining their own hymns ; Song / Brigit Pegeen Kelly --
Meeting the British ; Errata ; Throwback / Paul Muldoon --
Quinceañera / Judith Ortiz Cofer --
Parsley ; Daystar ; After reading Mickey in the night kitchen for the third time before bed ; Claudette Colvin goes to work / Rita Dove --
Our calling / Alice Fulton --
Thinking of Galileo ; Hatred / Barbara Hamby --
Unholy sonnet 13 / Mark Jarman --
Traveling onion ; Arabic ; Wedding cake / Naomi Shihab Nye --
Nani ; England finally, like my mother always said we would / Alberto Ríos --
Nocturne : blue waves ; Unfinished / Laurie Sheck --
Field poem ; Oranges ; Black hair / Gary Soto --
Yellow stars and ice ; Forest / Susan Stewart --
Brilliance ; Esta noche ; Bill's story / Mark Doty --
Black Nikes / Harryette Mullen --
Alcohol / Franz Wright --
To my brother ; "Love of my flesh, living death" / Lorna Dee Cervantes --
My wicked wicked ways ; Little clown, my heart / Sandra Cisneros --
Jack Johnson does the eagle rock ; Crows in a strong wind ; I'm a fool to love you / Cornelius Eady --
Indian boarding school : the runaways / Louise Erdrich --
Spooning / David Mason --
How I got that name ; Composed near the Bay Bridge Survivor / Marilyn Chin --
Youngest daughter / Cathy Song --
Another reluctance ; Insect / Annie Finch --
Gift ; Eating together / Li-young Lee --
Our lady ; As from a quiver of arrows / Carl Phillips --
Bag of mice ; Cartoon physics, part 1 / Nick Flynn --
Venus Hottentot ; Affirmative action blues (1993) ; Equinox / Elizabeth Alexander --
from White elephants: Million balconies ; Train windows / Reetika Vazirani --
What the orphan inherits ; Powwow at the end of the world / Sherman Alexie --
Hot combs ; Amateur fighter ; Flounder / Natasha Trethewey --
Tantrum / A.E. Stallings --
Postfeminism ; Your one good dress / Brenda Shaughnessy --
Quivira city limits ; Everywhere is out of town ; Whatever you want / Kevin Young --
At Pegasus ; Lady sings the blues / Terrance Hayes.
