Poetry Anthology for Many Readers,

Poetry Anthology

For many readers, poetry has an aura of separation form the world, an ethereal quality achieved in sublime language that carries the reader to a higher existence. Much poetry has this sort of metaphysical quality, and numerous poets have nurtured this image over the centuries as they work their magic and express the ineffable in choice and powerful language that separates them from the run-of-the-mill human being. However, the fact that much poetry has this sense of existing on a higher plane should never blind us to the fact that much poetry has a mundane tie at the same time and means to express and to be social commentary on some aspect of life, some social problem, some wrong that needs to be righted. It is perhaps not surprising that for many poets, this aspect of poetry has become more vital in the last century, also a time of political and social ferment and of taking sides in various debates and on issues covering a wide range. The poems collected in this anthology are poems of social comment and also of experimentation, since the poet's challenge to society often also involves a challenge to the staid nature of the poetry of earlier generations, and one who challenges the rules made by society may also challenge the poetic rules made by the literary establishment. These poems experiment with language, meter, rhyme, and rhythm as well as subject matter and so constitute a revolutionary expression as well as often a call for revolution.

Of course, social commentary in poetry is not something new with these writers or with their era. Many of the poets of World War I addressed issues of war and its effect on people and societies, such as Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, or Edward Thomas. Many poets can be quite specific about the social issue they are addressing, as with William Butler Yeats and his "

Easter 1916" by William Butler Yeats, addressing th Easter Uprising in Ireland. After World War I, though, more and more poets expressed their social consciousness through their poetry, seeing poetry as a means of communication with a special power all its own and allowing them to experiment with form and content to convey ideas about what they saw in the world.

Another influence on the socially conscious has been the changing nature of criticism. Any specific type of criticism provides a certain perspective on literature, serving to focus the argument and often to set forth criteria by which to judge given works. No one school of criticism should be seen as definitive, for all by their very nature focus the argument on a narrowed spectrum compared to the possible areas of inquiry and types of approach possible. For instance, Feminist Criticism serves the useful purpose of redirecting critical inquiries in a direction that has been ignored for far too long, offering a female point-of-view and suggesting ways in which society has stifled that point-of-view in the real world and in literature. This is a fairly recent development in criticism, dating from the late 1960s, and it serves as a guide to increase awareness of the role of women in society, of the special interests and abilities of women writers, and of the relationship between subject matter and social realities in a culture. Such criticism also challenges poets to respond an to address the same sorts of issues. Other critical movements have also had a similar effect, including Marxian criticism, Race criticism, and Critical Theory.

We begin with a poet of the Harlem Renaissance who made social consciousness a central element in his poetry, not surprising for an African-American poet reacting to the segregation and discrimination which by the 1920s was endemic in American life. Langston Hughes copes with the reality of race in his works and with the social tensions beset the black community. The poetry of Langston Hughes is challenging. It derives from a different tradition from most American poetry, a tradition of black culture, of jazz, and of protest. Hughes celebrated his racial identity, something few poets had done before. He was said to speak for the black masses, and he took this responsibility much to heart. Hughes' poetry seems to come from somewhere deep inside and to explode as a spontaneous utterance, however carefully designed it may actually be. For the black man, society demands a certain level of behavior, denying individuality, while at the same time denying full membership in the society imposing these rules. Hughes feels the force of this paradox in his life and expresses this idea in his poetry, asserting an individual vision through his work that is difficult for the average black man to achieve in society. He accomplishes this by making use of the black experience in America and by drawing upon black idioms, language, music, and cultural elements to evoke a vision of the black man in American life.

Hughes came from the black world of the 1920s, a time when black culture was becoming more appealing to white society through the jazz and other music blacks produced. Hughes' poetry was part of the so-called Harlem Renaissance, the name given this explosion in black culture across a wide front, beginning in Harlem and moving outward. Hughes tried to create a poetry that evoked the spirit of black America, and this necessitated creating a black identity that made sense to him and that would appeal to his audience at the same time. The voice he developed came from his experience and reflected the experience of the black masses he represented. His writings of every sort told the story of the black man in America.

