#albert goldbarth

[firstfullmoon]

Albert Goldbarth, from “One Continuous Substance,” in The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Losing

[derangedrhythms]

The things we call the night: O / Mother of Terrors.

Albert Goldbarth, I Feel A Little Jumpy Around You: Paired Poems by Men & Women; from 'Hey Sweetie', ed. Naomi Shihab Nye & Paul B. Janeczko

[th0tcrates]

[subtextures]

By Albert Goldbarth, a teacher of mine long ago.

[razorsadness]

1. Appendix, Coccyx, Pineal Eye

Yes: that fingery fraction of a rabbit's commodius sack, for the slow incorporating of cellulose: is with us. The slinky bone-links of a tail have fused like flutes into a panpipes: and are with us. And the lizard's third, glazed eye is, like a whole yolk, folded deep in the dough of our brains: and is awake there when its outer brothers drowse. And there are some of us with the tent-flap vestige of vaginal lips around the standard penis; with three-teated breasts... Or the One and a Halfs: with parasite baby-"brother" or-"sister" bodies dangling partway out: Laloo the Hindu: arms, waist, buttocks, legs "and perfect nails on the feet" extending forever from his chest like a child burrowing in him, the head already whispering to his lungs; it could pee and get hard. And saying "freak" of them can't naysay what the gill and apehair stages of the womb mean: everybody's wagged the tag-end of a fish in the motherly waters. Do we know it, do we dream the dreams of penguin, ostrich, rhea, kiwi, cassowary, moa, rail, kakapo: all, birds for which flying's a pair of muscley nubbins itching the living flesh.

—Albert Goldbarth, from "Vestigial" (Poetry Magazine, August 1984)

[johnesimpson]

Standing on the Same Spot -- Always Standing There

John Tarrant, Thomas Mann, et al.: 'Standing on the Same Spot -- Always Standing There'

[Image: “Steady On,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)] From whiskey river: The beginning of being fine is noticing how things really are. 1. Life is uncertain, surprises are likely. 2. If you are alive, that’s good; lower the bar. 3. In a dark place, you still have what really counts. 4. If you are in a…

[soracities]

what are your suggestions for starter poetry for people who dont have strong reading/analysis backgrounds

I've answered this a few times so I'm going to compile and expand them all into one post here.

I think if you haven't read much poetry before or aren't sure of your own tastes yet, then poetry anthologies are a great place to start: many of them will have a unifying theme so you can hone in based on a subject that interests you, or pick your way through something more general. I haven't read all of the ones below, but I have read most of them; the rest I came across in my own readings and added to my list either because I like the concept or am familiar with the editor(s) / their work:

Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times (ed. Nick Astley) & Being Alive: The Sequel to Staying Alive (there's two more books in this series, but I'm recommending these two just because it's where I started)

The Rattlebag (ed. Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes)

The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (ed. Ilya Kaminsky & Susan Harris)

The Essential Haiku, Versions of Basho, Buson and Issa (ed. Robert Hass)

A Book of Luminous Things (ed. Czesław Miłosz )

Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns by Robert Hass (this may be a good place to start if you're also looking for commentary on the poems themselves)

Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World(ed. Pádraig Ó'Tuama)

African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song (ed. Kevin Young)

The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing (ed. Kevin Young)

Lifelines: Letters from Famous People about their Favourite Poems

The following lists are authors I love in one regard or another and is a small mix of different styles / time periods which I think are still fairly accessible regardless of what your reading background is! It's be no means exhaustice but hopefully it gives you even just a small glimpse of the range that's available so you can branch off and explore for yourself if any particular work speaks to you.

