Poem Anthology Quotes

Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.

Gardens are poems Where you stroll with your hands in your pockets. (Les jardins sont des poemes Ou l'on se promene les mains dans les poches.)

If you read every poem in every anthology of Greek poetry, you wouldn't read one poem in which a character of the woman who's loved is described or matters.

L'union libre [Freedom of Love]" My wife with the hair of a wood fire With the thoughts of heat lightning With the waist of an hourglass With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes With the tongue of an unbelievable stone My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writing With brows of the edge of a swallow's nest My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof And of steam on the panes My wife with shoulders of champagne And of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the ice My wife with wrists of matches My wife with fingers of luck and ace of hearts With fingers of mown hay My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut And of Midsummer Night Of privet and of an angelfish nest With arms of seafoam and of riverlocks And of a mingling of the wheat and the mill My wife with legs of flares With the movements of clockwork and despair My wife with calves of eldertree pith My wife with feet of initials With feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinking My wife with a neck of unpearled barley My wife with a throat of the valley of gold Of a tryst in the very bed of the torrent With breasts of night My wife with breasts of a marine molehill My wife with breasts of the ruby's crucible With breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dew My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of days With the belly of a gigantic claw My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically With a back of quicksilver With a back of light With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk And of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinking My wife with hips of a skiff With hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathers And of shafts of white peacock plumes Of an insensible pendulum My wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestos My wife with buttocks of swans' backs My wife with buttocks of spring With the sex of an iris My wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypus My wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeat My wife with a sex of mirror My wife with eyes full of tears With eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needle My wife with savanna eyes My wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prison My wife with eyes of wood always under the axe My wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire

In the hours waking, when we're still all still, and you can hear the floorboards creaking, and you can feel the shades blow in, the night we slept with, we'll never kiss like that again. Our lips, will sever, our memories, will dissipate, and our shadows will be swallowed by the sky.

One could say that artists are people who think naturally in highly patterned ways.

I have made a similar suggestion for poetry: that one should approach it as pure sonority, reading and rereading it as a sort of music, and should not introduce meanings or intentions into the diction before clearly grasping the system of sounds that every poem must offer on pain of nonexistence.

Who is that blond child laughing as he runs after his colored marbles? [my marbles] It's me And who is the poet writing this poem? That blond child who laughed as he ran after his colored marbles

Each poem leads you to the questions it makes sense to ask it.

People are jostling at the gates of heaven or Department stores Words are bumping into each other ("Poem")

They're just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place but they're not poets.

They're not. That's partly what's so awful. I mean they're not real poets. They're just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place but they're not poets.

The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don't mind happiness not always being so very much fun if you don't mind a touch of hell now and then just when everything is fine because even in heaven they don't sing all the time The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don't mind some people dying all the time or maybe only starving some of the time which isn't half bad if it isn't you Oh the world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don't much mind a few dead minds in the higher places or a bomb or two now and then in your upturned faces or such other improprieties as our Name Brand society is prey to with its men of distinction and its men of extinction and its priests and other patrolmen and its various segregations and congressional investigations and other constipations that our fool flesh is heir to Yes the world is the best place of all for a lot of such things as making the fun scene and making the love scene and making the sad scene and singing low songs and having inspirations and walking around looking at everything and smelling flowers and goosing statues and even thinking and kissing people and making babies and wearing pants and waving hats and dancing and going swimming in rivers on picnics in the middle of the summer and just generally 'living it up' Yes but then right in the middle of it comes the smiling mortician

I go in and slip a note in Jane's locker, which I've gotten in the habit of doing. It's always just a line or two that I found from some poem in the gigantic poetry anthology my sophomore English taught me from. I said I wouldn’t be the kind of boyfriend who reads her poetry, and I’m not, but I guess I am the kind of cheesy bastard who slips lines of poetry into her mornings.

Rain" Oh amiable rain Washer of trees and roofs who has prepared them for the pink ray of evening ("Poems")

Hemingway is overrated, Twain is even more lost at sea, And all truths point to the mouth of a woman, Where both her whispers and her screams, Are born. Pour another glass, Beer, wine, whiskey, I don't care, So long as its wisdom is sharp, And it tells lies instead of promises.

ERIC: What are you always writin' in that book anyway? RODNEY: Poetry. TYRONE: Poetry? Rodney stops sketching and sentimentally flips through a few dozen pages of sketches and handwritten poems and notes. RODNEY: Poetry and pictures. Snapshots of our lives developed in the darkrooms of our souls." From CENTRAL PARK SONG -- a screenplay

At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary.

Without play at many levels of language, from phonemes to logical structures, a poem is merely prose with linebreaks added.

