Table of Contents
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-
0 "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"
arDionisio 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