Read an Excerpt
THE OPEN DOOR
ONE HUNDRED POEMS, ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF POETRY MAGAZINE
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2012 The Poetry Foundation
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-75070-5
Chapter One
EZRA POUND
In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
April 1913
KAY RYAN
Sharks' Teeth Everything contains some
silence. Noise gets
its zest from the
small shark's-tooth
shaped fragments
of rest angled
in it. An hour
of city holds maybe
a minute of these
remnants of a time
when silence reigned,
compact and dangerous
as a shark. Sometimes
a bit of a tail
or fin can still
be sensed in parks.
April 2004
MARIE PONSOT
Anti-Romantic I explain ontology, mathematics, theophily,
Symbolic and Aristotelian logic, says the tree.
I demonstrate perspective's and proportion's ways.
I elucidate even greyness by my greys and greys and greys.
Gravity's laws, the four dimensions, Sapphic imagery,
Come from contemplating me,
Says the tree.
I perfectly exhibit the functions of earth and air:
Look up, at and through, my branches, leaved, budded, or bare
Laid in their luminous degrees against lustrous infinity:
Your seeing relates you to all of space, through me.
Here's aesthetics, too. No sight's nearer to perfectly fair.
I am mediate and immediate, says the tree.
I am variable, exquisite, tough,
Even useful; I am subtle; all this is enough.
I don't want to be a temple, says the tree.
But if you don't behave, I will be.
March 1958
RODDY LUMSDEN
The Young You bastards! It's all sherbet, and folly
makes you laugh like mules. Chances
dance off your wrists, each day ready,
sprites in your bones and spite not yet
swollen, not yet set. You gather handful
after miracle handful, seeing straight,
reaching the lighthouse in record time,
pockets brim with scimitar things. Now
is not a pinpoint but a sprawling realm.
Bewilderment and thrill are whip-quick
twins, carried on your backs, each vow
new to touch and each mistake a broken
biscuit. I was you. Sea robber boarding
the won galleon. Roaring trees. Machines
without levers, easy in bowel and lung.
One cartwheel over the quicksand curve
of Tuesday to Tuesday and you're gone,
summering, a ship on the farthest wave.
December 2008
LEROI JONES
Valéry as Dictator Sad. And it comes
tomorrow. Again, grey, the streaks
of work
shedding the stone
of the pavement, dissolving
with the idea
of singular endeavour. Herds, the
herds
of suffering intelligences
bunched,
and out of
hearing. Though the day
come to us
in waves,
sun, air, the beat
of the clock.
Though I stare at the radical
world,
wishing it would stand still.
Tell me,
and I gain at the telling.
Of the lie, and the waking
against the heavy breathing
of new light, dawn, shattering
the naive cluck
of feeling.
What is tomorrow
that it cannot come
today?
December 1963
Don't be "viewy"—leave that to the writers of pretty little philosophic essays. Don't be descriptive; remember that the painter can describe a landscape much better than you can, and that he has to know a deal more about it.
EZRA POUND, March 1913
I would trade the bulk of contemporary anecdotal free verse for more incisive, chilling poetry.... There's more pathos in a poetry that recognizes the universe is central; the poor human, eccentric.
ANGE MLINKO, October 2007
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
Eros Turannos
She fears him, and will always ask
What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
All reasons to refuse him;
But what she meets and what she fears
Are less than are the downward years,
Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs
Of age, were she to lose him.
Between a blurred sagacity
That once had power to sound him,
And Love, that will not let him be
The seeker that she found him,
Her pride assuages her, almost,
As if it were alone the cost.
He sees that he will not be lost,
And waits, and looks around him.
A sense of ocean and old trees
Envelops and allures him;
Tradition, touching all he sees
Beguiles and reassures him;
And all her doubts of what he says
Are dimmed with what she knows of days,
Till even prejudice delays,
And fades—and she secures him.
The falling leaf inaugurates
The reign of her confusion;
The pounding wave reverberates
The crash of her illusion;
And home, where passion lived and died,
Becomes a place where she can hide,—
While all the town and harbor side
Vibrate with her seclusion.