[poems are] crystals deposited after the effervescent contact of the spirit with reality. (cristaux deposes apres l'effervescent contact de l'esprit avec la realite)

With a ring around the rosary And a pocket full of crosses Ashes to ashes They'll all fall down

They smell your breath Lest you have said: I love you, They smell your heart: These are strange times, my dear. From the poem Strange Times, My Dear, in the PEN Anthology of Contemporary Literature

They're not," Franny said. "That's partly what's so awful. I mean they're not real poets. They're just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place, but they're not poets.

A poem needs imaginative rhythms as well as imaginative transformation of content.

There ought to be a view around the world From such a mountain

While he sweated out a story she bled put a poem.

This constant basso on the horizon is it the waterfall or the cannon ("Poem")

Those letters under the door A new life The war at a distance and my drinking glass that smokes A brightness crowns the universe ("Two Poems")

For a little while I shall be nothing and good.

If you asked for a few words of comfort and guidance I would quickly kneel by your side and offer you a whole book … — Hafez, from “Companion for LIfe,” Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, eds. Phyliis Cole-Davis & Ruby R. Wilson (Grayson Books, 2017)

Distance, the dissonance insurmountable, would be not the end, but a magnet. When fingertips kiss, they imprint and cement something, that cannot be disintegrated. Time becomes a phantom, the wind becomes an anchor, and old dreams- blankets of warmth. Lull with me, Lady, there is no greater escape. Love and war, even when buttered on toast, still makes for the breakfast of champions.

You, too, were supposed to be a one-night stand. A quick fix. A conquest. A ten-line poem in my grand anthology of lovers. But you altered the narrative, you marked your territory on my timeline o that as I look back, I find I can neatly divide my more recent past into two unequal halves: before you and after.

The Sufi way is through knowledge and practice, not through intellect and talk. As Prince Dara Shikoh says, in a Persian poem: Do you wish to be included with the Lords of Sight? From speech (then) pass on to experience. By saying 'Unity', you do not become a monotheist; The mouth does not become sweet from the word 'Sugar

It happened that I had just finished co-writing a screen adaptation of Beowulf, the old English narrative poem, and was mildly surprised by the number of people who, mishearing me, seemed to think I had just written an episode of “Baywatch.” So I began retelling Beowulf as a futuristic episode of “Baywatch” for an anthology of detective stories. It seemed to be the only sensible thing to do. Look, I don’t give you grief over where you get your ideas from.

Birds will be bored If I'd forgotten something Ring the bells of those school dismissals in the sea What we shall call pensive borage We start by giving the solution to the contest To wit how many tears can be held in a woman's hand 1. as little as possible 2. in a medium-sized hand While I crumple this star-lit paper And while the everlasting flesh has once and for all taken possession of the mountain summits I live like a recluse in a little house in the Vaucluse Heart king's order

Little Light There is this little light within, Her name is Hope, And I know that as long as I can feel her there, Just beneath my skin, Sending her waves within the labyrinth of my mind, She is snugly at peace within my heart, And I have a chance.

Many a battles are won by our morals, Many a morals are lost in the battles.

Like the river, keep on flowing.

The things we have most longed for do not happen; or if they do, it is never at the time nor under the circumstances when they could have made us happiest.

By the time you swear you’re his, Shivering and sighing, And he vows his passion is Infinite, undying— Lady, make a note of this: One of you is lying.

The Indian daughter is the most ignored and formally accepted prisoner in the world. They are convicts by gender.

Maybe I will keep wanting more, perhaps I cannot stop this restless aching snore...

And when I look into those eyes, the world around me pauses, everything that exists just stops at your gaze, when it meets mine, rising the burning blaze...

Now listen here Matt, and listen carefully”, the man asserted, “Since I know your dirty little secret, I need you to do something for me”.

For three hours without history or thirst Time is my own unpurchased and intimate Republic of the cool wind and blue sea.

The soul could be happier anywhere than where it happens to be.

Without the tender rays of your love, I am nothing but a withered sunflower.

Vol. 4: Complete Poems in English, Milton

Fingers are the judge Words are the verdict Thoughts—prison.

His tales took on the form of an epic poem, and I felt I was hearing some Canadian Homer reciting his Iliad of the High Arctic regions.

We are creatures of rage and madness and bitter tears and we knew that from the start. Our end was disaster and we knew that from the start. We knew it all from the start.

In writing these poems about relatives, I found it almost impossible to write about the mother. I was stuck. My feelings about my mother, you see, must be too complicated to easily flow into words.

Ants know earth. Dragonflies know air. A cobbled mind is not fatal. You have to be willing to self-educate at a moment’s notice, and to be caught in your ignorance by people who will use it against you. You will mispronounce words in front of a crowd. It cannot be avoided. But your poems, with all of their deficiencies, products of lifelong observation and asymmetric knowledge, will be your own. Built on the edge of tradition, they will rarely be anthologized.