In his poetry, Hughes considers the point-of-view of the black man and how it differs from that of the white, though he sees that both are Americans. He links his voice to that of all black men through time in "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," a poem in which he says "I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins." This ancient past is within his soul, and his soul is one with the ancient rivers, growing as deep as they were. There is a long black history that has been largely ignored by white society, which treats all history as a white history. The speaker knows that this is not so and that within him is that truth his instructor says will come out on the page:

bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

A built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

A looked upon the Nile and raised my pyramids above it.

This ancient history is connected to the slave history in America as he refers to Mississippi and Abe Lincoln and New Orleans, and the Mississippi River is just one more of the ancient rivers he has known.

Many of Hughes' poems address issues of the blues directly, using the blues as subject matter while at the same time echoing the syncopation and rhythms of the music. One such instance is "The Weary Blues," a poem that links the blues and the black man in the opening lines:

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,

Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, heard a Negro play.

Hughes recreates a blues song in this poem:

Ain't nobody in all this world,

Ain't got nobody but ma self.

I's gwine to quit ma frownin'

And put ma troubles on the shelf.

Aurora Levins Morales in her poem "Child of the Americas" expresses some uncertainty as to her own identity, whether that be black, white, or Indian. She believes that most Americans have a sense of their identity that defines them in such terms and that those who have such a clearly defined identity look down on people like Morales, who do not. In truth, though, most Americans have only a vague sense of their own identity. If they define themselves as black or white, that is not a definition of their identity as an American, because Americans are both black and white and a number of other colors. If they define themselves as male or female, that is also not part of their American identity, which encompasses both. The American identity embodies many of these elements and can make an American appear as a citizen of the world, but under these superficial differences is the basic belief in freedom, equality, and the rule of law for all. This is what maintains the ongoing promotion of what is seen as good in government and the watchfulness for any betrayal of those principles.

Amiri Baraka's poem "An Agony. As Now" from 1964 presents the poet observing himself from some distance and taking stock of what he sees. The tone of the poem is thus bifurcated, as the poet is both observer and observed, an idea expressed from the first as if he (the consciousness) were trapped inside a body he does not admire and may even fear. This is evident from the first as the poet writes,

I am inside someone -- who hates me. I look out from his eyes (1-3).

This approach allows him to take a jaundiced view of himself and criticize his own shortcomings, as if they were those of someone else. He says he hates himself, meaning more that he hates some of the things he has done and that he may expect more from himself than he has been able to deliver. The way he pauses at the end of the first line emphasizes the next part of the sentence, that he is inside someone who hates him, meaning himself. He observes himself and does so as if observing the act of observing as well, creating a double distance between himself as poet and himself as man. The poet writes, "I look / out from his eyes" (2-3), again seeing himself watching himself. The work expresses the divided and in some ways unfinished nature of the black man in American society. In addition, the poet is expressing the view that his reality and his sense of self depends on his hatred of others. He says he hates himself, because he has been made to hate himself by the majority white society that prevents him from feeling complete. When he looks out at himself and hates himself, it is because of his inability to overcome the limitations placed on him. In the world in which he lives, "innocence is a weapon" (13).

In the most expansive sense, this poem expresses the pain felt by the poet as he tries to communicate with those outside his own flesh and with himself at the same time. Baraka's poetry is thus like a scream from someone burning alive, an image of the travails of the artist that is highly expressive. As the title of the poem says, it is "An Agony" and takes place right now, an immediate experience that shapes the message of the poet, defines the nature of the poet, and forces the poet to suffer pain all at the same time. This poem explodes on the page as if it were a stream-of-consciousness rant forced out of the poet as he observes himself and experiences self-hatred and doubt in the face of a social order that he does not believe is listening. He is at war with himself, between the self he was made to be by circumstances and the self he wants to be and is trying to become.

Louise Bogan's poem "Women" is a feminist work and restates many attitudes toward women by indirectly contrasting women with men. The contrast is not overt but is rather inherent in the way the poet says what women are not and do not do, implying that men are those things and do those things, which are not suited for women. By even raising these elements, the poet is saying that men engage in these behaviors and that the question has been raised as to whether women do as well. Her answer is that they do not, and it is necessary to read between the lines to see reasons why they do not.

