National Poetry Month
Since 1996 the Academy of American Poets has designated April as National Poetry Month. City Tech Library faculty and staff have shared a selection of some of their favorite poems below. You can also find new selections of poetry to borrow in the library. Featured titles are on display at the front of the library space on the fourth floor.
Untitled (Perfect Lovers): Two Commercial Clocks: Felix Gonzalez-Torres: 1987-89 By Eduardo C. Corral
a sentence bleeding milk
to burn like the lost
darner amberwing skimmer
the light of the next door
after hunger a watermark
in armor in lilac
music in the mirrors
sleeping but falling
nightly the fragrant hymns
prophecies like salt
torn ram tar mint star thorn
rain in the throat
to scatter the golden dirt
vague gods small truths
to leap over the hours
Submitted by Kel R. Karpinski
I really love Corral’s poetry in general – his collection Slow Lightning is really spectacular. He writes a lot of ekphrastic poems engaging with art work by other queer and Latinx artists. I love that Corral is using his poetry to make a queer lineage. This one is about a piece by one of my favourite artists – Felix Gonzalez-Torres who created this piece Untitled (Perfect Lovers): Two Commercial Clocks for his lover who died of HIV-AIDS. Much of his work deals with the impermanence of life and finding meaning in the quotidien. Check out what the piece looks like when it’s exhibited and read a letter Gonzalez-Torres wrote to his lover about it.
resolution # 1,003 :: june jordan
I will love who loves me
I will love as much as I am loved
I will hate who hates me
I will feel nothing for everyone oblivious to me
I will stay indifferent to indifference
I will live hostile to hostility
I will make myself a passionate and eager lover
in response to passionate and eager love
I will be nobody’s fool
Submitted by Wanett Clyde
As a person who is not particularly drawn to poetry I tend to like things that fall into the clever wordplay or declaration of war categories. For me this June Jordan poem, that I think of every New Year’s Eve, falls into the latter. While it’s not a true call to arms, it is a declaration of a kind. I re-read it whenever I need a kickstart, a reminder or a shield for battle.
The Bridge by Lisa Jarnot
That there are things that can never be the same about
my face, the houses, or the sand, that I was born under the
sign of the sheep, that like Abraham Lincoln I am serious
but also lacking in courage,
That from this yard I have been composing a great speech,
that I write about myself, that it’s good to be a poet, that I look
like the drawing of a house that was pencilled by a child,
that curiously, I miss him and my mind is not upon the Pleaides,
that I love the ocean and its foam against the sky,
That I am sneezing like a lion in this garden that he knows
the lilies of his Nile, distant image, breakfast, a flock of birds
and sparrows from the sky,
That I am not the husband of Cassiopeia, that I am not
the southern fish, that I am not the last poet of civilization,
that if I want to go out for a walk and then to find myself
beneath a bank of trees, weary, that this is the life that I had,
That curiously I miss the sound of the rain pounding
on the roof and also all of Oakland, that I miss the sounds of
sparrows dropping from the sky, that there are sparks behind
my eyes, on the radio, and the distant sound of sand blasters,
and breakfast, and every second of it, geometric, smoke
from the chimney of the trees where I was small,
That in January, I met him in a bar, we went
home together, there was a lemon tree in the back yard,
and a coffee house where we stood outside and kissed,
That I have never been there, curiously, and that it never was
the same, the whole of the island, or the paintings of the stars,
fatherly, tied to sparrows as they drop down from the sky,
O rattling frame where I am, I am where there are still
these assignments in the night, to remember the texture
of the leaves on the locust trees in August, under the
moonlight, rounded, through a window in the hills,
That if I stay beneath the pole star in this harmony of
crickets that will sing, the bird sound on the screen,
the wide eyes of the owl form of him still in the dark,
blue, green, with shards of the Pacific,
That I do not know the dreams from which I have come,
sent into the world without the blessing of a kiss, behind the
willow trees, beside the darkened pansies on the deck beside
the ships, rocking, I have written this, across the back of the
sky, wearing a small and yellow shirt, near the reptile house,
mammalian, no bigger than the herd,
That I wrote the history of the war waged between the
Peloponnesians and the south, that I like to run through
shopping malls, that I’ve also learned to draw, having been
driven here, like the rain is driven into things, into the
ground, beside the broken barns, by the railroad tracks,
beside the sea, I, Thucydides, having written this, having
grown up near the ocean.