Finding Peace- Poem Excerpt: Peace is finding your bliss Without any condition, situation, or person attached to it, Peace is the tenacity to be you and feel your heart. Peace is the sound you hear when you circle the scenery of your own soul. Like a tree, so rooted to what is real Like the ocean, exquisite and unending, whether people cherish it or not Like a butterfly, unique and colourful, be it night or day. Like the moon, full, even when not visibly so.

My anthology continues to sell & the critics get more & more angry. When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum-- however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in Faber's Anthology-- he calls poets 'bards,' a girl a 'maid,' & talks about 'Titanic wars'). There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him. . . .(from a letter of December 26, 1936, in Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, p. 124).

Dreams If I could mould the world As if working with clay I’d soften the hurt take the pain away I’d paint the sky the brightest blue With raindrops making wishes come true The sun would shine so bright and strong To dry the tears and right the wrongs

for a poem Needs multitude, multitudes of thoughts, all fierce, all flesh-eaters, musically clamorous Bright hawks that hover and dart headlong, and ungainly Gray hungers fledged with desire of transgression, salt slimed beaks, from the sharp Rock-shores of the world and the secret waters.

Between the Gardening and the Cookery Comes the brief Poetry shelf; By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology Offers itself. Critical, and with nothing else to do, I scan the Contents page, Relieved to find the names are mostly new; No one my age. Like all strangers, they divide by sex: Landscape Near Parma Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex, So does Rilke and Buddha. “I travel, you see”, “I think” and “I can read’ These titles seem to say; But I Remember You, Love is My Creed, Poem for J., The ladies’ choice, discountenance my patter For several seconds; From somewhere in this (as in any) matter A moral beckons. Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart Or squash it flat? Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart; Girls aren’t like that. We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff Can get by without it. Women don’t seem to think that’s good enough; They write about it. And the awful way their poems lay them open Just doesn’t strike them. Women are really much nicer than men: No wonder we like them. Deciding this, we can forget those times We stayed up half the night Chock-full of love, crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes, And couldn’t write.

Mukhota A hindi poetry anthology explores the various common elements of life. Right from religion, nature, nostalgia to love, freedom, and endless thoughts. Reading the poetries feels like touching every little aspects that constitute Life. "Enjoy 7 days free Audiobooks for first registration

Truth's Virtue- Poem Excerpt: Truth, in all her virtue, Will be your sunrise, your sunset, Your morning breeze and your bedtime nest, She will want a home in your heart, Guiding your way As a star that pounces from the heavens, Chasing cheating ghosts away, She will be the fruitful soil, from which a sincere and striking beauty will spring free, With sagely roots to ground her as the mightiest tree.

And I discovered Norton’s anthology of poetry in the patients’ library – it changed my life. I read the poems over and over again before I began to grasp their meanings. It wasn’t just that the words were musical notes my eyes could sing. It was the discovery that women and men, long dead, had left me messages about their feelings, emotions I could compare to my own. I had finally found others who were as lonely as I was. In an odd way, that knowledge comforted me.

In ‘Colonization in Reverse’41 (a famous poem much anthologized) the speaker is presented as a more or less reliable commentator who implies that Jamaicans who come to ‘settle in de motherlan’ are like English people who settled in the colonies. West Indian entrepreneurs, shipping off their countrymen ‘like fire’, turn history upside down. Fire can destroy, but may also be a source of warmth to be welcomed in temperate England. Those people who ‘immigrate an populate’ the seat of the Empire seem, like many a colonizer, ready to displace previous inhabitants. ‘Jamaica live fi box bread/Out a English people mout’ plays on a fear that newcomers might exploit the natives; and some of the immigrants are—like some of the colonizers from ‘the motherland’—lazy and inclined to put on airs. Can England, who faced war and braved the worst, cope with people from the colonies turning history upside down? Can she cope with ‘Colonizin in reverse’?

If we were not so-single-minded about keeping our lives moving and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death. Perhaps the earth can teach us as when everything seems dead and later proves to be alive. — Pablo Neruda, from “Keeping Quiet,” transl. Alastair Reid, Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, eds. Phyllis Cole-Dai & Ruby R. Wilson (Grayson Books, 2017)

But the mind always wants more than it has– one more bright day of sun, one more clear night in bed with the moon; one more hour to get the words right; one more chance for the heart in hiding to emerge from its thicket in dried grasses–as if this quiet day with its tentative light weren’t enough, as if joy weren’t strewn all around. — Holly J. Hughes, from “Mind Wanting More,” Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, eds. Phyllis Cole-Dai & Ruby R. Wilson (Grayson Books, 2017)

A peels an apple, while B kneels to God, C telephones to D, who has a hand On E’s knee, F coughs, G turns up the sod For H’s grave, I do not understand But J is bringing one clay pigeon down While K brings down a nightstick on L’s head, And M takes mustard, N drives to town, O goes to bed with P, and Q drops dead, R lies to S, but happens to be heard By T, who tells U not to fire V For having to give W the word That X is now deceiving Y with Z, Who happens, just now to remember A Peeling an apple somewhere far away.

