May 15, Janaree Nore rated it really liked it Recommends it for: people who loved college. I still have my college copy given to me by my great friend, Pam Lah.
We would read these poems aloud sitting on new spring grass outside our dorm. Feb 21, Lisa added it. Jul 10, Ginny rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorites. When I was in the hospital, this was all I wanted with me. Enough said. Jan 09, Suzanne rated it really liked it Recommends it for: poetry lovers. Shelves: poetry , on-my-bookcase , school-collections. Done with the modern anthology, on to contemporary.
Enjoyed most of both. A good selection of poetry from the most influential poets. Oct 24, Glenn rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: poets. This a compendium of poems from some of the greatest authours from the 20th century. Great book! Comes in a set of two books one is modern the other is contemporary.
Mar 22, S. Jay rated it liked it. Good stuff. May 18, Bailey rated it really liked it Shelves: poetry , read-for-school. I particularly enjoyed poems by Rich, Cummings, and Berryman.
Jun 01, Allison added it. May 27, Mark marked it as to-read. This is a really good collection of works. I have been reading the usual Great Poets and was looking for something more contemporary. This works! Right now I'm reading the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks. Feb 10, Victoria rated it it was amazing. All of the great classics in one stop. Danielle rated it really liked it Jan 17, Brad rated it it was amazing Jan 18, Kathy Davidson rated it it was amazing Jul 22, Jennifer Spry rated it it was amazing Aug 23, Internet Archive's 25th Anniversary Logo.
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Modern Poems: An Introduction to Poetry , second edition The Norton Anthology of Poetry , fourth edition Hoover, Paul, ed. National Poetry Month. Materials for Teachers Teach This Poem. Poems for Kids. Poetry for Teens. Lesson Plans.
Indeed, the narrative of identity--of immigrant experience--is perhaps the literary genre par excellence in the contemporary American academy. I conclude by considering the poetics of identity--the way in which poetic language "represents" the subject--and by considering briefly, by way of contrast, a poet for whom identity is constituted within language. Certainly, Ramazani does not regard identity as immutable. Yet if one looks for a recent poem in the Norton that treats the relation between language and identity as a problem , the pickings are slim.
Poem after poem uses its particular diction, pared-down or lush, formal or colloquial, to narrate a slice of life. On one poetic occasion, however, the arbitrariness of the signifier does appear as a social fact--as does the institution where the anthology will be used. Walker slapped the back of my head and made me stand in the corner for not knowing the difference between persimmon and precision.
How to choose. This is precision. Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted. Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one will be fragrant.
How to eat: put the knife away, lay down newspaper. Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat. Chew the skin, suck it, and swallow. Now, eat the meat of the fruit, so sweet, all of it, to the heart. The topic of "difference," for Lee's poem, begins with language: with two metrically identical English words one Latinate, the other a corruption of an Algonquin name --and with a scene of discipline by which the difference between the two words is enforced.
Walker, representing the educational institution, seeks to correct the boy's imprecise use of language, or to enforce the status--slow, backward--to which such imprecision dooms him.
The second stanza, as it unfolds in a kind of manual for the persimmon, continues to provide double evidence of mastery: the speaker's assumed familiarity with the "exotic" fruit modulates into a display of familiarity with the musical resources of English. To "choose" persimmons, in this sense, is to select them as fit subject for lyric meditation--as the full-ripened signs of a particular ethnic identity.
Donna undresses, her stomach is white. In the yard, dewy and shivering with crickets, we lie naked, face-up, face-down. I teach her Chinese. Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I've forgotten. Naked: I've forgotten. Ni, wo : you and me. I part her legs, remember to tell her she is beautiful as the moon. Other words that got me into trouble were fight and fright , wren and yarn. Fight was what I did when I was frightened, fright was what I felt when I was fighting.
Wrens are small, plain birds, yarn is what one knits with. Wrens are soft as yarn. My mother made birds out of yarn. I loved to watch her tie the stuff; a bird, a rabbit, a wee man. This dynamic--the linguistic failure of the immigrant speaker replaced by a mastery on other levels--characterizes the poem's movement. Moving from scenic memory to more generalized recollections, the poet as language learner attempts to separate language from experience: pairs of near-homonyms are further confounded as they prove to stand for associated experiences.
Yet again, the slippage of the signifier is halted by the introduction of primal, childhood realities: mother's handiwork is an art of confident connectivity: once given form, her yarn will not unravel. The poem then returns to the schoolroom--and when teacher imagines, as teachers will, that her classificatory powers over the signifier extend to the referent itself, the poet gains a certain revenge: Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class and cut it up so everyone could taste a Chinese apple.
Knowing it wasn't ripe or sweet, I didn't eat but watched the other faces. Some things never leave a person: scent of the hair of one you love, the texture of persimmons, in your palm, the ripe weight. The precision of the father's painting and the precision of his son's poem are drawn together: "this" is "Persimmons.
The adult speaking-self, throughout the poem, will clarify distinctions--will, quite exactly, "choose" precision, writing a masterful lyric organized around a central image. And so the slippery signifiers of childhood by poem's end are nowhere to be found. The deictic This of presence is mobilized against loss, even as the question of loss is shifted from the linguistic register to the anticipated loss of a beloved parent who has already lost his sight. In the headnote to his selection of Lee's poetry, Ramazani comments: "Imperfectly grounded in English as a child, the adult speaker, likewise unable to remember some Chinese words, is completely at home in neither language" Yet what Lee writes stabilizes the language of poetry in a lyric conclusion that takes shelter in tangible experience.
What makes the Norton 's emphasis on such poetry seem a partial reading of the contemporary is its own treatment of historical modernism. After all, the writing of non-native speakers has come to be seen as increasingly fundamental to our definition of poetic modernism: Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Louis Zukofsky all of whom in childhood used at least in part a language other than English --modernist experimentation can be said to stem from the explosion of unified national poetic traditions.
Indeed, all these aforementioned poets are included in the first volume of the new Norton. But the story this anthology tells us about our own moment is of the replacement of modernist mongrelism with a standardized workshop dialect--a dialect spoken by the current generation of immigrants, a dialect of which their mastery can signify successful poetic assimilation even as they thematize the ironies and complexities of double consciousness. The larger irony here is that the contemporary experimental scene--if it can even be thought of as a single scene--is anything but an old boys club.
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