Introduction by Rita Dove

Edward Lee Masters (1868-1950)
FROM Spoon River Anthology
The Hill
Fiddler Jones
Petit, the Poet

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)
Miniver Cheevy
Mr. Flood’s Party

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)
The Creation

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)
The Poet
Life’s Tragedy

Robert Frost (1874-1963)
The Death of the Hired Man
Mending Wall
Birches
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Tree at My Window
Directive

Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
Patterns

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
Susie Asado
FROM Tender Buttons:
A Box
A Plate

Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935)
I Sit and Sew

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
Grass
Cahoots

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
Peter Quince the Clavier
Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Anecdote of the Jar
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
Of Mere Being

Angelina Weld Grimké (1880-1958)
Fragment

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
Tract
Danse Russe
The Red Wheelbarrow
The Yachts
FROM Asphodel, That Greeny Flower (Book I, lines 1-92)

Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)
Moonlight
There Will Come Soft Rains

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance
The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
In a Station of the Metro
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
FROM Canto LXXXI (Libretto: “Yet / Ere the season died a-cold”)

Hilda Doolittle (H.D)> (1886-1961)
Sea Rose
Helen
FROM The Walls Do Not Fall:
(An incident here and there”)
FROM Hermetic Definition: “Red Rose and a Beggar”:
(“Why did you come”)
(“Take me anywhere…”)
(“Venice—Venus?”)

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)
Gale in April
Shine, Perishing Republic
Clouds at Evening
Credo

Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
The Fish
Poetry
Poetry

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Preludes
The Waste Land

Claude McKay (1889-1948)
If We Must Die
The Harlem Dancer

Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982)
Ars Poetica

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
First Fig
Recuerdo

E.E. Cumming (1894-1962)
in Just-
Buffalo Bill’s
the 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

Jean Toomer (1894-1967)
Reapers
November Cotton Flower
Portrait in Georgia

Louise Bogan (1897-1970)
Medusa
New Moon

Melvin B. Tolson (1898-1966)
Dark Symphony
FROM Harlem Gallery: Psi (“Black boy, / let me get up from the white man’s Table…”)

Hart Crane (1899-1932)
FROM The Bridge [excerpts]:
Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge
FROM II: Powahatan’s Daughter: The River

Robert Francis (190-1987)
Silent Poem

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
The Negro Speaks of Rivers
I, Too
Dream Boogie
Harlem

Countee Cullen (1903-1946)
Incident
To John Keats, Poet, at Spring Time
Yet I Do Marvel
From the Dark Tower

Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006)
Father and Son
The Portrait
Touch Me

W.H Auden (1907-1973)
Musée des Beaux Arts
Epitaph on a Tyrant

Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)
My Papa’s Waltz
The Waking
In a Dark Time

Charles Olson (1910-1970)
FROM The Maximus Poems: I, Maximus of Gloucester, to You
The Distances

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
The Fish
Sestina
First Death in Nova Scotia
Visits to St. Elizabeths
One Art

Robert Hayden (1913-1980)
Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday
Those Winter Sundays
Frederick Douglass
Middle Passage

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980)
Effort at Speech Between Two People
Then I Saw What the Calling Was
The Poem as Mask

Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966)
The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me

John Berryman (1914-1972)
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

Randall Jarrell (1914-1965)
90 North
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
The Woman at the Washington Zoo
Next Day

Weldon Kees (1914-1955)
For My Daughter

Dudley Randall (1914-2000)
A Different Image

William Stafford (1914-1993)
Traveling through the Dark
At the Bomb Testing Site

Ruth Stone (1915- )
Scars

Margaret Walker (1915-1998)
For My People

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)
The Mother
A Song in the Front Yard
The Bean Eaters
The Lovers of the Poor
We Real Cool
The Blackstone Rangers

Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
“To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage”
Skunk Hour
For the Union Dead

Robert Duncan (1919-1988)
Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow
My Mother Would Be a Falconress

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919- )
Populist Manifesto

William Meredith (1919-2007)
Parents

Howard Nemerov (1920-1991)
Because You Asked About the Line Between Prose and Poetry

Hayden Carruth (1921-2008)
The Hyacinth Garden in Brooklyn
August 1945

Richard Wilbur (1921- )
Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
Cottage Street, 1953
The Writer

James Dickey (1923-1997)
The Sheep Child

Alan Dugan (1923-2003)
Love Song: I and Thou

Anthony Hecht (1923-2004)
“More Light! More Light!”