Vain were the fancy, by treatise, or sermon, or poem, or tale, to persuade a man to forget himself. He cannot if he would. Sooner will he forget the presence of a raging tooth. There is no forgetting of ourselves but in the finding of our deeper, our true self—God’s idea of us when He devised us—the Christ in us. Nothing but that self can displace the false, greedy, whining self, of which most of us are so fond and proud. And that self no man can find for himself…“but as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God.

He asked you not to like me, So why did you, Neera? Even now, I perform breaststrokes in caterpillar-stuffed north eastern clouds He didn’t ask me for any poems for 50 years, So why are you asking now, Neera? Even now, standing in 10-foot-deep water, I wield icy rods He wrote an editorial on my sub-judice case, Turning an editor, why are you asking for my writing, Neera? Even now, I love flatbreads stuffed with smoked penguin fat He did not confess to being my anthology’s publisher Why did you confess, Neera? Even now, I have family-pack yawns in the face of families, He didn’t like pronouncing my name So why are you telling it to youths, Neera? Even now, in bloody waters, I join the Bollywood chorus of tiger sharks He had said I have nothing of a true writer So why do you think I do, Neera? At Imlitala, I knew rat roasts don’t taste too good without charcoal smoke He said I have nothing creative in me So why do you think I do, Neera? Having burnt bank notes worth Rs 5,000 crore, I smelt death He said I’ll never write poetry So why do you think I have, Neera? On the banks of Amsterdam’s canals I have heard doddering old men sing limericks He transcended from sorrow to anger and anger to hate Why are you so generous Neera? Please don’t tell my grandmother.

….Nancy now gave herself to the wider problems surrounding friends and lovers, igniting her torches from theirs, yet following her own. One much disputed loyalty to an American Negro fired her to battle for recognition for his people, compiling and publishing her "Negro Anthology." Another friendship drew her to Spain during the Civil War, in which she participated actively on the side of freedom and composed a series of Spanish poems. Because of these and further deviations from the United status quo, she was refused permission to re-enter America, where she had hoped to join her closest companion, whose absence in Europe left her solitary at heart. On Nancy Cunard

When the windows like the jackal’s eye and desire pierce the dawn, silken windlasses lift me up to suburban footbridges. I summon a girl who is dreaming in the little gilded house; she meets me on the piles of black moss and offers me her lips which are stones in the rapid river depths. Veiled forebodings descend the buildings’ steps. The best thing is to flee from the great feather cylinders when the hunters limp into the sodden lands. If you take a bath in the watery patterns of the streets, childhood returns to the country like a greyhound. Man seeks his prey in the breezes and the fruits are drying on the screens of pink paper, in the shadow of the names overgrown by forgetfulness. Joys and sorrows spread in the town. Gold and eucalyptus, similarly scented, attack dreams. Among the bridles and the dark edelweiss subterranean forms are resting like perfumers’ corks.

NMK is a well know maxillofacial surgeon, from India, pens his first poetry book Miracle Mix, favourably reviewed by literary critic Prof. M Krishnan Nair. He says "Every poem has an emotional reality. This is rarely found in modern poetry." Almost all the poems have a curious mix of humour and pathos. This anthology captures impressions made on poet's mind by various images and objects ranging from passing clouds, flowing streams to life itself. In simple yet evocative manner, the poet introduces the readers to his world of imagination through these poems. Sometimes he becomes one with the elements of nature and at others he narrates an old legend. Dr. Nikhil Kurien writes under the pen name NMK, he is an oral and maxillofacial surgeon. ISBN: 978-93-85020-82-7 Publisher: Zorba Books book available on Zorba Book Store, Flipkart, amazon, Infibeam and shop clues and on Kindle.

