"Author's Prayer" by Ilya Kaminsky

Kaminsky immigrated to the United States in 1993; he was born in 1977 in Odessa, former USSR. He is a professor at San Diego State University.

Key terms: imagery, repetition, parallel structure, emjambment

Author's Prayer

If I speak for the dead, I must leave
this animal of my body,

I must write the same poem over and over,
for an empty page is the white flag of their surrender.

If I speak for them, I must walk on the edge
of myself, I must live as a blind man

who runs through rooms without
touching the furniture.

Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking “What year is it?”
I can dance in my sleep and laugh

in front of the mirror.
Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,

I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak

of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say

is a kind of petition, and the darkest
days must I praise.

This poem is a rather short, but fascinating, meditation on the power of language. Indeed, it is specifically about writing- the title mentions authoring specifically, but the title also mentions prayer, which is another powerful kind of text, whether written down or simply spoken (or thought). The poem also mentions speech, prayer, praise, laughter, petition, and music; these are all powerful kinds of texts. The poem moves quickly between these ideas and they even seem to be linked with running, touching, sleeping, and living. The belief that this expresses is such that all life is a text: spoken, unspoken, and written, and that it is all powerful. It is all influential and memorable and worthy.

http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/239986

"In the Past" by Trumbull Stickney

Trumbull Stickney grew up with affluent parents in England before he went to school at Harvard. He was very well educated and especially dedicated himself to the study of the Greek classics. Eventually, Stickney returned to teach at Harvard. His poems are "highly emotional and technically daring," according to POL.

Key terms: alliteration, imagery, rhyme

In the Past

There lies a somnolent lake
Under a noiseless sky,
Where never the mornings break
Nor the evenings die.

Mad flakes of colour
Whirl on its even face
Iridescent and streaked with pallour;
And, warding the silent place,

The rocks rise sheer and gray
From the sedgeless brink to the sky
Dull-lit with the light of pale half-day
Thro’ a void space and dry.

And the hours lag dead in the air
With a sense of coming eternity
To the heart of the lonely boatman there:
That boatman am I,

I, in my lonely boat,
A waif on the somnolent lake,
Watching the colours creep and float
With the sinuous track of a snake.

Now I lean o’er the side
And lazy shades in the water see,
Lapped in the sweep of a sluggish tide
Crawled in from the living sea;

And next I fix mine eyes,
So long that the heart declines,
On the changeless face of the open skies
Where no star shines;

And now to the rocks I turn,
To the rocks, around
That lie like walls of a circling sun
Wherein lie bound

The waters that feel my powerless strength
And meet my homeless oar
Labouring over their ashen length
Never to find a shore.

But the gleam still skims
At times on the somnolent lake,
And a light there is that swims
With the whirl of a snake;

And tho’ dead be the hours i’ the air,
And dayless the sky,
The heart is alive of the boatman there:
That boatman am I.

This is another study in literary device: the poem is formatted traditionally, in quatrains with an abab rhyme scheme. There are notes of alliteration and assonance throughout, and of course the poem relies on heavy imagery. The narrator reflects on his positioning as a solitary boatman, as the "hours lay dead in the air / With a sense of coming eternity." He is surrounded by tranquility and wonder: "Now I lean o'er the side / And lazy shades in the water see, /  Lapped in the sweep of the sluggish tide / Crawled in from the living sea." This poem is a really neat parallel to Into the Wild, which we are finishing up in English 10. The wonder of nature and tranquility/stillness of the water, skies, forest, etc. put against the wanderlust and wondering of the narrator in this poem evoke images similar to those in the book. Does the narrator here thrive on these conditions or is he longing for intimacy? How does the title "In the Past" tie in?

http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/239640

"Inside Out" by Diane Wakowski

Diane Wakowski is a very prolific contemporary poet. Her poetry is "frankly personal and wildly humorous, and expresses a mindset in stark opposition to Americans’ materialism and moralistic rigidity" (POL). She is professor emeritus at Michigan State University.

Inside Out 

I walk the purple carpet into your eye
carrying the silver butter server
but a truck rumbles by,
                      leaving its black tire prints on my foot
and old images          the sound of banging screen doors on hot 
             afternoons and a fly buzzing over the Kool-Aid spilled on 
             the sink
flicker, as reflections on the metal surface.

Come in, you said,
inside your paintings, inside the blood factory, inside the 
old songs that line your hands, inside
eyes that change like a snowflake every second,
inside spinach leaves holding that one piece of gravel,
inside the whiskers of a cat,
inside your old hat, and most of all inside your mouth where you 
grind the pigments with your teeth, painting
with a broken bottle on the floor, and painting
with an ostrich feather on the moon that rolls out of my mouth.

You cannot let me walk inside you too long inside 
the veins where my small feet touch
bottom.
You must reach inside and pull me
like a silver bullet
from your arm.

This poem, in the absurd beat style that we've seen before, seems to describe the narrator's struggles with intimacy with a particular person. The strange language and form influences the reader's uncomfortable perspective, similar to the perspective of the narrator: "with a broken bottle on the floor, and painting / with an ostrich feather on the moon that rolls out of my mouth." This is certainly not a romantic poem, and not a particularly descriptive poem, despite the unique word choice and imagery. It's a poem of expression and confusion; a jarring narrative of strange and probably disappointing interaction. 

http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/176000

"Flounder" by Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey is a contemporary poet, born in 1966 to interracial parents. Her poems focus on the realism of working-class lives and jobs in the South, and she often combines personal experiences with historical issues. 

Flounder 

Here, she said, put this on your head.
She handed me a hat.
You ’bout as white as your dad,
and you gone stay like that.

Aunt Sugar rolled her nylons down
around each bony ankle,
and I rolled down my white knee socks
letting my thin legs dangle,

circling them just above water
and silver backs of minnows
flitting here then there between
the sun spots and the shadows.

This is how you hold the pole
to cast the line out straight.
Now put that worm on your hook,
throw it out and wait.

She sat spitting tobacco juice
into a coffee cup.
Hunkered down when she felt the bite,
jerked the pole straight up

reeling and tugging hard at the fish
that wriggled and tried to fight back.
A flounder, she said, and you can tell
’cause one of its sides is black.

The other side is white, she said.
It landed with a thump.
I stood there watching that fish flip-flop,

switch sides with every jump.

This poem follows a classic American style of reflection and storytelling. The narrator is reflecting on an experience with her aunt, where race is immediately called to the foreground of the poem's subject matter: "You 'bout as white as your dad, / and you gone stay like that." On one level, the speaker is simply making a pun as she is protecting the child from the sun (making her wear a hat so she doesn't burn and "change colors"), but on a deeper level, this type of speech calls to mind an historical narrative of what comes with being black/white in America. Aunt Sugar catches a flounder as they fish, and the narrator ends up thinking about the flounder's double identity: one side of the fish is black, and one is white. It seems fair to involve the poet's life in this poem, because she is mixed-race. Either way, the beginning of the poem alludes to the fact that the girl herself is mixed-race, and thus she identifies with the flounder. Perhaps she wishes she could so easily "switch" her two identities; perhaps she feels like they are not two separate parts of her and feels badly that the flounder can never be both.

http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/237548