The poet writes as if observing another species, for of the 20 lines of the poem, 9 begin with "they" and one with "their," as if the poet were setting women aside as a separate entity and writing about them. Women are contrasted with men in terms of work in the field, for women do not seek to tame the wilderness or to care for the cattle or give their attention to the finer points of farming. Instead, women are depicted as internalized creatures who turn their eyes inward, while men turn outward. Women "have no wilderness in them" (1) and are instead "Content in the right hot cell of their hearts" (3). Indeed, they are seen as oblivious to much of the world around them, suggesting that they are self-absorbed to the point of not seeing much of the beauty around them:

They do not hear

Snow water going down under culverts

Shallow and clear (6-8).

The portrait painted is not flattering, though there is sympathy for the way women live even if the reason why they do so is not explored.

Other women are represented and also comment on the society in which they live. Gwendolyn Brooks in her poem "We Real Cool" uses an urban dialect to create an interesting image of the life cycle and to evoke a sense of the sing-song that might be used in street play like skipping a rope. The ideas are carried line by line as the noun for each sentence is found at the end of each line while the verb and object are found on the next line. The subject is always "we." The poet identifies the speakers as seven pool players, and the story they tell is why they have no lives beyond spending their time in the pool room waiting for death. They say they are "real cool," and they got that way by leaving school. The seven are drop-outs and have no options beyond lurking late, drinking, listening to jazz, and waiting for death -- "We die soon."

The meter of the poem is regular, with two strong accented syllables leading to a pause for a period, followed by the beginning of the next thought with "we." The fact that all syllables are accented makes every short syllable equal to all others, and this adds to the sing-son quality of the piece. The primary rhyming syllable (not counting the rhyming "we" of each line) is next to last in each line, creating short couplets. The piece manages in a few short lines to create an image of life as repetition, and the dullness of this repeated pattern makes life seem futile and short.

Adrienne Rich's poem "Living in Sin" is in free verse, with sharp imagery created line by line. The situation is evident from the title, and each image builds on the idea of this woman examining her life and the reality of it as compared to romantic images of living in sin. Rich uses alliteration to link elements in her imagery and to convey a sense of unity. The primary sound in the opening lines is the "p" sound:

Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal, the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears, piano with a Persian shawl...

The "s" sound dominates in the next few lines. These repeated sounds create a sense of monotony and repetition, in keeping with the idea that the woman is finding her life to be a series of repeated events and actions, most of them examples of the mundane chores everyone has to perform just to live. "Living in sin" has all the glamour of everyday life in this poem, for that is precisely what it is for each person involved. The idea of continuity and that each day is the same is carried in the repeated image of the milkman on the stairs, arriving each day to announce the beginning of another 24-hours just like the last. Love dissipates in this repetitive atmosphere but returns each evening.

The poem "I Am Ready to Tell All I Know" by Minnie Bruce Pratt is structured as a dramatic interaction between mother and son. It is told from the point-of-view of the mother, who is the one who offers to tell all she knows. This title alone creates in the reader a sense of a revelation about to take place, and the rest of the poem indicates that this revelation is one that both specific to a given situation and generalized to parent-child relationships everywhere. The specific situation is of a child from the South going to school in the North and learning of a history that has been kept from him, a history that his mother is now ready top reveal. It is a history of racial injustice and murder, and the young man is surprised to learn of it in school and to learn that his mother has known of this and not told him. The mother for her part is ready to tell all she knows, ready because she has come to realize that all young people are linked just as all parents are linked -- how would she feel if the young man hung by a mob were her child?

The dramatic situation is clear, and most of the poem is taken up with the musings of the mother as she reacts to the questions asked by her son. The question forces her to reconsider the history of the south and her own place in that history. It forces her to reconsider her relationship with her son and to wonder in effect how any mother could tolerate the sorts of things that happened in the South in the past given that such events harmed the children of some mother somewhere. The mother creates the image of a group of white men hanging a young man and then going back to play cards even though there was now blood on their hands:

When my children bleed, my own blood rushes as if out of me. What if he were one of mine?