We tell you, tapping on our brows,
The story as it should be,—
As if the story of a house
Were told, or ever could be;
We'll have no kindly veil between
Her visions and those we have seen,—
As if we guessed what hers have been
Or what they are, or would be.
Meanwhile, we do no harm; for they
That with a god have striven,
Not hearing much of what we say,
Take what the god has given;
Though like waves breaking it may be,
Or like a changed familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea,
Where down the blind are driven.
March 1914
ANGE MLINKO
It Was a Bichon Frisé's Life ...
Louisiana skies paddle north nodding hello to some exiles
displaced by floodwaters so we all putter in the bisque
in fretted dresses, alleviated by a fan. But we have nothing on
"Le Matin," in whose rococo frame a curtain sweeps to bare
a boudoir, a Bichon Frisé worrying something between paws,
begging the dulcet glance of the mistress whose push-up,
cupless corset and up-drawn stocking border what they
fall short of, per the stern frame rippling like a cloud!
Even the candle angles to get a look in the mirror
engloving the scene. Why it is her slipper the bitch clutches!
The gentleman's reverie is elsewhere ... Loitering
Louisiana stops to admire this engraving by "N. Lavreinee."
What a chevalier! It makes the smeariest sunset think
it's in a Restoration Comedy, in such humidity
chefs defer meringues. "Ksar Rouge," "Taos Adobe,"
"Gulf Shrimp"—a thousand names of softboiled
lipsticks fritter English as if it were French, meaning
meeting no resistance from the flesh.
June 2008
MURIEL RUKEYSER
Song
The world is full of loss; bring, wind, my love,
my home is where we make our meeting-place,
and love whatever I shall touch and read
within that face.
Lift, wind, my exile from my eyes;
peace to look, life to listen and confess,
freedom to find to find to find
that nakedness.
October 1941
AUGUST KLEINZAHLER
The Hereafter
At the gates to the Hereafter,
a rather drab affair, might as well be a union hall
in south Milwaukee, but with shackled
sweating bodies along the walls,
female, chiefly, and not at all miserable,
straining like bored sultanas at their fetters,
each of them singing a separate song.
A Semitic chap—the greeter, I suppose—
gives me the quick once-over
and most amused he seems to be. Has me figured.
Not unlike a gent I met only last week,
a salesman at a stereo shop on Broadway.
—So, he says. Nothing more.
—Sew buttons, says I, in a cavalier mood
and why not.
Ushers me into a tiny cinema,
a two-seater, really quite deluxe,
a great big Diet Coke in the cupholder,
fizzing away.
—O.K.? he asks.
I nod and the film unrolls.
A 20-million-dollar home movie it is,
featuring yours truly: at the foot
of the stairs with the dog, mounting
Josette in a new Smyrna love nest,
a fraught kitchen showdown with Mom,
the suicide, car wreck, home run.
You know what these things are like:
the outlandish hairdos, pastel bathroom fixtures.
The editing is out of this world,
the whole shebang in under an hour:
the air-raid drill on Wednesday morning,
1957, when Tito wet his pants;
there I am, beside myself with laughter,
miserable little creature.
The elemental, slow-motion machinery
of character's forcing house.
Even with all the fancy camera angles,
jump cuts and the rest,
might as well be a chain of short features:
Animal Husbandry, Sexual Hygiene,
Lisboa by Night ...
What a lot of erections, voiding, pretzels,
bouncing the ball against the stoop.
She really did love you, all along.
These jealousies and rages of yours,
like a disgusting skin condition
that never goes away.
You, you ...
What catalogs of failure, self-deception ...
And then the lights come back on,
likewise the choir's splintered polyphony,
with its shards of Sprechstimme, the Ronettes, whatnot,
and in the air around us
something like the odor of a freshly spent cartridge,
when my minder asks brightly,
—How about another Coke?
October 2003
T. S . ELIOT
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
S' io credessi che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piú scosse.
Ma perciocchè giammai di questo fondo
Non tornò vivo alcum, s' i' odo il vero,
Senza tema d' infamia ti rispondo.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the spot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate:
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"—
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
(They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!")
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
(They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!")
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase.
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE OPEN DOOR Copyright © 2012 by The Poetry Foundation. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
