Good poems for hard times

pt. 1. Kindness to snails. -- Break of day / Galway Kinnell -- Happiness / Raymond Carver -- This morning / Jane Kenyon -- The monks of St. John's file in the prayer / Kilian McDonnell -- Job / William Baer -- Or death and December / George Garrett -- Sonnet : "Rarely, rarely comest thou, spirit of delight" / Gavin Ewart -- the little horse is newlY / E.E. Cummings -- A poem for Emily / Miller Williams -- For a five-year-old / Fleur Adcock -- For my daughter in reply to a question / David Ignatow -- The goose / Muriel Spark -- Starting the Subaru at five below / Stuart Kestenbaum -- Day bath / Debra Spencer --

pt. 2. Such as it is more or less. -- A dialogue of watching / Kenneth Rexroth -- A birthday / W.S. Merwin -- Thoughts in a garden / Andrew Marvell -- Spring / Mary Oliver -- Unharvested / Robert Frost -- The state of the economy / Louis Jenkins -- At the arraignment / Debra Spencer -- From "Song of myself" / Walt Whitman -- Ice storm / Jane Kenyon -- Passengers / Billy Collins -- The summer-camp bus pulls away from the curb / Sharon Olds -- you can take it with you / Josephine Jacobsen -- To David, about his education / Howard Nemerov -- Invitation / Carl Dennis -- Calling him back from layoff / Bob Hicok -- Working in the rain / Robert Morgan -- My father's lunch / Erica Funkhouser --

pt. 3. This lust of tenderness. -- The happiest day / Linda Pastan -- 'After dark vapours have oppressed our plains' / John Keats -- Children's hospital, emergency room / Gregory Djanikian -- The longly-weds know / Leah Furnas -- In answer to your query / Naomi Lazard -- Toast / Leonard Nathan -- Detail waiting for a train / Stanley Plumly -- September twelfth, 2001 / X.J. Kennedy -- The alter / Charles Simic -- Sonnet no. 6 : Dearest, I never knew such loving / Hayden Carruth -- There comes the strangest moment / Kate Light -- Snowflake / William Baer -- Somewhere I'll find you / Phebe Hanson -- Feasting / Elizabeth W. Garber -- Song / W.H. Auden -- Yes / Catherine Doty -- The dalliance of the eagles / Walt Whitman -- After love / Maxine Kumin -- Sonnet CVI : When in the chronicle of wasted time / William Shakespeare --

pt. 4. Deliberate obfuscation. -- A spiral notebook / Ted Kooser -- What's in my journal / William Stafford -- Why I take good care of my Macintosh / Gary Snyder -- Ode to my 1977 Toyota / Barbara Hamby -- Internal exile / Richard Cecil -- Burma-shave / Traditional -- Carnation milk / Anonymous -- A brief lecture on door closers / Clements Starck -- Sonnet Xll : Why are we by all creatures waited on? / John Donne -- Angels / Maurya Simon -- Passing through a small town / David Shumate -- In Paris with you / James Fenton -- Wedding poem for Schele and Phi / Bill Holm --

pt. 5. The sound of a car. -- Seven deadly sins / Virginia Hamilton Adair -- Teaching a child the art of confession / David Shumate -- A physics / Heather McHugh -- Things / Lisel Mueller -- Any prince to any princess / Adrian Henri -- The courage that my mother had / Edna St. Vincent Millay -- Please Mrs Butler / Allan Ahlberg -- To a frustrated poet / R.J. Ellmann -- the lesson of the moth / Don Marquis -- Disappointment / Tony Hoagland -- The cure / Ginger Andrews -- Upon hearing about the suicide of the daughter of friends / Jo McDougall --

pt. 6. Here it comes. -- the con job / Charles Bukowski -- Fareweel to a' our Scottish fame / Robert Burns -- Easter morning / Jim Harrison -- A million young workmen, 1915 / Carl Sandburg -- The college colonel. / Herman Melville -- Ordinary life / Barbara Crooker -- To fight aloud, is very brave / Emily Dickinson -- Analysis of baseball / May Swenson -- Ode to American English / Barbara Hamby -- High water mark / David Shumate -- After school on ordinary days / Maria Mazziotti Gillan -- Snow in the suburbs / Thomas Hardy -- Now winter nights enlarge / Thomas Campion -- Happiness / Michael Van Walleghen -- From Tender buttons / Gertrude Stein -- Classic ballroom dances / Charles Simic -- Theater / William Greenway -- Ode on the whole duty of parents / Frances Cornford --

