Billy Collins

A funny, thought-provoking poet, Billy Collins (http://www.billy-collins.com/) is an American favorite. He has served two terms as the National Poet Laureate, was the State poet for New York in 2004 and has been recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library.

If you don’t like poetry, don’t like modern poetry, or don’t like reading at all, you will love Billy Collins. Many of his poems are beloved, but here is a very popular one, “Introduction to Poetry”:

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Jane Kenyon

Jane Kenyon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Kenyon) died on Aprill 22, 1995. At the time of her death at the age of 48, she was the poet laureate for the state of New Hampshire. She died from leukemia. One of her most beloved poems is “Let Evening Come”, which reads like a prayer or a magic spell:

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton (http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/79)  has been honored in many ways: an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, a Lannan Literary Award, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Shelley Memorial Award, the YM-YWHA Poetry Center Discovery Award, and the 2007 Ruth Lilly Prize.

She has been the state poet laureate for the State of Maryland. She is now the Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She is known for the conversational tone of her work, which speaks of the everyday experiences of women, black women in particular. Her poem “Homage to My Hips” demonstrates this:

these hips are big hips.
they need space to
move around in.
they don’t fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don’t like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top

http://poemhunter.com/poem/homage-to-my-hips/

Elizabeth Alexander

This is the poet who read “Praise Song for the Day” at President Obama’s inauguration. She has produced five books of poetry: The Venus Hottentot (1990), Body of Life (1996), Antebellum Dream Book (2001), American Sublime (2005), which was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and was one of the American Library Association’s “Notable Books of the Year;” as well as a recent young adult collection Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color (2008 Connecticut Book Award).  Her official site :http://www.elizabethalexander.net/poems.html

One of her most popular poems is “Blues”:

I am lazy, the laziest
girl in the world. I sleep during
the day when I want to, ’til
my face is creased and swollen,
’til my lips are dry and hot. I
eat as I please: cookies and milk
after lunch, butter and sour cream
on my baked potato, foods that
slothful people eat, that turn
yellow and opaque beneath the skin.

(you can read the poem in its entirety as well as works by all of these other poets at http://poemhunter.com/poem/blues-3/)