It happens surprisingly fast, the way your shadow leaves you. All day you’ve been linked by the light, but now that darkness gathers the world in a great black tide, your shadow joins the sea of all other shadows. If you stand here long enough, you, too, will forget your lines and merge with the tall grass and old trees, with the crows and the flooding river—all these pieces of the world that daylight has broken into objects of singular loneliness. It happens surprisingly fast, the drawing in of your shadow, and standing in the field, you become the field, and standing in the night, you are gathered by night, Invisible birds sing to the memory of light but then even those separate songs fade, tiny drops of ink in an infinite spilling. — Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, “Still Life at Dusk,” Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, eds. Phyllis Cole-Dai & Ruby R. Wilson (Grayson Books, 2017)

A Lancashire Weaver This place might be haunted the ghost hunter said 'Midst the dust and the grime walk the feet of the dead. The machines now stand idle Looms clatter no more There's a stack of old bobbins piled up by the door. I remember my Mam she worked here, so she said A Lancashire weaver but now she is dead Along with this mill and along with the dreams of working mill lasses and their jobs, so it seems We once wove the best cotton cloth in the world But now that's all gone on the scrap heap been hurled The clatter of clogs on the old cobbled street the humdrum staccato from thousands of feet. Tough work and much hardship and many a care Folks they got by for brass, it was rare but still we had pride By Christ, did we ever! Will it ever come back The answer is NEVER This place might be haunted the ghost hunter said 'Midst the dust and the grime walk the feet of the dead. I'm glad that my Mam never saw it this way Out in all weathers came here every day When this closed down she had already died Perhaps just as well She'd have bloody well cried.

The poetry reading promoted an anthology celebrating the varied voices of the United States. The evening's readers represented several races and ethnicities, a kind of attention to inclusivity I admired. But a few days before my flight, I found out that I was the roster's only woman. I brought this to the attention of the event coordinators, and they said it was too late to correct the lack of gender equity. As a concession, they said that I and the other readers should make a point of reading others' poems to that end. When I joined the seven male readers at the venue, the organizers reminded us of our time limit and suggested I read first. I read my poem from the anthology, as well as one poem each by two other women: a wry, pointed poem by Jane Mead and a focused, hopeful poem by Audre Lorde. I kept to the specified time limit. Then I sat down. Like an obedient girl. The men at the podium, every one, read over their times. They read their own poems from the anthology. Then they read others. Not others as in other people's - women's - poems, which was the idea conveyed to me. No. These men read other poems of their own. I'd flown to New York to read a single poem of my own and watch men drown out my voice and the voices of all the other women in the book.

When I hit thirty, he brought me a cake, three layers of icing, home-made, a candle for each stone in weight. The icing was white but the letters were pink, they said, EAT ME. And I ate, did what I was told. Didn’t even taste it. Then he asked me to get up and walk round the bed so he could watch my broad belly wobble, hips judder like a juggernaut. The bigger the better, he’d say, I like big girls, soft girls, girls I can burrow inside with multiple chins, masses of cellulite. I was his Jacuzzi. But he was my cook, my only pleasure the rush of fast food, his pleasure, to watch me swell like forbidden fruit. His breadfruit. His desert island after shipwreck. Or a beached whale on a king-sized bed craving a wave. I was a tidal wave of flesh. too fat to leave, too fat to buy a pint of full-fat milk, too fat to use fat as an emotional shield, too fat to be called chubby, cuddly, big-built. The day I hit thirty-nine, I allowed him to stroke my globe of a cheek. His flesh, my flesh flowed. He said, Open wide, poured olive oil down my throat. Soon you’ll be forty… he whispered, and how could I not roll over on top. I rolled and he drowned in my flesh. I drowned his dying sentence out. I left him there for six hours that felt like a week. His mouth slightly open, his eyes bulging with greed. There was nothing else left in the house to eat.

December 9: The Mexican literary mafia has nothing on the Mexican bookseller mafia. Bookstores visited: the Librería del Sótano, in a basement on Avenida Juárez where the clerks (numerous and neatly uniformed) kept me under strict surveillance and from which I managed to leave with volumes by Roque Dalton, Lezama Lima, and Enrique Lihn. The Librería Mexicana, staffed by three samurais, on Calle Aranda, near the Plaza de San Juan, where I stole a book by Othón, a book by Amado Nervo (wonderful!), and a chapbook by Efraín Huerta. The Librería Pacífico, at Bolívar and 16 de Septiembre, where I stole an anthology of American poets translated by Alberto Girri and a book by Ernesto Cardenal. And in the evening, after reading, writing, and a little fucking: the Viejo Horacio, on Correo Mayor, staffed by twins, from which I left with Gamboa's Santa, a novel to give to Rosario; an anthology of poems by Kenneth Fearing, translated and with a prologue by someone called Doctor Julio Antonio Vila, in which Doctor Vila talks in a vague, question mark-filled way about a trip that Fearing took to Mexico in the 1950s, "an ominous and fruitful trip," writes Doctor Vila; and a book on Buddhism written by the Televisa adventurer Alberto Montes. Instead of the book by Montes I would have preferred the autobiography of the ex-featherweight world champion Adalberto Redondo, but one of the inconveniences of stealing books - especially for a novice like myself - is that sometimes you have to take what you can get.

