The Poetry Center at Smith College






			A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Click on a poet's name or face for biographical information. Click on titles to read individual poems. (asterisks indicate a poet's reading is available on video)


			Claribel Alegría Accounting Flowers from the Volcano Little Cambray Tamales Elizabeth Alexander Absence Fugue The Venus Hottentot Agha Shahid Ali A Villanelle Ghazal The Dacca Gauzes Doug Anderson Bamboo Bridge Blues Purification Sinan Antoon A Prism: Wet with Wars To an Iraqi infant Wars I John Balaban A Note to Hayden Carruth from Miami On Sharing a Husband (By Hồ Xuân Hương) Three-Mountain Pass By Hồ Xuân Hương Van Gogh Robin Becker Ephemera Late Butch-Femme With Two Camels and One Donkey Charles Bernstein from talk alone you don't get a poem the throat Verdi and Postmodernism Frank Bidart Lament for the Makers Music Like Dirt Star Dust Richard Blanco Photo Shop Shaving Tía Olivia Serves Wallace Stevens a Cuban Egg Chana Bloch Please Hold Psalm The Kiss Eavan Boland That the Science of Cartography is Limited The Last Discipline The Pomegranate Annie Boutelle Bens One Way to Varanasi River Gwendolyn Brooks A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon. The Children Of The Poor The Coora Flower Ernesto Cardenal Economic Brief Excerpt from CANTIGA 2: The Word Questions by the Lake Marilyn Chin Beijing Spring Hospital Interlude Tonight while the Stars are Shimmering Lucille Clifton moonchild the photograph: a lynching the times Henri Cole Canard Pompeian Wall Painting White Spine Billy Collins On Turning Ten Sonnet The Iron Bridge Stephen Dobyns Can Poetry Matter? How To Like It Oh, Immobility, Death Mark Doty A Green Crab's Shell The Embrace My Tattoo Denise Duhamel Ferida Durakovíc It Look, Someone Has Moved From The Beautiful Neighbourhood Where Roses Die To The Antelope Cornelius Eady How I Got Born I Thrift Martín Espada Thanksgiving The Mexican Cabdriver Two Mexicanos Lynched in Santa Cruz, California, May 3, 1877

			B.H. Fairchild Excerpt of Beauty Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest Hearing Parker the First Time Lawrence Ferlinghetti Nikky Finney Making Foots Sign Language Sex Diane Gilliam Fisher A Reporter from New York Asks Edith Mae Chapman, Age Nine, What Her Daddy Tells her about the Strike A Woman Is the Heart of a Home Pink Hollyhocks Carolyn Forché Taking Off My Clothes The Colonel The Testimony of Light Gina Franco Fishing The Bells passed over the shadows and put our soles on their vanity which seems a body Daisy Fried Bulrush Clean Correggio Alice Fulton Fierce Girl Playing Hopscotch Industrial Lace The Priming is a Negligee

			Jack Gilbert A Brief for the Defense The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart The Great Fires Louise Glück Penelope's Song Brown Circle Witchgrass Jorie Graham At Luca Signorelli's Resurrection of the Body Sea-Blue Aubade The Swarm Melissa Green Excerpt of The Squanicook Eclogues (August, part iv) Excerpt of The Squanicook Eclogues(October, part ii) Daphne in Mourning Linda Gregg Fish Tea Rice Let Birds The Precision Eve Grubin The Buried Rib Cage Unhappiness on Earth A Gate We Might Enter

			Kimiko Hahn Reckless Sonnet #7 Things That Make Me Cry Instantly Gowanus, Late Summer (2000) John Haines Daphne The Traveler Trees are People and the People are Trees Forrest Hamer Charlene -n- Booker 4Ever Getting Happy Pica Suheir Hammad exotic our mothers and their lives of suffer suicide watch Joy Harjo She Had Some Horses Songline of Dawn We Encounter Nat King Cole As We Invent The Future Robert Hass Privilege of Being Ezra Pound's Proposition First Things at the Last Minute Terrance Hayes Woofer (When I consider the African-American) Touch Wind in a Box Seamus Heaney Höfn Postscript The Clothes Shrine David Hinton Lunar Eclipse Overnight at Stone-gate Cliffs The New Moon Jane Hirshfield In a Net of Blue and Gold Rebus Salt Heart Marie Howe How Many Times The Last Time Watching Television Frieda Hughes Foxes Kookaburra Thief Kim Hye-sun A Song Regarding Love You



			Angela Jackson Bread Faith Practicing Patience Honorée Fanonne Jeffers An Old Lady Told Me Swing Low, Sweet Chariot Unidentified Female Student, Former Slave (Talladega College, circa 1885)

