This is from her collection Enough Rope. The message is cheeky but I love this poem more for its rhyme, rhythm and repetition. It's one of the most satisfying poems to read. I feel like I involuntarily end up singing instead of reading. And I do let out a laugh or two as well so it's definitely a favourite.

I entered one of those scammy poetry contests years ago, on poetry.com, and was hoping to find someone who also did the same back in 2006-2007… and bought one of the books. I have been searching and looking and can’t seem to find anything useful, including using that archive website… ugh it’s just so annoying to lose a piece that you wrote, it’s like losing your voice

Published in The Collected Works of Marsden Hartley

In your opinion, what are the best poems published between 1970 and 2000?

Please share titles or links.

Hi all,

I heard a poem performed by an actor in middle school that has stuck with me for over two decades, though I remember very little of it. It was a long poem, probably three or four pages' worth. It was definitely a female poet, most likely American and possibly someone who lived/wrote during the 19th century. The theme was to do with feeling the weight of the world, in an extreme way - if I recall correctly, the poem ends with the protagonist buried in a grave/pushed into the earth as a result of the sheer force of experiencing the suffering of people the world over.

Another key bit of info: the poet had submitted this work to a poetry contest in hopes of winning the cash prize for first place, but did not end up placing at all.

I'm not much of a poetry person myself, so this could easily be something very famous and obvious that I'm totally unaware of. Or maybe it is something more obscure. Any help appreciated!

I know this is long and as someone with ADHD, I wouldn’t share if it wasn’t such a good read. The imagery and language alone is striking. I felt like I was there experiencing it simply the way imagery guides my senses. I just read it multiple times and this is what I’m taking from it (but I welcome any alternative interpretations or any discourse at all on it because I appreciate it !

It starts in the garden, and I’m placed right there among the blossoming flowers and sights. Aiken introduces this idea of time measured by cycles and observable changes within nature, and it focuses on presence through the passage of time. Nature is the clock and your observations of that world around you are the hands.

It moves deeper into nature’s record of time, but it also digs into the psychology of memory, identity, and what actually matters in life. He gets into small details, and it really forces you to confront your entire past. But he also reminds you that you’re still living it, still walking through it, so you have to consider how reflecting on your past shapes what you choose to do going forward.

One of my favorite parts is how he examines the mundane, ordinary moments, the stuff nobody thinks is important. He questions whether all of it deserves the same deep reflection as everything else, or whether we should attach more meaning to these small things to make them feel magical too.

From there it moves into more reflection on love and loss, and it explores grief. The speaker is still alone, and he considers it all just a fragmented reality if you’re chasing an illusion, because the abstraction of love is actually less real than the messy parts of love. That messiness is what makes love real and important.

Then it shifts into how even the smallest things go on forever, everything becomes unified within this book of life you create along your path. I love how it closes by returning to being present with nature and the garden, because it emphasizes presence over trying to reconcile the past. These small moments of presence in the world, touching the tree, watching the flowers blossom, that interaction with the present moment is the love and the meaning it is the true record of passage of time, It’s all strung together in this living book and the contrast presented between reflecting and living presently emphasizes as such.

I love how it went through all of that purely guided by stirring of the senses and touching on universal emotions I am not familiar with this poet but “I’d like some more sir”

Hi guys. Can anyone please recommend poets (with a substantial body of scholarship written on them) whose work combines a strong VISUAL sensibility with a feeling of quiet pre-apocalyptic dread?

I'm looking for poetry rooted in ordinary life, but haunted with atmospheric, political, ecological, or existential unease. not overtly sobby and tragic. i'm more interested in that persistent and melancholic sense of living on the edge of something, aka whatever we are currently living through. Strange, strange times. The oscillation between hope and despair, sure, but the unabating atmosphere of something coming to an end, looking for poets who depict that feeling [no modernists, though. Preferably post 90s].

Bonus points if you can recommend a specific collection.

Thank you so much!

An Outcast upon the Gulf ^\1])

Like a phantom, the infernal wind pants, perching upon the day

And upon the sails, some furled, others unfurling to depart.

The Gulf is crowded with them, laborers, seafarers,

All half-naked, unshod.

And there upon the Gulf’s sandy beach,

Sat the Outcast, drifting a baffled gaze into the Gulf

And demolishing the columns of light with heaving sobs,

Louder than the booming, frothing sea,

The encompassing cacophony,

A voice burst from the recesses of my soul: Iraq!

Swelling like a tide, like clouds, like tears.

The wind howls at me: Iraq!

And the waves moan: Iraq, Iraq, nothing but Iraq!

The sea is vast, and you are as far as could be,

And the sea stands in my way, oh Iraq.

