Request for poems

[stephantom.livejournal.com]

Hi, folks. I'd like to ask for some help, if I could. I'm a student teacher and I'm starting a unit on Monday... basically on the why behind this whole reading and writing thing. The need for communication, the power of written word to express one's perspective, experiences, identity, as well as to learn about other people's perspectives, experiences, etc... This is 7th grade, by the way. And the point is, I'm looking for poems that could be used to talk/think about how difficult it can be for people to really understand each other. People trying to understand each other, struggling, maybe failing...

I offer you one poem I've got so far:


A Single Slice Reveals Them
by Naomi Shihab Nye

An apple on the table

hides its seeds

so neatly

under seamless skin.


But we talk and talk and talk

to let somebody

in.

Comments

[icarusblood.livejournal.com]

hi, not sure if this would help but I think Mark Strand's Eating Poetry might be useful.

Eating Poetry
by Mark Strand

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

[theratmanknows.livejournal.com]

7th grade is a hard target demographic, haha, but here's what came to mind:


Why I Am Not a Painter
by Frank O'Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.



it might also be worth looking at some political poets - hughes (maybe "children's rhymes"?) or jean valentine.

although the more i think about it, the more i think that my entire english degree is committed to answering this question, and any poem of any value should be addressing this question to a certain degree, if not as explicitly self-referentially as the o'hara, then at least implicitly in its choice to be a poem (and not a painting or essay or interpretive dance or conversation the poet kept to himself).

[bloodrebel333.livejournal.com]

Ha, lovely poem. :D

[catalania.livejournal.com]

'Dear Reader ' - Billy Collins

Baudelaire considers you his brother,
and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs
as if to make sure you have not closed the book,
and now I am summoning you up again,
attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing
in the doorway of these words.

Pope welcomes you into the glow of his study,
takes down a leather-bound Ovid to show you.
Tennyson lifts the latch to a moated garden,
and with Yeats you lean against a broken pear tree,
the day hooded by low clouds.

But now you are here with me,
composed in the open field of this page,
no room or manicured garden to enclose us,
no Zeitgeist marching in the background,
no heavy ethos thrown over us like a cloak.

Instead, our meeting is so brief and accidental,
unnoticed by the monocled eye of History,
you could be the man I held the door for
this morning at the bank or post office
or the one who wrapped my speckled fish.
You could be someone I passed on the street
or the face behind the wheel of an oncoming car.

The sunlight flashes off your windshield,
and when I look up into the small, posted mirror,
I watch you diminish—my echo, my twin—
and vanish around a curve in this whip
of a road we can't help traveling together.




'The Quiet World' - Jeffrey McDaniel

In an effort to get people to look
into each other's eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn't respond,
I know she's used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.


These two sprung to mind - perhaps not exactly what you were thinking of but I hope they help!

[wicked-sassy.livejournal.com]

I love "The Quiet World." Such a great poem.

[wicked-sassy.livejournal.com]

Maybe this would be suitable? Good luck! Also, love the Naomi Shihab Nye poem you posted. :)

I want to be a tourist
© Kapka Kassabova
from Geography for the Lost

I imagine my life as a city
somewhere in the third world, or the second.
And I want to be a tourist
in the city of my life.

I want to stroll in shorts and baseball hat,
with laminated maps and dangling cameras.
I want to find things for the first time.
Look, they were put there just for me!

I want a room with musty curtains.
I want a view of rubbish dumps and urchins.
I want food poisoning, the dust of traffic
in the mouth, the thrill of othersÂ’ misery.

Let me be a tourist in the city of my life.
Give me overpriced coffee in the square,
let me visit briefly the mausoleum of the past
and photograph its mummy,

give me the open sewers, the stunted dreams,
the jubilation of ruins, the lepers, the dogs,
give me signs in a funny language that I never
have to learn. Then take my money and let me go.