			Galway Kinnell Karl Kirchwey Blackberries Villanelle Repair Yusef Komunyakka Mary A. Koncel Bump Psalm Take Your Time Sharon Kraus Eighth Week, Driving Home After The Sonogram, Beethoven Voyage What If Stanley Kunitz The Portrait The Layers Touch Me

			Joan Larkin Fawn Before Doe Season Inventory Want Li-Young Lee Persimmons The Gift With Ruins Philip Levine Black Stone On Top Of Nothing Night Words The Mercy

			Anne Marie Macari Mary's Blood New York, 1927 Still Life with Magnolia and Dove Sarah Manguso The Deer Comes Down the Mountain This Might Be Real Burning Meredith Martin Apology Five Apology Two Nothing Else Demetria Martinez Psalm Tell Me Untitled Gail Mazur Dana Street, December Air Drawing Traces Richard McCann Ghost Letter Excerpt of Nights of 1990 Third Premonition: rue des Petits Hôtels J. D. McClatchy After Magritte Honest Iago My Mammogram Heather McHugh Etymological Dirge Nano-knowledge Stroke Semezdin Mehmedinovic Dates Wounded Parks Moorish Fountain Constance Merritt Cradle Song: A Found Poem Ghazal The Mother's Seduction W. S. Merwin Air Place Through a Glass Honor Moore Cut Outs Portrait of Manet's Wife To Janet, On Galileo Nancy Morejón I Love My Master Impressions The Drum Tracie Morris Get Away 1928 for Marvin Sewell Las Brujitas Writers Are My Nepenthe with apologies to Ted Joans

			Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill Nine Little Goats Nude The Language Issue Naomi Shihab Nye Muchas Gracias Por Todo Fold For Mohammed Zeid of Gaza, Age 15

			Sharon Olds I Go Back to May 1937 Psalm Stag’s Leap Mary Oliver Morning Glories Sand Dabs, Five Yes! No!

			Michael Palmer Autobiography 3 Lens The Library is Burning Carl Phillips Custom Ravage Sudden Scattering of Leaves, All Gold Marie Ponsot One is One The Story After The Story Winter Kevin Prufer Ars Poetica Air Disaster Over Kansas Ode to Rome



			Claudia Rankine The Room is a Fountain in Experience ["As if I craved error, as if love was ahistorical"] ["What we live"] Barbara Ras The Sadness of Parents The Sadness of Puppies You Can't Have It All Adrienne Rich Four: History Signatures There Is No One Story and One Story Only Translations Aleida Rodriguez Lexicon of Exile Extraída Extracted Jerome Rothenberg Shaman Dreamwork Two There Is Never Enough Time "Lorca's Spain: A Homage" Carl Hancock Rux Asylum Of Gestures Elmina Blues (pidgin Drum Song) Just Asking

			Tomaz Salamun Acquedotto History Lacquer Mary Jo Salter Distance The Twelfth Year Young Girl Peeling Apples (Nicolaes Maes) Sonia Sanchez An Anthem Depression Present Maureen Seaton Tim Seibles Each Letter Kerosene The Caps on Backward Ntozake Shange Bocas: A Daughter's Geography resurrection of the daughter senses of heritage Charles Simic Windy Evening My Noiseless Entourage The Birdie Susan Snively A Woman Holding a Balance Second Glance Spencer Tracy Gary Snyder Riprap Song of the Taste We Wash Our Bowls in This Water Cathy Song Girl Powdering Her Neck Picture Bride Untouched photograph of passenger Gerald Stern Behaving Like a Jew Grapefruit Grass and Water Ruth Stone Etc. Hummingbirds Words Adrienne Su Address Men Savannnah Crabs

			James Tate Memory Read the Great Poets The Workforce Brian Turner Eulogy Here, Bullet In the Leupold Scope



			Jean Valentine Dream Barker Elegy For Jane Kenyon (2) To Plath, To Sexton Reetika Vazirani Excerpt of the sonnet sequence White Elephants English It's Me, I'm not Home

			Derek Walcott A Far Cry from Africa Elsewhere Love after Love Ellen Doré Watson Broken Railings Ghazal The Ones Richard Wilbur For C. The Writer This World Eleanor Wilner Emigration Her Body is Private Of a Sun She Can Remember Jay Wright Bolero 9 Indian Pond The Albuquerque Graveyard



			Abe Louise Young Torn Screens Ninth Ward Jazz Feminesto: dialogue Saadi Youssef Poetry Solos on the Oud The New Baghdad