I want you to look again and again, to recognize the tender grasses, curled like a baby’s fine hairs around your fingers, as a recurring miracle, to see that the river rocks shine like God, that the crisp voices of the orange and gold October leaves are laughing at death. — Rebecca Baggett, from “Testimony,” Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poems, eds. Phyliis Cole-Davis & Ruby R. Wilson (Grayson Books, 2017)

My Flower A seed it was planted Inside my heart And as it started to grow I was filled with joy And overwhelmed By the beauty someday it would show I watered this seed With wishes and dreams And hoped for sun filled days I watched from afar As it started to bloom

Moments hanging by a thread Tortured twisted memories Where angels fear to tread If I could put together the pieces Of the the puzzle in my mind I could finally become whole again And fill the void inside

WARNING. PSA LITERARY TYPES ARE EVERYWHERE. So always carry some form of protection when dealing with poets. This includes but is not limited to anthologies, whiskey bottles (or other object including flask or gin), bags of coffee, berets or bookmarks, turtlenecks, a book of Kerouac or Whitman, etc. Be wary. Prose writers are harder to spot and if they are novelists leave their area immediately or you will be stuck for hours listening to plots.

Although I adore Christ, I have zero tolerance for Christians because they do not even somewhat resemble him.

LITTLE LOST PUP He was lost! — Not a shade of doubt of that; For he never barked at a slinking cat. But stood in the square where the wind blew raw, With a drooping ear, and a trembling paw, And a mournful look in his pleading eye. And a plaintive sniff at the passer-by That begged as plain as a tongue could sue, " Oh, Mister, please may I follow you?" A lorn, wee waif of a tawny brown Adrift in the roar of a heedless town. Oh, the saddest of sights in a world of sin Is a little lost pup with his tail tucked inl Well, he won my heart (for I set great store On my own red Bute, who is here no more) So I whistled clear, and he trotted up. And who so glad as that small lost pup? Now he shares my board, and he owns my bed, And he fairly shouts when he hears my tread. Then if things go wrong, as they sometimes do. And the world is cold, and I'm feeling blue. He asserts his right to assuage my woes With a warm, red tongue and a nice, cold nose, And a silky head on my arm or knee, And a paw as soft as a paw can be. When we rove the woods for a league about He's as full of pranks as a school let out; For he romps and frisks like a three-months colt. And he runs me down like a thunder-bolt. Oh, the blithest of sights in the world so fair Is a gay little pup with his tail in air! - Anonymous

TO MY DOG BLANCO My dear dumb friend, low lying here, A willing vassal at my feet, — Glad partner of my home and fare. My shadow in the street, — I look into your great brown eyes, Where love and loyal homage shine, And wonder where the difference lies Between your soul and mine. For all of good that I have found Within myself or human kind Hath royally informed and crowned Your gentle heart and mind. I scan the whole broad earth around For that one heart which, real and true, Bears friendship without end or bound. And find the prize in you. I trust you as I trust the stars; Nor cruel loss, nor scoff, nor pride. Nor beggary, nor dungeon bars. Can move you from my side. As patient under injury As any Christian saint of old; As gentle as a lamb with me, But with your brothers bold. More playful than a frolic boy, More watchful than a sentinel — By day and night your constant joy To guard and please me well. I clasp your head upon my breast — The while you whine and lick my hand — And thus our friendship is confessed. And thus we understand. Ah, Blanco I Did I worship God As truly as you worship me, Or follow where my Master trod, With your humility — Did I sit fondly at His feet. As you, dear Blanco, sit at mine, And watch Him with a love as sweet. My life would grow divine. - Josiah Gilbert Holland

Emily Dickinson, the “Belle of Amherst,” wrote hundreds of poems during her lifetime that are striking in their originality of thought and their intensity of feeling. Most were not even published until after her death, and her works only very slowly gained the widespread critical acclaim and appreciation that they enjoy today. When did the act of creation occur? When she was actually writing the poems? Or only after they were discovered, published, and admired by society? Vincent van Gogh produced hundreds of paintings throughout his life. Yet no one, except a few friends, purchased any of his paintings, and he died an apparent failure. Only later did critical acclaim make his work widely sought after, and now his paintings sell for millions of dollars when auctioned at Sotheby’s or Christie’s. Most of John Donne’s songs and sonnets, satires, and religious and secular love poems circulated in a handwritten underground form during much of his life. For three centuries they remained largely underground and appeared infrequently in anthologies until the early twentieth century, when T. S. Eliot rediscovered the metaphysical poets and held them up as ideal models of what poetry should be like.

Most of the books of erotic poetry available today are either too old or are big anthologies covering the same poets and poems. There is a lack of new and original work. Most of us have read something from Ovid, Sappho, Shakespeare, the ancient Greeks, the Romans, or from the Kama Sutra. But love is a theme that should be celebrated with freshness.