Listen to an audio version of the poem.
Submitted by Nora Almeida
This is one of the poems that I return to most often because it’s a poem about transition and how we look back in order to move forward. I studied with Lisa Jarnot in college and so the poem reminds me of her (and particularly her voice and cadence because I can always hear the way she would read it) and also of my hometown because of its invocation of the ocean and the specificity of childhood. I like how personal and expansive it is–mixing the mythology of an individual childhood with ancient greek figures.
The Cremation of Sam McGee Robert Service (Read by Johnny Cash)
Submitted by Jen Hoyer
This is a classic for Canadian children (and adults), and for myself it brings back memories of camping trips up near Lake Laberge (Yukon Territory), visiting Robert Service’s cabin at Dawson City, and reading books of Service’s poetry that my grandmother passed down to me. I have always loved reading this poem, and the illustrations in this video, by Ted Harrison, are from my favorite print edition.
Learn more about this poem on Wikipedia.
Harlem by Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Submitted by Nanette Johnson
I recently learned the correct name of the poem Harlem, I always thought it was titled a Dream Deferred. I think many people (myself included) are working so hard and moving so fast that they don’t take time to focus on their dreams. The importance of dreams that can be linked to actionable goals is invaluable. Don’t let anything negative or what you are experiencing now keep you from your dreams.
I attended a West Indian Religious School, St. John’s Elementary School, that wanted to make sure we were prepared for the hard world around us. I believe the teachers were trying to prepare our minds that as Black Caribbean and African Americans we were going to have to work hard to obtain our goals. We couldn’t play all the time. This reminds me of an excerpt from the poem, The Ladder of St. Augustine by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
Her Kind by Anne Sexton
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.
I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.
Submitted by Rachel Jones
Anne Sexton’s life was creative, but also turbulent and destructive, as she had a severe form of bipolar disorder. Her therapist suggested that she channel her intensity and imagination into poetry. She became one of the most famous American poets of her time. In this poem, she writes of her identification with witches, symbols of rebellious power and independence.
Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.
Submitted by Andrea Espinoza
So, from my earliest days, poetry has always been in my consciousness. When I was seven years old and living with my grandparents in Trinidad, one of my care packages contained the book “Through the Looking Glass” by Sir Lewis Caroll. Now, to this day, I could not tell you much about the plot of the book, but I always remember this poem that was written in the book. I think it resonated with me so much because the year that I received this book, we had a really bad rainy season in my village and I used to read this poem whenever the rain and thunder got to be too much. I guess the torrential downpour outside provided an amazing background track for the poem. My favorite aspect of the poem is that Carroll used a lot of his own made-up language. The made-up words transport me to another place and time where we wielded vocabulary as currency and poetry recitation was the norm.
The Prestige by Hanif Abdurraqib
the poem begins not where the knife enters
but where the blade twists.
Some wounds cannot be hushed
no matter the way one writes of blood
& what reflection arrives in its pooling.
The poem begins with pain as a mirror
inside of which I adjust a tie the way my father taught me
before my first funeral & so the poem begins
with old grief again at my neck. On the radio,
a singer born in a place where children watch the sky
for bombs is trying to sell me on love
as something akin to war.
I have no lie to offer as treacherous as this one.
I was most like the bullet when I viewed the body as a door.
I’m past that now. No one will bury their kin
when desire becomes a fugitive
between us. There will be no folded flag
at the doorstep. A person only gets to be called a widow once,
and then they are simply lonely. The bluest period.
Gratitude, not for love itself, but for the way it can end
without a house on fire.
This is how I plan to leave next.
Unceremonious as birth in a country overrun
by the ungrateful living. The poem begins with a chain
of well-meaning liars walking one by one
off the earth’s edge. That’s who died
and made me king. Who died and made you.
Submitted by Joshua Peach
Representing our shared hometown of Columbus, OH, Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic. Abdurraqib’s ability to place words in new combinations to create intimate and expansive imagery draws me to his work. With an economy of language, he breathes life into complicated thoughts and feelings.