Richard Hugo (1923-1982)
Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg
The Freaks at Spurgin Road Field

Denise Levertov (1923-1997)
The Poem Unwritten
Caedmon
Swan in Falling Snow

Louis Simpson (1923- )
American Poetry

Carolyn Kizer (1925- )
A Muse of Water

Kenneth Koch (1925-2002)
Fresh Air
Permanently

Maxine Kumin (1925- )
Morning Swim
How It Is

Gerald Stern (1925- )
Behaving Like a Jew
The Dancing
Another Insane Devotion

A.R. Ammons (1926-2001)
The City Limits
Corsons Inlet

Robert Bly (1926- )
Snowfall in the Afternoon
Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter
Waking from Sleep

Robert Creeley (1926-2005)
The Flower
I Know a Man
The Language
The Rain
Bresson’s Movies

James Merrill (1926-1995)
The Victor Dog

Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
Steps
Poem (“Lana Turner has collapsed!”)
The Day Lady Died

John Ashbery (1927- )
Some Trees
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
What Is Poetry

Galway Kinnell (1927- )
The Bear
After Making Love We Hear Footsteps
Saint Francis and the Sow

W.S. Mervin (1927- )
Air
For the Anniversary of My Death
Yesterday
Chord

James Wright (1927-1980)
A 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 Virgina, Has Been Condemned

Donald Hall (1928- )
My Son My Executioner
Digging

Philip Levine (1928- )
Animals Are Passing From Our Lives
They Feed They Lion
You Can Have It
The Simple Truth

Anne Sexton (1928-1974)
Her Kind
The Abortion
Wanting to Die
In Celebration of My Uterus
Rowing

Adrienne Rich (1929- )
Orion
Planetarium
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
FROM Twenty-One Love Poems: XIII (“The rules break like a thermometer…”)

Gregory Corso (1930-2001)
Marriage

Gary Snyder (1930- )
Hay for the Horses
Riprap
Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout

Derek Walcott (1930- )
A Far Cry from Africa
Sea Grapes
FROM The Schooner: Flight (part 11, After the Storm: “There’s a fresh light that follows…”)
The Light of the World
FROM Omeros, Book VII, LXIV, I (“I sang of quiet Achille, Afolabe’s son…”)

Miller Williams (1930- )
Let Me Tell You

Etheridge Knight (1931-1991)
The Idea of Ancestry

Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) (1934- )
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
An Agony.As Now.
SOS
Black Art

Ted Berrigan (1934-1983)
Wrong Train
A Final Sonnet

Audre Lorde (1934-1992)
Power

Sonia Sanchez (1934- )
poem at thirty

Mark Strand (1934- )
The Prediction
The Night, the Porch

Russell Edson (1935- )
A Stone is Nobody’s

Mary Oliver (1935- )
Singapore
The Summer Day

Charles Right (1935- )
Reunion
Dead Color
California Dreaming

Lucille Clifton (1936-2010)
homage to my hips
[at last we killed the roaches]
the death of fred clifton
to my last period

June Jordan (1936-2002)
Poem About My Rights

Frederick Seidel (1936- )
1968

C.K. Williams (1936- )
From My Window
Blades

Diane Wakoski (1937- )
The Mechanic

Michael S. Harper (1938- )
Dear John, Dear Coltrane
Last Affair: Bessie’s Blues Song
Grandfather
Nightmare Begins Responsibility

Charles Simic (1938- )
Stone
Fork
Classic Ballroom Dances

Paula Gunn Allen (1939-2008)
Grandmother

Frank Bidart (1939- )
Ellen West

Carl Dennis (1939- )
Spring Letter
Two or Three Wishes

Stephen Dunn (1939- )
Allegory of the Cave
Tucson

Robert Pinsky (1940- )
History of My Heart
The Questions
Samurai Song

James Welch (1940-2003)
Christmas Comes to Moccasin Flat

Billy Collins (1941- )
Introduction to Poetry
The Dead

Toi Derricotte (1941- )
Allen Ginsberg
The Weakness

Stephen Dobyns (1941- )
How to Like It
Lullaby

Robert Hass (1941- )
Song
The Pornographer
The Return of Robinson Jeffers

Lyn Hejinian (1941- )
From My Life: A name trimmed with colored ribbons

B.H. Fairchild (1942- )
The Machinist, Teaching His Daughter to Play the Piano

Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee) (1942- )
But He Was Cool or: he even stopped for green lights
A Poem to Complement Other Poems

