Jazz Fan Looks Back by Jayne Cortez

Cortez's poem is in the strained syncopated meter of jazz, a kind of stride talk. It reviews the history of Jazz by naming the names of the great Jazz Legends who gave Jazz a name. It is a pure celebration, a paen to Jazz music, an epidictic. The speaker even styles herself after the women in Jazz whom she admired. The past tense is key, for the speaker is "looking back" on an era that no longer sizzles, larger than life, but which persists in memory and tribute. So for all its celebratory tone, Cortez's poem is also elegiac, like a good ol' fashioned New Orleans funeral.

For the young who want to by Marge Piercy

This refreshing poem is nearly thirty years old. I had never read Marge Piercy before. In "For the young who want to," the speaker's conclusion is that "Work is its own cure." After you've done something worthwhile, others praise you; but before the result occurs, all you get is criticism. The speaker seems to be pointing out, among other things, a tendency of human nature. Knowing this should forearm creative people against placing too much stock in what people say. Self-reliance is much more important than paying any mind to the "labels" other like to stick on you, whether they be talented, bum, delusional, sadist, etc.

Harlem by Langston Hughes

Here is a spiky poem, built like a virus, that infected the minds of class-conscious integrationists and militants, alike. It dared to speak in the voice of a "native" and portray Negro life as it was. Hughes enumerates several of the options open to Black Folk in a country that did not make good on its promise of emancipation, but chose rather to ignore the law, or strangle the hope of freedom in a tangle of legalisms. The dream of equal representation, enfranchisement, equal opportunity, and civil rights had been "deferred" after 1877 (the end of the Reconstruction era) by the "separate but equal" provisions of the Jim Crow laws in the South. The question that Hughes asks is how are Black people supposed to live, educate themselves, earn a living, and raise their children in a white racist society? What social "types" are engendered by veiled oppression and freedom in name only? Are Black people expected to just wither and die, or become ill, or turn to crime? Or become buffoons? Or use their strength to merely bear the weight of oppression? Or should Black people follow the revolutionary principles outlined by the framers of the Constitution?

Blackberry Eating by Galway Kinnell

A good poem about eating, and how eating is connected to the art of wordcraft, or speaking. The alliterations--liquids, sibilants, plosives, and bilabials--seem to evoke the lusciousness of the experience of eating blackberries: /l/, /s/, /p/, /b/, and /m/.

The Changing Light by L. Ferlinghetti

The poetic description of the changing light of San Francisco is soft, mellow, airy. One of the poet's late works, it evokes the calm after the storm. Vernacular ("...is none of..") and yet precise ("scrim"), the poem eventually settles on Greece--the cradle of modern western civilization--as having light which is similar to San Francisco's: an island light that creates sharp dark shadows. The poet's gaze cast eastward, he overlooks the east coast of the US and Paris, France to settle on Greece. Oh, the soup we could make with those allusions! But instead, let's consider the gentle motion of the fog, like clockwork, rolling in at night and burned off by late morning. By mid-afternoon, the wind picks up; then, it is soon evening, and the "city lights" begin to twinkle. And the poet is aware of having made history, yet the whole city drifts, as in a dream, "anchorless over the ocean," in search of direction.

Howl by Allen Ginsberg

I've read that it is impossible to underestimate the influence that Ginsberg's Howl has exerted on American poetry over the last 50 years since it was first written. I believe it was Galway Kinnell who said that Howl changed poetry's concern with meter to a preoccupation with breath. Howl marked a watershed moment in American verse. The breath required to read each line is substantial; in the recording on poets.org the effort that Ginsberg makes is audibly discernible, marked by longish pauses, slight coughs, and occasional deep breaths. Of course, Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" provided Ginsberg with a historical model.

A Letter in October by Ted Kooser

Kooser's poem plays lovingly with light, darkness, reflections, time, nature, and art. Four stanzas of 6 lines each, 36 lines. Unrhymed, and rhythmically mostly enjambed tetrameters. We are in October, and the speaker is up at dawn, usually, reflecting on the morning. His image too reflects in the window pane since "dawn comes later and later now." His field of vision dwindles rapidly--he once enjoyed early morning nature scenes, but now can see no more than his own reflection in the window pane beyond which is the darkness of night. Light and dark are not absolutes, but rather form a continuum to which the speaker is witness, and a participant. His face appears "pale and odd, / startled by time." And now that it is fall (the autumn of life), the speaker is forced to look inwards (reflect) instead of look out at nature. The poem uses simple language to describe natural scenes that seem imbued with the sparkle and awe of magical realism; and maps the contours of the speaker's life within the framework of the four ages (seasons) of man. We sense the genuineness of the speaker's discovery, its freshness, while at the same time recognize the signs of his dawning awareness of his own mortality.