Poetry

A small sampling of some of my favorite poems

Words About Not Having Words

• "if i have made, my lady, intricate" by e. e. cummings

• "I found the words to every thought" (Poem 581) by Emily Dickinson

• "V" from "East Coker" by T. S. Eliot

• "A Letter" by Anthony Hecht

• "A Letter" by Ted Kooser

• "Drinking Wine" by Tao Qian

• "When in the chronicle of wasted time" (Sonnet 106) by William Shakespeare

• "There can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of obscure allusions that lurks in these things" from If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italio Calvino, trans. William Weaver

• "between the lips and the voice something goes dying/Something with the wings of a bird, something of anguish and oblivion./The way nets cannot hold water" from "I Have Gone Marking" by Pablo Neruda, trans. W. S. Merwin

• "I could say: those mountains have a meaning/but further than that I could not say." from "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" by Adrienne Rich

Complete Poems

By author

e.e. cummings:

• "somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond"

• "since feeling is first"

• "if i have made, my lady, intricate"

Ada Limón:

• "Open Water"

• "The End of Poetry"

Pablo Neruda: 

• "We Have Lost Even"

• "So That You Will Hear Me" 

• "Leaning Into the Afternoons"

Frank O'Hara:

• "Morning" 

• "Instant coffee with slightly sour cream"

Edna St. Vincent Millay: 

• "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why"

• "Bluebeard"

Kay Ryan:

• "A Certain Kind of Eden"

• "Paired Things"

Others

• "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"  by T. S. Eliot

• "A Bronze God, or a Letter on Demand" by Clifton Gachagua

• "A Letter" by Anthony Hecht

• "Sunday at the Mall" by Tony Hoagland

• "A Letter" by Ted Kooser

• "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell

• "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" by Adrienne Rich

• "You Who Never Arrived" by Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell

• "Let me not to the marriage of true minds" (Sonnet 116) by William Shakespeare