But in any case, for individual collections, I would try:

anything by Sara Teasdale

Devotions / Wild Geese / Felicity by Mary Oliver

Selected Poems and Prose by Christina Rossetti

Collected Poems by Langston Hughes

Where the Sidewalk Endsby Shel Silverstein

Morning Haiku by Sonia Sanchez

Revolutionary Letters, Diane di Prima

Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved by Gregory Orr

Rose: Poems by Li-Young Lee

A Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor / Barefoot Souls by Maram al-Masri

Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky

Tell Me: Poems / What is This Thing Called Love? by Kim Addonizio

The Trouble with Poetry by Billy Collins (Billy Collins is THE go-to for accessible / beginner poetry in my view so I think any of his collections would probably do)

Crush by Richard Siken

Rapture / The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy

The War Works Hard by Dunya Mikhail

Selected Poems by Walt Whitman

View with a Grain of Sand by Wislawa Szymborska

Collected Poems by Vasko Popa

Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas (this is a play, but Thomas is a poet and the language & structure is definitely poetic to me)

Bright Dead Things: Poems by Ada Limón

Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth by Warsan Shire,

Nostalgia, My Enemy: Selected Poems by Saadi Youssef

As for individual poems:

“Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver

[Dear The Vatican] erasure poem by Pádraig Ó'Tuama // "The Pedagogy of Conflict"

"Good Bones" by Maggie Smith

"The Author Writes the First Draft of His Weddings Vows (An erasure of Virginia Woolf's suicide letter to her husband, Leonard)" by Hanif Abdurraqib

"I Can Tell You a Story" by Chuck Carlise

"The Sciences Sing a Lullabye" by Albert Goldbarth

"One Last Poem for Richard" by Sandra Cisneros

"We Lived Happily During the War" by Ilya Kaminsky

“I’m Explaining a Few Things”by Pablo Neruda

"Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" //"Nothing Gold Can Stay"//"Out, Out--" by Robert Frost

"Tablets: I // II // III"by Dunya Mikhail

"What Were They Like?" by Denise Levertov

"Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden,

"The Patience of Ordinary Things" by Pat Schneider

“I, too” // "The Negro Speaks of Rivers” // "Harlem” // “Theme for English B” by Langston Hughes

“The Mower” // "The Trees" // "High Windows" by Philip Larkin

“The Leash” // “Love Poem with Apologies for My Appearance” // "Downhearted" by Ada Limón

“The Flea” by John Donne

"The Last Rose of Summer" by Thomas Moore

"Beauty" // "Please don't" // "How it Adds Up" by Tony Hoagland

“My Friend Yeshi” by Alice Walker

"De Humanis Corporis Fabrica"byJohn Burnside

“What Do Women Want?” // “For Desire” // "Stolen Moments" // "The Numbers" by Kim Addonizio

“Hummingbird” // "For Tess" by Raymond Carver

"The Two-Headed Calf" by Laura Gilpin

“Bleecker Street, Summer” by Derek Walcott

“Dirge Without Music” // "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed" by Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Digging” // “Mid-Term Break” // “The Rain Stick” // "Blackberry Picking" // "Twice Shy" by Seamus Heaney

“Dulce Et Decorum Est”by Wilfred Owen

“Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition”by Wislawa Szymborska

"Hour" //"Medusa" byCarol Ann Duffy

“The More Loving One” // “Musée des Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden

“Small Kindnesses” // "Feeding the Worms" by Danusha Laméris

"Down by the Salley Gardens” // “The Stolen Child” by W.B. Yeats

"The Thing Is" by Ellen Bass

"The Last Love Letter from an Entymologist" by Jared Singer

"[i like my body when it is with your]" by e.e. cummings

"Try to Praise the Mutilated World" by Adam Zagajewski

"The Cinnamon Peeler" by Michael Ondaatje

"Last Night I Dreamed I Made Myself" by Paige Lewis

"A Dream Within a Dream" // "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe (highly recommend reading the last one out loud or listening to it recited)

"Ars Poetica?" // "Encounter" // "A Song on the End of the World"by Czeslaw Milosz

"Wandering Around an Albequerque Airport Terminal” // "Two Countries” // "Kindness” by Naoimi Shihab Nye

"Slow Dance” by Matthew Dickman

"The Archipelago of Kisses" // "The Quiet World" by Jeffrey McDaniel

"Mimesis" by Fady Joudah

"The Great Fires" // "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" // "Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert

"The Mermaid" // "Virtuosi" by Lisel Mueller

"Macrophobia (Fear of Waiting)" by Jamaal May

"Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong" by Ocean Vuong

"Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou

I would also recommend spending some times with essays, interviews, or other non-fiction, creative or otherwise (especially by other poets) if you want to broaden and improve how you read poetry; they can help give you a wider idea of the landscape behind and beyond the actual poems themselves, or even just let you acquaint yourself with how particular writers see and describe things in the world around them. The following are some of my favourites:

Upstream: Essays by Mary Oliver

"Theory and Play of the Duende" by Federico García Lorca

"The White Bird" and "Some Notes on Song" by John Berger

In That Great River: A Notebook by Anna Kamienska

A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib

The Book of Delights by Ross Gay

"Of Strangeness That Wakes Us" and "Still Dancing: An Interview with Ilya Kaminsky" by Ilya Kaminsky

"The Sentence is a Lonely Place" by Garielle Lutz

Still Life with Oysters and Lemon by Mark Doty

Paris, When It's Naked by Etel Adnan

[llovelymoonn]

favourite poems of january

christian wiman hard night: "the ice storm"

timothy donnelly hymn to life

randall jarrell the complete poems: "the lost world"

dana levin the living teaching

stuart dybeck brass knuckles: "the knife-sharpener's daughter"

kofi awoonor the promise of hope: new and selected poems: "lament of the silent sisters"

bruce snider ode to a dolly parton drag queen

jon pineda birthmark: "translation"

brenda shaughnessy interior with sudden joy: "dear gonglya"

franny choi hangul abecedarian

atsuro riley hutch

clark moore strikes and gutters

jenny xie eye level: "rootless"

alberto ríos the smallest muscle in the human body: "rabbits and fire"

tim seibles mosaic

anthony hecht an offering for patricia

harry matthews cool gales shall fan the glades

robert glück the word in us: lesbian and gay poetry of the next wave: "burroughs"

albert goldbarth the poem of the little house at the corner of misapprehension and marvel

george seferis collected poems (george seferis): "spring a.d."

alberto ríos a small story about the sky

sharmila voorakkara for the tattooed man

robin blaser the holy forest: collected poems of robin blaser: "the truth is laughter 10"

robert pinsky gulf music: "antique"

henri cole blackbird and wolf: "twilight"

paul violi likewise: "in praise of idleness"

ron padgett collected poems: "what are you on?"

meena alexander birthplace with buried stones: "lychees"

sara borjas decolonial self-portrait

valerie martínez absence, luminescent: "the reliquaries"

kathryn simmonds the visitations: "in the woods"

kofi

[partiallithopseffect]

[ID: A screenshot of a poem:

Years later they let him go. New evidence

—somebody's shoe and a letter, and then

another man confessed. So along with the cheap gray suit

and job ads that they all receive, he

had a brief note of apology. I suppose some people

go wild or bitter. But this is what happened to him:

we're sitting up way past midnight in August,

the six of us, hoping for a breeze. The air

might move in a solid block, as if pushed

by a streetsweeper's broom, but you couldn't call it

a breeze. Hot isn't the word. The stars

only make the sky a sore throat. And one of us,

Sally maybe, says we must be dead because

it's hell for sure, and the rest of us laugh, but

he's been called far out of our little bent circle,

you can tell by his eyes, they're filled with the moon,

with the simple delight of seeing the moon touch all of us

all over without a bar in the way,

without the shadow of even one bar

to fall on the light like a nightstick.]

The More Modest the Definition of Heaven, the Oftener We’re There by Albert Goldbarth

[april-is]

April 1, 2024: vocabulary, Safia Elhillo

vocabulary Safia Elhillo

fact:

the arabic word هواء (hawa) means wind thearabicwordهوى (hawa) means love

  test: (multiple choice)   abdelhalim said you left me holding wind in my hands                           or   abdelhalim said you left me holding love in my hands

           abdelhalim was left                empty                                              or            abdelhalim was left                full

  fairouz said                   o wind, take me to my country                            or   fairouz said                   o love, take me to my country

           fairouz is looking for             vehicle                                              or            fairouz is looking for             fuel

  oum kalthoum said       where the wind stops her ships, we stop ours                            or   oum kalthoum said       where love stops her ships, we stop ours

                oum kalthoum is           stuck                                                    or                 oum kalthoum is           home

--

It's here, it's here; happy National Poetry Month! In case you forgot: I'll be sharing a poem every day in April.

Want it as an email? Sign up here and it'll be whisked to your inbox by a team of digital carrier pigeons.