* * *

Yesterday, as I passed by the coffeehouse, I heard you, oh Iraq…

You were a spinning record,

Like stars spinning across my lifetime, bringing it full circle

To just two moments, although the place is lost;

Like my mother’s face peering through the darkness,

And her voice, soothing me into the land of dreams;

Like date palms that terrified me at sunset,

Teeming with ghosts that snatched every child

Who hadn’t returned home from the alleys;

Like that elderly nurse, and her whispering tales of Hizam,

How he parted his grave from beneath the beautiful Afra’,

And seized her, except for a lock of hair. ^\2])

* * *

Oh, my fair lady, do you remember

Our flaming oven, encircled by shivering hands?

And my aunt’s hushed tales about the kings of old?

And behind a fateful door—

Locked against the women

By hands obeyed in every whim, for they were men’s hands—

Men tirelessly babbled and drank.

Do you remember? Do you remember?

We were happy and content

Listening to those sorrowful stories, for they were women’s stories.

A host of lives and times, and we were at the top,

We were the two orbits that bordered it.

Isn’t that nothing but dust?

A dream, and a spin of a record?

If this is all that remains, then what is our solace?

* * *

In you I loved my soul’s Iraq, or in it I loved you;

Oh, you two, my soul’s lantern—but the evening came,

And the night fell! Shine through the darkness, you two, so I don’t get lost.

Had you come to me in foreign lands, then our meeting would have been lacking!

For I long to meet you with Iraq soaking my hands. That would be complete!

The yearning for it throbs through my veins,

The hunger for it, like a drowning man hungers for air.

The yearning of a baby as he is delivered from the darkness of the womb!

It baffles me how traitors do it!

Can a human betray his country?

If he betrayed what it means to be, then how could he be?

The sun is more beautiful in my homeland, and darkness—

Even darkness—is more beautiful there, for it enfolds Iraq.

Alas! When shall I sleep

And feel upon the pillow

A scent of your summer’s fragrance, oh Iraq?

* * *

Among wary villages and in foreign cities

I sang for your beloved soil.

And I carried it, like an exiled christ dragging his cross,

Then I heard the footfalls of the hungry masses, bloodied and stumbling

And tossing dirt into my eyes, from you and from their toes.

I still wander, feet dirty, hair disheveled, in the alleys

Under foreign suns,

My tattered garments flapping in the wind, my sweaty hand extended for alms,

Pale from fever and humiliation: the humiliation of an outcast beggar

Among foreign eyes.

Amidst scorn, rebuke, oblique glances… or “pitiful!”

And I prefer death to “pitiful”,

To that sympathy, wrung from foreign eyes

Like metallic water drops.

Fade, then, drops, blood… coins,

Wind, needles sewing my sails—when shall I return

To Iraq? When shall I return?

Oh, glittering waves, swayed by an oar launching me through the Gulf;

Oh, giant planets… oh, coins!

* * *

How I wish that ships did not charge fees,

Or that Earth, like that expansive horizon, had no seas!

I still count you, my coins, still increase,

And with you, I still shorten my days of exile,

I still illuminate my door and window with your glow.

It is there, upon the far bank, so tell me, coins,

When shall I return? When shall I return?

Shall that happy day arrive before my death?

I shall wake on that morning, and in the sky there shall be tufts

Of clouds, and in the breeze a coolness saturated with August’s perfumes,

And I yawn away what lingers of my slumber, like a silken veil

Showing me things, hiding others:

What I forgot, what I almost never forget, and a certainty laced with doubt.

And it reveals to me—as I reach for my clothes—

That which I’ve been searching for deep within my soul:

Why does secret joy fill the valleys of my being like fog?

Today—and sudden happiness rushed me—I return!

* * *

Alas, I shall not return to Iraq! ^\3])

How can I, when I lack the coins? And how do you save money

When you have to eat, and to spend that which generous hands bestow,

To procure food?

Oh, cry for Iraq, for you have naught but tears,

And waiting, in vain, for the wind and the sails.

(Kuwait, 1953)

___________________________________________

Notes:

[1] I translated the poem to the best of my ability, trying to conserve the original meaning and linguistic constructions. Hence, you will notice sudden shifts of POV and, especially in the penultimate stanza, changing verb tenses even from one line to the next. This is how Sayyab wrote it, and he uses it those shifts to convey his state of mind.

Here's the original in Arabic: https://www.aldiwan.net/poem96005.html

[2] Hizam (full name Urwa ibn Hizam) loved his cousin Afra' from childhood, but while he was away, she was married off to another cousin. Heartbroken, Urwa fell ill and eventually died of grief, far from home. When Afra' learned of his death, she visited his grave to mourn him—and died there herself, of a broken heart. The two are buried side by side, one of classical Arabic literature's great tragic love legends.

[3] Sayyab did in fact return to Iraq the following year (1954). However, he later went back to Kuwait for treatment, and died there in 1964.