Choosing poems for today’s workshop on Poetry and Death – and when is poetry not in some way speaking through death – has been, er, so much fun. People who aren’t going to be able to come to the workshop today have asked me to send them a list of poems we’ll be reading, so I thought I’d post it here. This list is so incomplete, but it’s a start for today’s workshop, set against Bay2Breakers and a solar eclipse. Couldn’t have asked for a better backdrop.
Feast of Losses: Poems
all living things have shoulders – Nick Flynn
Anti-Love Poem – Grace Paley
Come on All You Ghosts – Matthew Zapruder
Derelict – Dana Goodyear
Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night – Dylan Thomas
Facing It – Yusef Komunyakaa
Father’s Old Blue Cardigan – Anne Carson
For the Anniversary of My Death – W.S. Merwin
Grief – Matthew Dickman
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain – Emily Dickinson
istanbul (the word made flesh) – Nick Flynn
Let Evening Come – Jane Kenyon
Letter to a Funeral Parlor – Lydia Davis
My Dead Friends – Marie Howe
New Year’s Eve, In Hospital – Philip Levine
Now that I know I am to be Destroyed by a Seventeen Year-Old Girl – Anthony Madrid
One Art – Elizabeth Bishop
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone – W.H. Auden
The Falls – Sharon Olds
The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart – Gabrielle Calvocoressi
The Layers – Stanley Kunitz
The Long Boat – Stanley Kunitz
The Morning Baking – Carolyn Forché
The Olive Wood Fire – Galway Kinnell
The Portrait – Stanley Kunitz
The Wild Iris – Louise Gluck
The Yellow Star That Goes With Me – Jessica Greenbaum
Tornado – Dorothea Lasky
Visitation – Mark Doty
What the Living Do – Marie Howe
You Ask How – Nick Flynn
You Can Have It – Philip Levine