According to Warren, Glück’s “power [is] to distance the lyric ‘I’ as subject and object of attention” and to “impose a discipline of detachment upon urgently subjective material.” Glück’s early books feature personae grappling with the aftermaths of failed love affairs, disastrous family encounters, and existential despair, and her later work continues to explore the agony of the self. In the New York Times, critic William Logan described her work as “the logical outcome of a certain strain of confessional verse—starved of adjectives, thinned to a nervous set of verbs, intense almost past bearing, her poems have been dark, damaged and difficult to avert your gaze from.”
Here is a link to a collection of my favorite poems by Louise Gluck
Theodore Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz” from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Copyright 1942 by Hearst Magazines, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.
Buy or borrow this book:
Source: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (1961)
I'm currently trying to get all of Olds' books and this is the one I can't find. I want it so bad. I'm reading The Gold Cell and The Wellspring right now.
Also Mark Bibbins' poem "When It Was Always Dark" over at Cortland Review
Michael Dickman's "We Did Not Make Ourselves" from The New Yorker
and Christian Wiman's "We Did Not Make Ourselves"
from The Poetry Foundation on Louise Gluck:
According to Warren, Glück’s “power [is] to distance the lyric ‘I’ as subject and object of attention” and to “impose a discipline of detachment upon urgently subjective material.” Glück’s early books feature personae grappling with the aftermaths of failed love affairs, disastrous family encounters, and existential despair, and her later work continues to explore the agony of the self. In the New York Times, critic William Logan described her work as “the logical outcome of a certain strain of confessional verse—starved of adjectives, thinned to a nervous set of verbs, intense almost past bearing, her poems have been dark, damaged and difficult to avert your gaze from.”
Here is a link to a collection of my favorite poems by Louise Gluck
My Papa's Waltz by Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz” from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Copyright 1942 by Hearst Magazines, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.
Buy or borrow this book:
I'm currently trying to get all of Olds' books and this is the one I can't find. I want it so bad. I'm reading The Gold Cell and The Wellspring right now.
Lost in the Forest (Amy Gerstler...from Nerve Storm)
I'd given up hope. Hadn't eaten in three
days. Resigned to being wolf meat
when, unbelievably, I found myself in
a clearing. Two goats with bells
round their necks stared at me.
Their pupils like coin slots
in piggy banks. I could have gotten
the truth out of those two,
if goats spoke. I saw leeks
and radishes planted in rows;
wash billowing on a clothesline...
and the innocuous-looking cottage
in the woods with its lapping tongue
of a welcome mat slurped me in.
In the kitchen, a woman so old her sex
is barely discernible pours a glass
of fraudulent milk. I'm so hungry
my hand shakes. But what is this liquid?
"Drink up, sweatheart," she says,
and as I wipe the white mustache
off with the back of my hand:
"Atta girl." Have I stumbled
into the clutches of St. Somebody?
Who can tell. "You'll find I prevail here
in my own little kingdom," she says as
she leads me upstairs--her bony grip
on my arm a proclamation of ownership,
as though I've always been hers.
Father Outside (by Nick Flynn; check out his book Some Ether)
A black river flows down the center
of each page
& on either side the banks
are wrapped in snow. My father is ink falling
in tiny blossoms, a bottle
wrapped in a paperbag. I want to believe
that if I get the story right
we will rise, newly formed,
that I will stand over him again
as he sleeps outside under the church halogen
only this time I will know
what to say. It is night &
it's snowing & starlings
fill the trees above us, so many it seems
the leaves sing. I can't see them
until they rise together at some hidden signal
& hold the shape of the tree for a moment
before scattering. I wait for his breath
to lift his blanket
so I know he's alive, letting the story settle
into the shape of this city. Three girls in the park
begin to sing something holy, a song
with a lost room inside it
as their prayerbook comes unglued
& scatters. I'll bend
each finger back, until the bottle
falls, until the bone snaps, save him
by destroying his hands. With the thaw
the river will rise & he will be forced
to higher ground. No one
will have to tell him. From my roof I can see
the East River, it looks blackened with oil
but it's onlly the light. Even now
my father is asleep somewhere. If I followed
the river north I could still reach him.
That Year (by Sharon Olds)
The year of the mask of blood, my father
hammering on the glass door to get in
was the year they found her body in the hills,
in a shallow grave, naked, white as
mushroom, partially decomposed,
raped, murdered, the girl from my class.
That was the year my mother took us
and hid us so we would not be there
when she told him to leave; so there wasn't another
tying by the wrist to the chair,
or denial of food, not another
forcing of food, the head held back,
down the throat at the restaurant,
the shame of vomited buttermilk
down the sweater with its shame of new breasts.
Thwat was the year
I started to bleed,
crossing over that border in the night,
and in Social Studies, we came at last
to Auschwitz, in my ignorance
I felt as if I recognized it
like my father's face, the face of a guard
turning away--or worse yet
turning toward me.
The symmetrical piles of white bodies,
the round, white breast-shapes of the heaps,
the smell of the smoke, the dogs the wires the
rope the hunger. This had happened to people,
just a few years ago,
in Germany, the guards were Protestants
like my father and me, but in my dreams,
every night, I was one of those
about to be killed. It had happened to six million
Jews, to Jesus's family
I was not in--and not everyone
had died, and there was a word for them
I wanted, in my ignorance,
to share some part of, the word survivor.
Father, Son and the Wholly Ghost (by Joel Dias-Porter, aka DJ Renegade)
We meet only
in the alleys of memory.
Our broken smiles
glitter on the ground.
Although we bear the same name,
identical scars,
you can't remember
what day I was born.
Anger spills
down the side
of my face.
This is what you have taught me:
needles are as hollow as lies,
collapse more families
than veins.
Now a prisoner in death's camp,
you grow thinner every day
until I can count your T-cells
on one hand.
The phone rings,
Mama pleads
Please buy a dark suit to wear.
I tell her
I wear black every day,
all day,
anyway.