But which bloodied one, mine?

The poet effectively generalizes from this one mother to the plight of all mothers and to the way parents and children never manage to communicate on past history until the younger generation has become openly appalled at the reality of the older generation.

Minnie Bruce Pratt's poem "Poem for My Sons" is a lyric about change, tracing that change through the life of her sons. When they were born, there were no poets who were women, and now that they are grown, she is not the woman she once was and doe snot have to be because the times have changed. The poem celebrates these changes and also serves as a warning to the sons not to slide back to an earlier time but to revel in the freedom that has been given to women.

The speaker is clearly the poet -- the title alone tells us that this is so, and the voice throughout is consistent in being someone used to expressing herself in words and now doing so. She is also a mother, a stance often taken by Pratt in her poetry, and she speaks to her sons in order to make them aware of the changes that have taken place since their birth. She makes direct reference to Yeats and his poetry to his daughter and son, and such poetry has allowed young men ever since to hear the voice of the father, while the mother was sleeping the sleep of one exhausted by her housework. That was the situation when her sons were born.

The usual course then was for the father to work and the mother to sublimate her needs and desires to the family:

Your father was then the poet I'd ceased to be when I got married.

It's taken me years to write this to you (Pratt 13).

The fact that she had internalized her poetry left her at times "mean as she can be." Now the boys are grown, and she is no longer the woman she once was. In the past, she could imagine no future beyond the family, but now she is a human being fully able to express herself and seeking much more from her life. What she is doing now is assuring herself that her sons will learn from her and will be able to see evil when it appears, to know good and do it, and to find work that they like doing. She also wants her sons to be aware and not to choose the anesthesia that affects most human beings so that they only want not to feel, not to be bothered, not to know pain, not to know anything. She wants her sons to be aware and to be enjoying life, and at the same time she wants them to understand women, the role of women, the capabilities of women, and not to be threatened by women as men were when they were born:

can only pray:

That you'll never ask for the weather, earth, angels, women, or other lives to obey you (Pratt 14).

Sylvia Plath's poem "Lady Lazarus" uses the facts of the poet's own inner life to make a universal statement about the human condition, here turning more toward the place of women in society. The poem includes within it a number of references to the Holocaust, but the poem is not really about that subject. Instead, Plath uses the Holocaust as a metaphor for her own suffering and, by extension, the suffering of women in society. She views her own body in terms of Nazi atrocities, such as using the skin of prisoners to make lampshades and other parts of the body for other purposes. Plath describes in this way how she feels trapped in her own body in some respects and how she might seek freedom by peeling away the layers in the way the Nazis did to gain her freedom.

A poet covering both feminist issues and racial issues is Maya Angelou, and in her poem "Phenomenal Woman," she expresses confidence in being a woman so that she transcends the limited criteria for approval society uses to give value to women. She asserts her femaleness and her power as a human being, suggesting that she has achieved a strong enough sense of self so that she no longer worries about youth or beauty or thinness or any of the other ways women try to please men and shame each other. Instead, the poet knows who she is and is proud of that fact, and imparts this pride so much to others that they are attracted to her confidence and her fully grounded personality.

The poet clearly knows that her appeal is outside the socially approved boundaries so that others will be surprised at her power. This also suggests that society has shaped their thinking to so that they cannot see much beyond the outer shell. She states first, "Pretty women wonder where my secret lies." This indicates that she does not consider herself pretty but that it does not matter because she has this secret, a secret that goes against what most people believe:

I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size

But when I start to tell them, they think I'm telling lies.

The real secret is that she is just who she is:

I'm a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That's me.

More overtly political expression can be found in several poems. Christopher Buckley's poem "Why I'm in Favor of a Nuclear Freeze" uses a free verse form to tell a story which for the reader is not immediately recognized as a response to the title of the poem. The poem tells a story about a man remembering his youth and a hunting trip he took with his friend Harry near Harry's father's ranch. This is memory, and in the latter part of the poem the speaker returns to the present, a period when he and Harry no longer hunt, when the world has changed. This is what the poem conveys, a sense of change and of new priorities. The speaker particularly remembers a rabbit he and Harry killed, not for food or even sport, but because it was there as they walked back from their trip. This leads to a vision of why he and Harry had killed the rabbit:

why the hell had we killed it so cold-heartedly? And I saw

That it was simply because we had the guns, because we could...