pt. 7. Whatever happens. -- The benefits of ignorance / Hal Sirowitz -- Bunthorne's song / W.S. Gilbert -- The rules of evidence / Lee Robinson -- Courtesy / Hilaire Belloc -- What the uneducated old woman told me / Christopher Reid -- Proverbs of hell / William Blake -- To a daughter leaving home / Linda Pastan -- No longer a teenager / Gerald Locklin -- Prayer / Galway Kinnell -- Minnesota Thanksgiving / John Berryman -- Berryman / W.S. Merwin -- Mother, in love at sixty / Susanna Styve -- My agent says / R.S. Gwynn -- Afraid so / Jeanne Marie Beaumont -- The yak / Hilaire Belloc -- High plains farming / William Notter -- The fish / Elizabeth Bishop -- The future / Wesley McNair -- Riveted / Robyn Sarah -- All that time / May Swenson -- My husband discovers poetry / Diane Lockward -- The poet's occasional alternative / Grace Paley -- The unsaid / Stephen Dunn -- Snapshot of a lump / Kelli Russell Agodon -- Hymn to God, my God, in my sickness / John Donne -- Last days / Donald Hall --

pt. 8. Let it spill. -- Thelonious Monk / Stephen Dobyns -- The discovery of sex / Debra Spencer -- The lawyer / Carl Sandburg -- The prodigal son's brother / Steve Kowit -- Calling your father / Robert Bly -- Al and Beth / Louis Simpson -- The meeting / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -- Nothing is lost / Noël Coward -- The planet on the table / Wallace Stevens -- It is raining on the house of Anne Frank / Linda Pastan -- The sunlight on the garden / Louis MacNeice -- too sweet / Charles Bukowski -- For my sister, emigrating / Wendy Cope -- The three Kings / Muriel Spark -- Not only the Eskimos / Lisel Mueller -- Where go the boats / Robert Louis Stevenson -- The parade / Billy Collins -- My cup / Robert Friend -- Affirmation / Donald Hall -- A singing voice / Kenneth Rexroth -- Since you asked / Lawrence Raab -- Inviting a friend to supper / Ben Johnson -- The love cook / Ron Padgett -- Soda crackers / Raymond Carver -- That silent evening / Galway Kinnell -- This is how memory works / Patricia Hampl -- "The purpose of time is to prevent everything from happening at once" / X.J. Kennedy --

pt. 9. I feel our kinship. -- Death mask / Edward Field -- That's the sum of it / David Ignatow -- Suck it up / Paul Zimmer -- The day the tree fell down / Jack LaZebnik -- White autumn / Robert Morgan -- Naked / Jennifer Michael Hecht -- Slow children at play / Cecilia Woloch -- Driving to town late to mail a letter / Robert Bly -- [My brother's in Wyoming ...] / Gary Young -- My brother / Denver Butson -- Still life / Carl Sandburg -- The changing light / Lawrence Ferlinghetti -- At the fishhouses / Elizabeth Bishop -- A man in Maine / Philip Booth -- The war in the air / Howard Nemerov -- In the middle / Barbara Crooker -- Are you tired of me, my darling? / Traditional -- On a night of snow / Elizabeth Coatsworth -- Closing in on the harvest / Leo Dangel -- Reconciliation / Walt Whitman -- Tie the strings to my life, my Lord / Emily Dickinson -- The last waltz / Alden Nowlan -- Rye whiskey / Traditional -- Let old Nellie stay / Traditional -- In praise of my bed / Meredith Holmes -- Poem for the family / Susan Cataldo -- In bed with a book / Mona Van Duyn -- My father gets up in the middle of the night to watch an old movie / Dennis Trudell -- A prayer in the prospect of death / Robert Burns -- Diner / Louis Jenkins -- When death comes / Mary Oliver -- At my funeral / Willis Barnstone -- The wish to be generous / Wendell Berry -- Last poem / Ted Berrigan --

pt. 10. Simpler than I could find words for.

Just now / W.S. Merwin

Psalm 51

Dawn revisited / Rita Dove

Crossing the bar / Alford, Lord Tennyson

Morning swim / Maxine Kumin

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