Poem search?

Question

I'm looking for an competition piece. It has to be a poem in the style of prose and the author has to have been borne after 1900. I am not alloud to use a self written one or one with an unknown author. Could you all please help me out?
God Bless!!

Answer 1

temporary writers working in the prose poem/flash fiction form include James Tate (writer), Lyn Hejinian, Mary Oliver, Campbell McGrath, Sheila Murphy, Kim Chinquee, and Anne Carson.

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/jamestate/

Answer 2

I love this poem, and it has a lot of very vivid images that would make it great for competition. Plus, it's by a Canadian author. :)

The Double Voice

Two voices
took turns using my eyes:

One had manners,
painted in watercolours,
used hushed tones when speaking
of mountains or Niagara Falls,
composed uplifting verse
and expended sentiment upon the poor.

The other voice
had other knowledge:
that men sweat
always and drink often,
that pigs are pigs
but must be eaten
anyway, that unborn babies
fester like wounds in the body,
that there is nothing to be done
about mosquitoes;

One saw through my
bleared and gradually
bleaching eyes, red leaves,
the rituals of seasons and rivers

The other found a dead dog
jubilant with maggots
half-buried among the sweet peas.

- Margaret Atwood

Answer 3

Hmm. Max Ehrmann ("Go Placidly Amid the Noise and Haste") and Carl Sandburg both were born before 1900, per Google search.

There's always "Daddy," by Sylvia Plath.

Google search (advanced/exact phrase) the dirty word

In Memory of Karl Shapiro
I'm also doing a paper on the dirty word and I want to know the total breakdown and meaning of the poem. Thank you, for your help. ...
www.departments.bucknell.edu/stadler_center/shapiro/discuss.asp - 7k - Cached - Similar pages

So, "The Dirty Word" is by Karl Shapiro.

Google search "karl shapiro" birthdate

Shapiro was born in 1913. The poem is an interesting analogy.

Google search "thomas stearns eliot" birthdate

T. S. Eliot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Thomas Stearns Eliot, OM (September 26, 1888–January 4, 1965) was a poet, dramatist and literary critic, whose works, such as The Love Song of J. Alfred ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._S._Eliot - 97k - Cached - Similar pages

Answer 4

Yvor Winters was born in 1900 and diagnosed with tuberculosis while he was studying at the University of Chicago. He wrote his first two books, experiments in free verse published in 1921 and 1922, in a sanitarium:

From The Magpie's Shadow (1922)

From Part 1. "In Winter"

No Being
I, bent. Thin nights receding


From Part II. "In Spring"

Spring
I walk out the world's door.

Song
Why should I stop for spring?


From Part III. "In Summer and Autumn"

The Aspen's Song
The Summer holds me here.

Alone
I saw day's shadow strike.
What happens in tuberculosis is this: A specific bacterium is transmitted from one person to another through the air. As the bacteria multiply, they attack and destroy tissue primarily in the lungs, but they also can spread to the brain, kidneys, or bones. During the first stage, the immune system fights the disease by walling off most of the bacteria in fibrous capsules. Some of the encapsulated bacteria remain alive and may reactivate if the person becomes stressed or depleted. If the disease proceeds to the second stage, lung damage reduces ability to breathe.

The body fights off multiplicity and chaos, that which doesn't belong. In Winters's time, a retreat to an orderly, white, dry environment was part of the cure.

Which is easier to attain, sickness or health? Which is easier to accept? "Early in 1928 I abandoned free verse and returned to traditional meters...."2

After which:

Sonnet to the Moon

Now every leaf, though colorless, burns bright
With disembodied and celestial light,
And drops without a movement or a sound
A pillar of darkness to the shifting ground.

The lucent, thin, and alcoholic flame
Runs in the stubble with a nervous aim,
But, when the eye pursues, will point with fire
Each single stubble-tip and strain no higher.

O triple goddess! Contemplate my plight!
Opacity, my fate! Change, my delight!
The yellow tom-cat, sunk in shifting fur,
Changes and dreams, a phosphorescent blur.

Sullen I wait, but still the vision shun. Bodiless thoughts and thoughtless bodies run.

Hope this helps. •

Answer 5

Into my heart's treasurey
I slipped a coin
A thing time can not steal
nor a thief purloin
Oh better than the minting
of a Gold-crowned King
is the safe-kept memory of a lovely thing~ Sara Teasdale

I love Sara Teasdale and had almost all of her poems memorized by the time I was twenty. Good choice of poets by the way.

Answer 6

Allen Ginsberg wrote prose poetry in the 1960's or 1970's.

Answer 7

I come around back searching for a physically powerful feud or a clever insult, so i will sit down and brood of a wretched line, i will rewrite stable of the prospect to be indignant like I might desire to yet something consistently ruins my techniques-set i hit upon myself crammed with a sugary form of food the Pollyanna's rule the roost and we trolls finally end up "happy juiced" So I pray to the saint of the lost, St. Jude please deliver me somebody irritable and impolite i might climb Mount Everest if i ought to just to drop some sweetheart on their hood. yet regrettably i will in no way get to objective, oh hex! I in basic terms bypass the insults and then say Byeeeeeeeexxxx

Answer 8

sarah teasdale is hauntingly good poet but was born in 1883. Try muriel rukeyser, a lot of her poems really allude to the rise of feminism and individuality which is a huge theme in the twentieth century

Answer 9

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T.S. Eliot, has always been one of my favorite poems. Written in 1917, it marked the transition between the end of the Romantic Poets and the dawn of the contemporary author.
(Sorry about the stanza numbers!)


Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats 5
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question … 10
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, 15
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, 20
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; 25
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate; 30
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go 35
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair— 40
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare 45
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, 50
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all— 55
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? 60
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress 65
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets 70
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! 75
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? 80
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, 85
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while, 90
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”— 95
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while, 100
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: 105
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
. . . . . 110
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use, 115
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old … I grow old … 120
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me. 125

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown 130
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Answer 10

My favorite poems are by Sarah Teasdale. They all rhyme and they're almost all above love. My favorite!!

Hardly anyone knows about her though, it seems...