Old pond— a frog jumps in the sound of water

IS THIS LOVE? Abegunde Sunday Olaoluwa   Is this love that stirs up my feelings, Or is it athirst for the meaning of loving?   Am I getting lost in longing? Is it you I'm lovingly awaiting?   Love is ever magical, Yes I know, I know…. Love is ever mystical, It's a union of souls.   Hating is never logical, Yes I know, I know…. Dating is ever tactical,

ATTACHED TO MY HEART Ogedengbe Tolulope Impact   Attached to my heart Is a wonderful picture, A symbol of love Given to me from above.   Attached to my heart Are memories unforgotten, Issues that were begotten On my short journey on earth.   Attached to my heart Is a beautiful picture, With a radiant face Smiling at the world.

Writing is my soul food, sometimes I eat alone, sometimes I share the bread.

I prefer solitude to companions, since there are so few men who are trustworthy, and almost none truly learned. I do not say this because I demand scholarship in all men—although the sum total of men’s learning is small enough; but I question whether we should allow anyone to waste our time. The wasting of time is an abomination.

When we write nowadays that six million perished during the Holocaust, the number is awesome, abstract; it is hard for the mind to comprehend that number, yet each one was a world. Can we fathom what we lost, what the world lost? NOTE: For years only her small group of friends knew about the existence of the poems. Her two close friends, who kept the manuscripts, and her former mathematics teacher from tenth grade, Hersh Segal, got together and published the Anthology - Blütenlese in Rechovot, Israel, in 1976. This privately financed publication reached a larger public and her name and fame spread, but very slowly. A second edition was published by the Diaspora Research Institute, Tel Aviv University, in 1979.

Tieken has suggested, on the basis of the problems we have outlined, that all the Sangam poems in the major anthologies were composed to order by poets who were perfectly aware of the fictive nature of their subject (tuṟai) and its context. Thus eighth- or ninth-century poets at the Pandya court, in Tieken’s reconstruction, deliberately composed poems with an internal speaker addressing a far more ancient hero or patron—as if a poet today were to adopt the persona of, say, Christopher Marlowe writing verses for Queen Elizabeth. But there is no need to conjure up such a scenario, with early-medieval court poets busy composing thousands of poems deliberately retrojected into the distant past, using conventional themes as well as invented materials meant to bring these ancient kings and bards to life. Is it not far more economical to imagine a process whereby the poems, many of them very old, all of them self-conscious literary efforts to begin with, survived through a slow process of recording, editorial accretion, and explication? Moreover, the relation of poem to colophon must have been, in many cases, far more intimate than any linear development could account for. There may well have been cases where the text and the colophon are, in a special sense, mutually determining—that is, cases where the poetic situation at work in the poem fits and informs the colophon long before the latter was recorded. Again, there is no need to assume that the “fictive” nature of the colophon means it is false. Quite the contrary may be the case: poem and colophon, though certainly distinct, usually share a single mental template. Fiction often offers a much closer approximation to truth than what passes for fact can give us. It’s also possible that some of the colophons are arbitrary editorial interventions long after the period of composition—that is, that well-known, ancient names were recycled by creative editors. We need to keep an open, critical mind as we investigate these materials.

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue Who says my hand a needle better fits; A Poets pen all scorn I should thus wrong, For such despite they cast on Female wits: If what I do prove well it won’t advance; They’l say it’s stoln, or else it was by chance.

Song Day, in melting purple dying, Blossoms, all around me sighing, Fragrance, from the lilies straying, Zephyr, with my ringlets playing, Ye but waken my distress; I am sick of loneliness. Thou, to whom I love to hearken, Come, ere night around me darken; Though thy softness but deceive me, Say thou’rt true, and I’ll believe thee; Veil, if ill, thy soul’s intent, Let me think it innocent! Save thy toiling, spare thy treasure: All I ask is friendship’s pleasure; Let the shining ore lie darkling, Bring no gem in lustre sparkling! Gifts and gold are nought to me; I would only look on thee! Tell to thee the highwrought feeling, Ecstasy but in revealing; Paint to thee the deep sensation, Rapture in participation, Yet but torture, if compressed In a lone, unfriended breast. Absent still! Ah! come and bless me! Let these eyes again caress thee; Once, in caution, I could fly thee: Now, I nothing could deny thee; In a look if death there be, Come, and I will gaze on thee!

Rejoice, and men will seek you; Grieve, and they turn and go. They want full measure of all your pleasure, But they do not need your woe. Be glad, and your friends are many; Be sad, and you lose them all. There are none to decline your nectared wine, But alone you must drink life’s gall.

