Welcome!

I am proud to unveil the ENGL-233 class blog. Very few of you proposed names, so it came down to either "Fantastic-Super-Happy-Fun Blog" or "Spiders" (I found the latter to be a bit ominous, but maybe that's just my arachnophobia). Check back Thursday night for the prompt on Akhmatova.

Here is a list of the poems (with links if possible) you chose as memorable. The only two poets still living are Maya Angelou and Melissa Underwood, so I look forward to introducing you to more contemporary writers.

"Richard Cory" by Edwin Robinson
"A Poison Tree" by William Blake
"Only a Curl" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"The Will to Win" by Melissa Underwood
"Continuities" by Walt Whitman
"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou
"The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot
"Sniper's Serenity" by Robert Baird
"Dream Deffered" by Langston Hughes
"Phenomenal Woman" by Maya Angelou
"If you were coming in the fall" by Emily Dickinson
"Footprints in the Sand" by Mary Stevenson
"Bluebird" by Charles Bukowski
"I had a guinea golden" by Emily Dickinson
"The Daffodils" by William Wordsworth
"Let America Be America Again" by Langston Hughes
"Journey of the Magi" by T.S. Eliot
"The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allen Poe
"Sick" by Shel Silverstein
"Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas
"Whatif" by Shel Silverstein

A poem that continues to matter to me, with increasing resonance, is "I Go Back to May 1937" by Sharon Olds. Sharon was my instructor in my N.Y.U. Graduate Program, and I was her assistant for a year. I admire how the poem is simultaneously specific and expansive. The speaker uses a particular photograph as a spring-board for reflection; in just 30 lines, we learn of a troubled parent-child relationship and a destructive marriage, and most interestingly, past and present overlap. The poem is also a kind of "Ars Poetica," or statement of poetry's intentions: that it bears witness to the difficult, that art sublimates pain ("I say/Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.").

I Go Back to May 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

Here's a clip of Sharon Olds reading a lighthearted poem on Def Poetry Jam: