High school. Everything started there— the copying of poems on the cover of binders, the prefacing each day’s journal entry with a verse written by a ghost, the slow seduction of language and the careful attention the poet brings to words.
There was a way of being there and not being there, entirely. Poetry was like playing hookey mentally, opting out of the classroom scenes.
Metaphorical hookey aside, the first time I skipped school, it was raining. And the rain resembled the peasant dress my great-grandmother wore in the portrait which hung on the dark wooden walls of our hallway, except that the peasant dress was intended to symbolize the rain I imagined would arrive when, suddenly and dramatically, I left school after trigonometry, knowing that my boyfriend would likely look for me – knowing he would look and worry, given that we had argued in the cafeteria earlier. But the privilege of seeing him look and worry – the very reason for which I left – was made impossible by my leaving.
As for the rain, it arrived an hour later, by which point I had already been conquered by things I was sitting on, namely, the swing shaped like a metal dragon which resided in the park a mile down the road from the school; I had already been swinging and wondering if he was still looking for me, wondering also if he had realized that there had been an argument which occurred earlier in the cafeteria, an argument which represented the struggle between my hopes for community and my commitment to him, as an individual, with extensive emotional needs, and the sort of vibratory lexicon required to communicate these needs to me, and make my head spin and spin and spin with him. Or, rather, make my head spin a bit with the words I had come to associate with the idea of him — nervy, metamorphic, sensitive, sandy, necrophobic, misunderstanding.
Perhaps nothing came of it. Perhaps poetry is the nothing that comes of things we hold close?
In honor of a new year, and poetry, here is a handful, a small dusting of poems which I first copied then, onto various surfaces — including the doors of my closet, my head, my hands. One shares such things because someone else shared them first. Something abides in these poems—-something outlasts its self. May they bring you closer to whatever you’re imagining or writing.
*Disclaimer: These poems were collected prior to the internet and the world wide web, back in the day when teens went to libraries and sat with books copying poems from them in Alabama towns where the bookstores only held Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The linked translations are not necessarily my favorite, or the best. But they were easier to find. And I erred towards ease ….
“For the Anniversary of My Death” by W. S. Merwin
“This world is not conclusion” by Emily Dickinson
“A Confession” by Czeslaw Milsoz
“December 11th” by Anne Sexton
“Keeping Things Whole” by Mark Strand
“Elegy” to Marina Tsvetaeva by Rainer Maria Rilke
“The Abyss” by Charles Baudelaire
“Mock Orange” by Louise Gluck
“Untitled” by Cesar Pavese
“Love Songs” by A. R. Ammons
“Marriage” by Gregory Corso
“O Lull Me, Lull Me” by Theodore Roethke
“No Childhood” by Adam Zagajewski
“Recreation” by Audre Lorde
“Third and Last” by Anna Akhmatova
“A Litany for Survival” by Audre Lorde
“Elegy, owed” by Bob Hicok
“Soonest Mended” by John Ashbery
“Vita Nova” by Louise Gluck
“I Knew a Woman” by Theodore Roethke
“Encounter” by Czeslaw Milosz
“Two Poems for T.” by Cesar Pavese
“The First Elegy” & “The Eighth Elegy” from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies
“Fame is the one that does not stay—” by Emily Dickinson
“Plaster Cast Torso of Apollo” by Rainer Maria Rilke
“Be Drunk” by Charles Baudelaire
“Knee Song” by Anne Sexton
“My Faithful Mother Tongue” by Czeslaw Milosz
“Meditations in an Emergency” by Frank O’Hara
“Posthumous Remorse” by Charles Baudelaire
“My Heart” by Frank O’Hara
“Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium” by James Wright
“Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire” by Stéphane Mallarmé
“With Mercy for the Greedy” by Anne Sexton
“Autre Eventail” by Stéphane Mallarmé
“You Who Wronged” by Czeslaw Milosz
“Sensibility! O La!” by Theodore Roethke
“Purists with Object” by John Ashbery
“Late Echo” by John Ashbery
“Etiology” by Linda Gregg
“Last blues, to be read someday” by Cesar Pavese
“Night Song” by Lisel Mueller
“Tortures” by Wislawa Szymborska
“The Aeolian Harp” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“The Room of My Life” by Anne Sexton
“Constancy to an Ideal Object” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“And then we cowards…” by Cesar Pavese
“People at Night” by Rainer Maria Rilke
Copious amounts of Leonard Cohen, including “Owning Everything” & “The Only Poem” & “These Heroics” & “I am dying…” etc.
Poets in Romanian (Stanescu, Ana Blandiana, Enescu, so many others)—this would be a longer list