This is the essence of the poem, relating the meaning of the story to the title. The poet is in favor of the nuclear freeze because if we have the bomb, we will use it just because we have it. He has shown the way life has developed, with Harry having his children to protect, and now he looks at what could destroy all this and hopes that a freeze will prevent it.

In Henry Reed's "The Naming of Names," classification is used overtly as a way of making a point about military training and about how we view the world. The speaker in the poem classifies the things of military life and the things of the world. Classification is a human action taken to make sense of a world that is complex and that is difficult to understand without imposing some order on the chaos. Classification is one way of doing this.

The poet writes about the day during military training when the parts of the gun are named, and each name is given here as the speaker learns the routine. The naming of the parts is set against the world of nature, and some of the names imitate nature while serving the interests of death rather than life. The naming of parts takes place on one day, a day of classification, but in the opening lines the poet classifies first the days themselves by detailing what takes place on each:

Today we have the naming of parts. Yesterday,

We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,

We shall have what to do after firing. But today.

Today we have naming of parts (1-4).

This classification leads to the development of the further classification of the parts, and naming the parts makes them real. From the first, this act is linked with nature: "Iaponica / Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens" (4-5).

There are two speakers, the first being the trainee in the opening stanza, and the other being the trainer who describes what each trainee has and does not have as he names the parts. The first speaker returns in the last stanza, and in both the first and last stanza, the speaker makes reference to the garden and the bees in the gardens and so brings in the natural world as a contrast. The poem is not a dialogue, however, in that the trainee is speaking to the reader only and not to the trainer. who in turn speaks to the trainee and not directly to the reader.

Two poets from Africa take a political stance to the problems in their part of th world. Soyinka in his work "Chimes of Silence," one of the longer poems in the collection, emphasizes the sense of imprisonment in the titles and subjects of each section -- "Wailing Wall," "Wall of Mists," "Amber Wall," all leading to "Purgatory," that place where the sinner pays restitution, but always with the hope of salvation in the end. The image created in every section is of the human being imprisoned by walls of different sorts, not merely the physical walls of a prison, but walls created by society, walls preventing the individual from acting out of freedom. The sky above creates a covering like a prison:

Wall to polar star, wall of prayers roof in blood-rust floats beyond Stained-glass wounds on wailing walls (34).

The image is ritualistic, with vivid scenes of prayer and punishment evoked a tone and the same time:

Choirmaster

When a hymn is called he conducts,

Baton-beaking their massed discordance:

Invocation to the broken Word

On broken voices (34).

He makes a reference to a "raft of faith" which is needed today to "exorcise the past" because of the evil that it has created and left to the present:

For evil is impenitent, evil feeds

Upon the wounds and tears of piety

Wall of prayers, preyed upon by scavenger, undertaker (34-35).

Okot p'Bitek shows many of the same concerns as he also writes about imprisonment and its meaning. He also has to face the reality of a country that has known more than its share of violence and where the people have not been able to find the will to become their own rulers through democratic elections. The National Resistance Movement took control in Uganda in 1986, but before that, each postindependence government in turn left the country in worse shape than it found it. Some 300,000 Ugandans may have been slaughtered during the rule of Idi Amin Dada in the 1970s, for instance, and mass killings resumed in the early 1980s under Milton Obote. There were two wars against the central government, one in 1979 and the other beginning in 1981, and these also left the population devastated. This latter war was taking place when p'Bitek died.

P'Bitek wrote powerful poetry about the prison experience, and the prison itself, terrible though it might be, could be seen as a harsh mistress:

The stone floor

Lifts her powerful arms

In cold embrace

To welcome me

As I sit on her navel (41).

Other terms are used to describe the prison as if it were a woman, and the prisoner, her lover. The experience of being a prisoner does not leave one passive and lost but instead generates a fire within, a fire such as is seen in those who have been radicalized by the experience: