Poems for Life Read online

  Poems

  forLife

  Poems

  forLife

  A Special Collection of Poetry

  Selected by:

  E. L. Doctorow • Allen Ginsberg • David Mamet

  Tom Wolfe • Joyce Carol Oates • Stephen Sondheim

  Kurt Vonnegut • Elie Wiesel • And many more

  Introduction by Anna Quindlen

  Arcade Publishing • New York

  Copyright © 1995, 2011 by The Nightingale-Bamford School

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Designed by Jeff Ward

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61145-350-8

  Printed in China

  Contents

  Teachers’ Note

  Introduction: “Poetry Emotion” by Anna Quindlen

  Contributors (in alphabetical order) and their selections:

  JANE ALEXANDER “In Black Earth, Wisconsin” by Andrea Musher

  BROOKE ASTOR “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth

  KEN AULEITA “Ode to the West Wind” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

  HAROLYN M. BLACKWELL “To Be Somebody” by Langston Hughes

  MARTIN CHARNIN “Laughing Down Lonely Canyons” by James Cavenaugh

  MARIO CUOMO “Outwitted” by Edwin Markham

  DAVID DINKINS “Stars” by Langston Hughes

  E. L. DOCTOROW “A Blessing” by James Wright

  GERALDINE FERRARO “If” by Rudyard Kipling

  ALLEN GINSBERG “Ode to the West Wind” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

  RUDOLPH GIULIANI “If I can stop one Heart from breaking” by Emily Dickinson

  RICHARD F. GREIN Excerpt from “Four Quartets” by T. S. Eliot

  DAVID HALBERSTAM Excerpt from “The Passing of Arthur” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost

  SHELDON HARNICK “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman

  BILL IRWIN “The Yachts” by William Carlos Williams

  PETER JENNINGS “Man with Wooden Leg Escapes Prison” by James Tate

  EDWARD I. KOCH “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe

  KENNETH KOCH “The Dawn of Me” by Jeff Morley

  JILL KREMENTZ “The Low Road” by Marge Piercy

  ANGELA LANSBURY “Cuttin’ Rushes” by Moira O’Neill

  YO-YO E. MA “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats

  DAVID MAMET “The Dog” by David Mamet

  JASON MCMANUS “I never saw a Moor” by Emily Dickinson

  JOAN S. MCMENAMIN “Life Is Mostly” by A. L. Gordon and “He That Loveth” by Thomas a Kempis

  VED MEHTA “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold

  ISMAIL MERCHANT “Song” by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

  RUTH W. MESSINGER “The Gift Outright” by Robert Frost

  SUSAN MINOT “When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be” by John Keats

  JOYCE CAROL OATES “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” by Emily Dickinson

  RON PADGETT “A Step Away from Them” by Frank O’Hara

  HAROLD PRINCE “Credo” by Thomas Wolfe

  ANNA QUINDLEN “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” by W. B. Yeats

  DAVID READ “Holy Sonnet XIV” (“Batter my heart, three-personed God”) by John Donne

  RICHARD W. RILEY “Duty Was Joy” by Rabindranath Tagore

  ISABELLA ROSSELLINI “Get Yourself Drunk” by Charles Baudelaire

  GENE SAKS “Does It Matter?” by Siegfried Sassoon

  DIANE SAWYER “If” by Rudyard Kipling

  WHITNEY NORTH SEYMOUR JR. Excerpt from “Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood” by William Cullen Bryant

  ALLY SHEEDY “On Stripping Bark from Myself” by Alice Walker

  BEVERLY SILLS “It Is Not the Critic Who Counts” by Theodore Roosevelt

  MARGARET CHASE SMITH “My Creed” by Margaret Chase Smith

  RONALD B. SOBEL “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost

  STEPHEN SONDHEIM “Come to the Edge” by Christopher Logue

  LIV ULLMANN “Meditation #17” (“No Man is an Island”) by John Donne

  KURT VONNEGUT “The Angel that presided o’er my birth” by William Blake

  WENDY WASSERSTEIN Excerpt from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  PAUL WATKINS “Clouds” by Rupert Brooke

  ELIE WIESEL “From Tomorrow On, I Shall Be Sad” by Motele

  ELIZABETH WINTHROP “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver

  TOM WOLFE Excerpt from “I’ve Been to a Marvelous Party” by Noel Coward

  Grade V Students

  Contributors

  Acknowledgments

  Teachers’ Note

  The inspiration behind this project, which was begun in 1992, was an Irish poetry anthology called Lifelines. Lifelines consists of a collection of letters and poems sent in by well-known figures in Ireland at the request of a group of Dublin students. These students found a publisher for the book, which they dedicated to the “children of the Third World,” then donated all their royalties to organizations that might assist these children.

  Our thought was to do something in the same spirit and to the same purpose. At Nightingale-Bamford, poetry is an integral part of the fifth-grade curriculum. In addition to writing their own poems, the students read and memorize a variety of poetry during the year, culminating in a recitation for their parents. Moreover, when students enter the middle school, they become involved in class projects dealing with social service. It therefore seemed very fitting to combine the fifth-grade social-service project with part of their English curriculum. We wanted the students not only to be awakened to a world of poetry through other people’s choices, but to become aware of a world of need outside their immediate communities, one to which they could in some way contribute. We decided the proceeds of our project should benefit the International Rescue Committee, and more specifically the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children (a division of the IRC). The students were already familiar with this particular organization because Mary Anne Schwalbe, staff director, had come to the school and talked about her experiences with refugee women and children on several occasions.

  For two years, the students wrote to well-known people in all fields. Every day, they awaited the mail with eager anticipation. When a reply arrived it was greeted with curiosity and excitement. Each letter and accompanying poem was read in class, and the poem and poet discussed. We greatly enjoyed finding out why people had selected a particular work, and we learned from what they had to say about it. What most struck all of us was how important poetry had been in the lives of the contributors, who had turned and returned to poems for amusement, solace, wisdom, and, perhaps most importantly, to find some part of themselves.

  We are extremely grateful to all those who took the time to send in their thoughts and poems. We would also lik
e to thank Timothy Bent, our editor at Arcade, who had such faith in the project; Mary Anne Schwalbe of the International Rescue Committee; The Nightingale-Bamford School teachers and administrators; and, most of all, the students of Class V from 1993 and 1994, whose names appear at the end of the volume.

  Faith O’Grady

  Mary Allen

  Introduction

  “Poetry Emotion”

  by Anna Quindlen

  Yusef Komunyakaa won the Pulitzer Prize, but he does not expect to become a household name, and not because his name itself, phonetically simple once parsed out bit by bit, looks at first glance so unpronounceable. Mr. Komunyakaa won the prize for poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever.

  It’s hard to figure out why this should be true, why poetry has been shunted onto a siding at a time, a place, so in need of brevity and truth. We still use the word as a synonym for a kind of lovely perfection, for an inspired figure skater, an accomplished ballet dancer. Many of the finest books children read when young are poetry: The Cat in the Hat, Goodnight Moon, the free verse of Where the Wild Things Are.

  And then suddenly, just as their faces lose the soft curves of babyhood, the children harden into prose and leave verse behind, or reject it entirely. Their summer reading lists rarely include poetry, only stories, “The Red Badge of Courage,” not Mr. Komunyakaa’s spare and evocative poems about his hitch in Vietnam:

  He danced with tall grass

  for a moment, like he was swaying

  with a woman. Our gun barrels

  glowed white-hot.

  When I got to him,

  a blue halo

  of flies had already claimed him.

  For some of those children who once were lulled to sleep by the rhythms of Seuss and Sendak, poetry comes now set to music: Nirvana and Arrested Development, Tori Amos and the Indigo Girls. Many readers are scared off young, put off by the belief that poetry is difficult and demanding. We complain that it doesn’t sound like the way we talk, but if it sounds like the way we talk, we complain that it doesn’t rhyme.

  A poet who teaches in the schools tells of how one boy told him he couldn’t, wouldn’t write poetry. Then one day in class he heard Hayden Carruth’s “Cows at Night” and cried, “I didn’t know we were allowed to write poems about cows.”

  Or write a poem about two women talking in the kitchen.

  Crazy as a bessy bug.

  Jack wasn’t cold

  In his grave before

  She done up & gave all

  The insurance money

  To some young pigeon

  Who never hit a lick

  At work in his life.

  He cleaned her out & left

  With Donna Faye’s girl.

  Honey, hush. You don’t

  Say …

  That’s Mr. Komunyakaa from the collection, Neon Vernacular, that won the Pulitzer. His publisher originally printed 2,500 copies, which is fairly large for poetry but a joke to the folks who stock those racks at the airport. Few are the parents who leap up with soundless joy when a son or daughter announces, “Mom, Dad, I’ve decided to become a poet.“

  People who are knowledgeable about poetry sometimes discuss it in that knowing, rather hateful way in which enophiles talk about wine: robust, delicate, muscular. This has nothing to do with how most of us experience it, the heart coming around the corner and unexpectedly running into the mind. Of all the words that have stuck to the ribs of my soul, poetry has been the most filling. Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, the divine W. B. Yeats. April is the cruelest month. O World, I cannot hold thee close enough! After the first death, there is no other. A terrible beauty is born.