Soon after joining the agency, Marks set out to lessen the danger. His first step was to get rid of the codes that the agency had been using to communicate with its people in the field. They had come from MI6, which, for the first two years of SOE’s existence, had controlled its wireless circuits and provided its sets and coding. Marks was dismayed by the simplicity of the codes, which were based on classic English poems by Shakespeare and others that were “so familiar that an educated German was quite capable of recognizing them and guessing the cipher.” To replace them, he wrote poems of his own, ranging from ribald verses to tender love poems. He gave one of the latter, entitled “The Life That I Have,” to a twenty-one-year-old agent named Violette Szabo, who, after being parachuted into France in 1942, was eventually captured, tortured, and killed by the Gestapo. It read: The life that I have Is all that I have And the life that I have Is yours. The love that I have Of the life that I have Is yours and yours and yours. A sleep I shall have A rest I shall have Yet death will be but a pause For the peace of my years In the long green grass Will be yours and yours and yours. Since then, the poem has developed a life of its own. It has been used in a movie about Szabo’s life, found in poetry anthologies, reprinted on a 9/11 victims’ website, and recited by Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky at their wedding in 2010. “Every code,” Marks would later say, “has a human face.

How can a poem make a difference? How can a tree make a difference? Perhaps the answer to those questions is that poetry and nature have a way of simply reminding us that we are not alone. The Kentucky writer bell hooks once wrote, “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” Going to the woods, or simply noticing the small defiant ways nature is thriving all around me on a daily basis, helps me feel that communion. And poems, like the poems that I’ve collected here for this anthology, help me feel that sense of communion too.

Real America, in honor of the hellhound, our beloved Bukowski You hate America, no, not at all, I love it so much that I can say obvious truths that they themselves do not want to accept. If I criticize myself all the time, why would I stop criticizing others? A poem in honor of the only sincere American, Bukowski. The myth of America tells us of the land of freedom, founded by descendants of intelligent and puritanical Europeans. It's all a load of crap, no, it's the land of slavery, my friends, not just in the sense of slavery of African descendants, but of mental slavery. Yes, the land of the alienated. Eden, created by Angels. This is all a load of crap. Real America, Real America, Strong America, came from the indigenous tribes, from the toil of blacks and the industrious mentality of descendants of Europeans, all lazy, violent and who wanted to get fat like pigs, without worrying about anything. Dirty America that produces clean America, sold in the movies. Why lazy? Well, they don't like to make a lot of effort, and this indolence produces innovation. Is that why they are so creative? Well, they are creative in order to pay well the brains of other nations who go to work there. They knew that numerous wars and constant friction were much worse than anything else and cost money. So? Well, then, let's create a land where everyone can get fat, rich and kill each other, but only as long as the general profit of society increases. Let's sell the excess food, weapons and our gourmet culture to other peoples. It worked. But let's not fool ourselves. America is Golden on the outside and dark on the inside. America is the country of weapons, drugs, fantasies and lies. Above all, lies. See, the mafias that operated there to supply the demand for alcohol, prohibited in order to maintain the pure "spirit" of the drunken bourgeoisie, were all called mafias of other nationalities. But they were all Americans. America is geography, not history or ethnicity. You are an American because of your ties to this immense land blessed by God. Is that what these bastards have done? They have turned their own pain into art and sold it to us in the movies. The weapons, yes, they have to be good and they have to kill quickly. Why? Because Americans are lazy and don't like anything that lasts long. Even wars have to be fought in other countries and if they are too exhausting, they lose their Hollywood shine, so we have to abandon Saigon. Fatness, that is another thing that best represents America. Americans are all obese. Well, at least you can't help but notice them. They are, well, heavy people, especially the Karens. I love Karens, I'm a male Karen, you know. And as for drugs, well, that's the most interesting part. It's the country that consumes them the most, why? Well, maintaining the American dream requires a lot of mescaline. Fat drug addicts with guns sticking out of their own toilets. The toilets in America must hide everything we really want to know. I will probably never get a visa there, thanks to this poem. Still, you can't deny that my writing is anthological. God bless all the Americas. Please don't blow me up, I have poetic license to write these words.

Ashoka’s dilemma may lie behind the story of the Mahabharata, India’s great epic. This massive work—eight times the length of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey combined—is an anthology of many strands of tradition transmitted orally from about 300 BCE but not committed to writing until the early Common Era. The Mahabharata is more than a narrative poem, however. It remains the Indian national saga and is the most popular of all India’s sacred texts, familiar in every home. It contains the Bhagavad-Gita, which has been called India’s “national gospel.”103 In the twentieth century, during the buildup to independence, the Gita would play a central role in the discussions about the legitimacy of waging war against Britain.

Eyes as dark as devil’s Mouth twisted in a salacious grin The wilderness was the attire Of the killer and its black fiend

Art can do much; but this maxime’s most sure, A weak or wounded brain admits no cure.