William Matthews (1942-1997)
In Memory of the Utah Stars
The Accompanist

Sharon Olds (1942- )
The Language of the Brag
The Lifting

Henry Taylor (1942- )
Barbed Wire

Tess Gallagher (1943- )
Black Silk
Under Stars

Michael Palmer (1943- )
I Do Not

James Tate (1943- )
The Lost Pilot

Norman Dubie (1945- )
Elizabeth’s War with the Christmas Bear
The Funeral

Carol Muske-Dukes (1945- )
August, Los Angeles, Lullaby

Kay Ryan (1945- )
Turtle
Bestiary

Larry Levis (1946-1996)
Childhood Ideogram
Winter Stars

Adrian C. Louis (1946- )
Looking for Judas

Thomas Lux (1946- )
The People of the Other Village

Marilyn Nelson (1946- )
The Ballad of Aunt Geneva
Star-Fix

Ron Silliman (1946- )
Albany

Ai (1947-2010)
Cuba, 1962
The Kid
Finished

Yusef Komunyakaa (1947- )
Thanks
Tu Do Street
Facing It
Nude Interrogation

Nathaniel Mackey (1947- )
Song of the Andoumboulou: 21

Gregory Orr (1947- )
Gathering the Bones Together
Two Lines from the Brothers Grimm
Origin of the Marble Forest

Roberta Hill Whiteman (1947- )
Reaching Yellow River

Albert Goldbarth (1948- )
Away

Heather McHugh (1948- )
Language Lesson 1976
What He Thought

Leslie Marmon Silko (1948- )
In Cold Storm Light

Olga Broumas (1949- )
Calypso

Victor Hernández Cruz (1949- )
Latin & Soul

Jane Miller (1949- )
Miami Heart

David St. John (1949- )
Iris

C.D. Wright (1949- )
Why Ralph Refuses to Dance
Girl Friend Poem #3
Crescent

Carolyn Forché (1950- )
Taking Off My Clother

Jorie Graham (1950- )
San Sepolcro

Marie Howe (1950- )
What the Living Do

Joy Harjo (1951- )
She Had Some Horses
My House is the Red Earth

Garrett Hongo (1951- )
The Legend

Andrew Hudgins (1951- )
Begotten
We Were Simply Talking

Brigit Pegeen Kelly (1951- )
Imagining Their Own Hymns
Song

Paul Muldoon (1951- )
Meeting the British
Errata
The Throwback

Judith Ortiz Cofer (1952- )
Quinceañera

Rita Dove (1952- )
Parsley
Daystar
After Reading Mickey in the Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed
Claudette Colvin Goes to Work

Alice Fulton (1952- )
Our Calling

Barbara Hamby (1952- )
Thinking of Galileo
Hatred

Mark Jarman (1952- )
Unholy Sonnet 13

Naomi Shihab Nye (1952- )
The Traveling Onion
Arabic
Wedding Cake

Alberto Ríos (1952- )
Nani
England Finally, Like My Mother Always Said We Would

Laurie Sheck (1952- )
Nocturne: Blue Waves
The Unfinished

Gary Soto (1952- )
Field Poem
Oranges
Black Hair

Susan Stewart (1952- )
Yellow Stars and Ice
The Forest

Mark Doty (1953- )
Billiance
Esta Noche
Bill’s Story

Harryette Mullen (1953- )
Black Nikes

Franz Wright (1953- )
Alcohol

Lorna Dee Cervantes (1954- )
To My Brother
“Love of My Flesh, Living Death”

Sandra Cisneros (1954- )
My Wicked Wicked Ways
Little Clown, My Heart

Cornelius Eady (1954- )
Jack Johnson Does the Eagle Rock
Crows in a Strong Wind
I’m a Fool to Love You

Louise Eldrich (1954- )
Indian Boarding School: The Runaways

David Mason (1954- )
Spooning

Marilyn Chin (1955- )
How I Got That Name
Composed Near the Bay Ridge
The Survivor

Cathy Song (1955- )
The Youngest Daughter

Annie Finch (1956- )
Another Reluctance
Insect

Li-Young Lee (1957- )
The Gift
Eating Together

Carl Phillips (1959- )
Our Lady
As from a Quiver of Arrows

Nick Flynn (1960- )
Bag of Mice
Cartoon Physics, part 1

Elizabeth Alexander (1962- )
The Venus Hottentot
Affirmative Action Blues (1993)
Equinox

Reetika Vazirani (1962-2003)
FROM White Elephants:
A Million Balconies
Train Windows

Sherman Alexie (1966- )
What the Orphan Inherits
The Powwow at the End of the World

Natasha Trethewey (1966- )
Hot Combs
Amateur Fighter
Flounder

A.E. Stallings (1968- )
The Tantrum

Joanna Klink (1969- )
Spare

Brenda Shaughnessy (1970- )
Postfeminism
Your One Good Dress

Kevin Young (1970- )
Quivira City Limits
Everywhere is Out of Town
Whatever You Want

Terrance Hayes (1971- )
At Pegasus
Lady Sings the Blues