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==

This is, uh, the 20th year of this project??? See many years of past selections by browsing the archives or exploring the poems sent on today's date in:

2023: Reasons to Live Through the Apocalypse, Nikita Gill 2022: New Year, Kate Baer 2021: Instructions on Not Giving Up, Ada Limón 2020: Motto, Bertolt Brecht 2019: Separation, W.S. Merwin 2018: Good Bones, Maggie Smith 2017: Better Days, A.F. Moritz 2016: Jenny Kiss’d Me, Leigh Hunt 2015: The Night House, Billy Collins 2014: Tim Riggins Speaks of Waterfalls, Nico Alvarado 2013: Nan Hardwicke Turns Into a Hare, Wendy Pratt 2012: A Short History of the Apple, Dorianne Laux 2011: New York Poem, Terrance Hayes 2010: On Wanting to Tell [ ] about a Girl Eating Fish Eyes, Mary Szybist 2009: A Little Tooth, Thomas Lux 2008: The Sciences Sing a Lullabye, Albert Goldbarth 2007: Elegy of Fortinbras, Zbigniew Herbert 2006: When Leather is a Whip, by Martin Espada 2005: Parents, William Meredith

Thank you for being here!

[karlkapri]

― ”A Standard Unit of Measurement”, Albert Goldbarth.

Hockey Poetry Post 26/?

(Photo credit: Jeffrey T. Barnes, Paul Rutherford, Alex Trautwig, Winslow Townson, Stuart Cahill, Alex Trautwig, Ben Jackson, Fred Kfoury III, link)

w a special thank u to @cinnamoncowboy for the assist 

[chavisory]

Someone posted this in the Emilys Facebook group I'm in.

A Poem for Emily Miller Williams

Small fact and fingers and farthest one from me, a hand's width and two generations away, in this still present I am fifty-three. You are not yet a full day.

When I am sixty-three, when you are ten, and you are neither closer nor as far, your arms will fill with what you know by then, the arithmetic and love we do and are.

When I by blood and luck am eighty-six and you are someplace else and thirty-three believing in sex and god and politics with children who look not at all like me,

sometime I know you will have read them this so they will know I love them and say so and love their mother. Child, whatever is is always or never was. Long ago,

a day I watched awhile beside your bed, I wrote this down, a thing that might be kept awhile, to tell you what I would have said when you were who knows what and I was dead which is I stood and loved you while you slept.

[commandercod]

[ID: A screenshot of a poem by Albert Goldbarth.

A Standard Unit of Measurement

Lightning. Then, six heartbeats later,

its thunder. We say “thunder and lightning”

as if they were separate phenomena, but

they’re one, of course, at two speeds.

It’s the way our myths about why Death

or Why Creation are really only stories

about a single state of existence

at two velocities. And in between the two:

six heartbeats. Lately, I find it everywhere.

The immediate glory (or pain) of love.

[six heartbeats]

Then our song about it. /end ID]

[subtextures]

It has been a bit of time since I read Goldbarth, even longer since I sat in his class trying hard to be a poet. I found this book at the Pflugerville library. It was published in 2018. I finished it today. It is a beautiful reflection on time, mortality, and life. His writing is funny…witty, and simultaneously profound, much like I saw him when I was 21. Then is now

[thesporkidentity]

A Standard Unit of Measurement

By Albert Goldbarth (1948- ), Published 2021

Lightning. Then, six heartbeats later,  its thunder. We say “thunder and lightning”  as if they were separate phenomena, but they’re one, of course, at two speeds.  It’s the way our myths about Why Death  or Why Creation are really only stories about a single state of existence  at two velocities. And in between the two:  six heartbeats. Lately, I find it everywhere. The immediate glory (or pain) of love.                           [six heartbeats]               Then our song about it.

[89rooms]

Physics says: go to sleep. Of course you’re tired. Every atom in you has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes nonstop from mitosis to now. Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance inside themselves without you. Go to sleep. Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch by inch America is giving itself to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch. You aren’t alone. All of the continents used to be one body. You aren’t alone. Go to sleep. Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow, Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle, Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town. And History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down.

Albert Goldbarth - 'The Sciences Sing a Lullabye'