  Poems are now appearing on posters in subway trains; one commuter said of a Langston Hughes poem, “I can’t express it, but I get it.” Now rolling through the soot-black dark of the tunnels and the surprising sunshine where the subways suddenly shoot aboveground: Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Audre Lord, May Swenson, Rita Dove, and Gwendolyn Brooks, who wrote that exquisite evocation of carpe diem, and perhaps of poetry, too:

  Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.

  And be it gash or gold it will not come

  Again in this identical disguise.

  Says Mr. Komunyakaa, who teaches, “I never really approached it from the perspective of making a living. It was simply a need.” Maybe it’s a need for us all we just forget.

  Poems

  forLife

  JANE ALEXANDER

  Dear Ms. Rabbino,

  Thank you for your letter, and I applaud your project as a means to raise funds for the International Rescue Committee to benefit refugee children.

  You have asked me to give you a copy of my favorite poem. I have many favorite poems, but I read one the other day that is my current favorite and I thought you might wish to include it in your book. The poem, “In Black Earth, Wisconsin,” was written by Andrea Musher. I read it in a recently published anthology of poems by Dane County writers of Wisconsin. The anthology is called The Glacier Stopped Here, published by the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission and Isthmus Publishing Company in 1994.

  The poem is my favorite presently because it paints for me a picture of this very specific Wisconsin country. I get a clear picture of the farm, the mother and family and the graveyard at the top of the hill. It evokes for me a particular time and an almost unbearable emotional path that this mother and family have taken.

  Poems are perhaps my favorite kind of reading because they encapsulate in a few descriptive lines a world — a world that I may never get to visit but which, somehow, recalls for me the common ground we all stand on.

  All the best with your project.

  Sincerely,

  IN BLACK EARTH, WISCONSIN

  thistles take the hillside

  a purple glory of furred spears

  a fierce army of spiky weeds

  we climb through them

  your mother, two of her daughters, and me

  a late walk in the long June light

  in the barn the heart throb

  of the milking machine continues

  as your father and brother change

  the iodide-dipped tubes

  from one udder to the next

  and the milk courses through the pipeline

  to the cooling vat where it swirls

  like a lost sea in a silver box

  we are climbing to the grove of white birch trees

  whose papery bark will shed

  the heart-ringed initials of your sister

  as the grief wears down

  this farm bears milk and hay

  and this mother woman walking beside us

  has borne nine children

  and one magic one is dead:

  riding her bike

  she was a glare of light

  on the windshield of the car

  that killed her

  a year and a half has passed

  and death is folded in among the dishtowels

  hangs in the hall closet by the family photos

  and like a ring of fine mist

  above the dinner table

  we stand on a hill looking at birch bark

  poking among hundred-year-old graves

  that have fallen into the grass

  rubbing the moss off and feeling for the names

  that the stone sheds

  we are absorbing death like nitrates

  fertilizing our growth

  this can happen:

  a glare of light

  an empty place

  wordlessly we finger her absence

  already there are four grandchildren

  the family grows thick as thistle

  —Andrea Musher

  BROOKE ASTOR

  Thank you for your letter of April 24th. I think your class project sounds wonderful and I hope it is an enormous succe
ss.

  My favorite poem is “The Daffodil“ by William Wordsworth because it is lighthearted and gay and brings to mind such beautiful images. In the Spring, my garden is filled with golden daffodils which are a glorious sight to behold, and when the winter comes, I can close my eyes and see them “fluttering and dancing in the breeze” and my heart is uplifted and filled with joy. I have enclosed a copy of the poem for your book.

  I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD

  I wandered lonely as a cloud

  That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

  When all at once I saw a crowd,

  A host, of golden daffodils,

  Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

  Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

  Continuous as the stars that shine

  And twinkle on the milky way,

  They stretched in never-ending line

  Along the margin of a bay:

  Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

  Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

  The waves beside them danced, but they

  Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

  A poet could not but be gay,

  In such a jocund company:

  I gazed — and gazed — but little thought

  What wealth the show to me had brought:

  For oft, when on my couch I lie

  In vacant or in pensive mood,

  They flash upon that inward eye

  Which is the bliss of solitude;

  And then my heart with pleasure fills,

  And dances with the daffodils.

  — William Wordsworth

  KEN AULETTA

  Dear Maggie,

  Among my favorite poems, one is certainly Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” with its rich optimism: “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

  Read it, and cheer.

  HAROLYN M. BLACKWELL