This document provides summaries of poems by several notable American poets from the 2000s including Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Robert Hass, Ted Kooser, Stanley Kunitz, Mary Oliver, and others. It includes short biographies of each poet as well as samples of their poetry. The samples range from a few lines to a full poem and cover topics such as nature, aging, relationships, and social commentary.

1. Poetry of the 2000s
American Poets

2. Maya Angelou
1928 to present:
She is a writer, dancer,
television director, radio
show host, and an
African-American
activist. She has written
five autobiographies.

3. Poor Girl
You’ve got another love You’re going to leave her too
and I know it and I know it
Someone who adores you She’ll never know
just like me what made you go
Hanging on your words She’ll cry and wonder
like they were gold what went wrong
Thinking that she understands
your soul Then she’ll begin
Poor Girl to sing this song
Just like me. Poor Girl
Just like me.
You’re breaking another heart
and I know it
And there’s nothing
I can do
If I try to tell her
what I know
She’ll misunderstand
and make me go
Poor Girl
Just like me.

4. On Reaching Forty
Other acquainted years
sidle
with modest
decorum
across the scrim of toughened
tears and to a stage
planked with laughter boards
and waxed with rueful loss
But forty
with the authorized
brazenness of a uniformed
cop stomps
no-knocking
into the script
bumps a funky grind on the
shabby curtain of youth
and delays the action.
Unless you have the inborn
wisdom
and grace
and are clever enough
to die at thirty-nine.

5. Tears
Tears
The crystal rags
Viscous tatters
Of a worn-through soul
Moans
Deep swan song
Blue farewell
Of a dying dream.
Sounds Like Pearls
Sounds
Like pearls
Roll of your tongue
To grace this eager ebon ear.
Doubt and fear,
Ungainly things,
With blushings
Disappear.

6. Gwendolyn Brooks
1917-2000:
She was born in Topeka,
Kansas. In her early writings,
she used a strict technical
form and lofty word choice.
In 1967 her work achieved a
new tone and vision, as she
changed to a more simple
writing style so that her
themes could come across
more strongly.

7. Martin Luther King Jr.
April 4, 1968
A man went forth with gifts.
He was a prose poem.
He was a tragic grace.
He was a warm music.
He tried to heal the vivid volcanoes.
His ashes are
reading the world.
His Dream still wishes to anoint
the barricades of faith and of control.
His word still burns the center of the sun,
above the thousands and the
hundred thousands.
The word was Justice. It was spoken.
So it shall be spoken.
So it shall be done.

8. Best Friends
Getting to home means joining
Very Best Friends –
from the very wide shelf
my father put on a wall for me.
One Friend, or another, knows what to say to me
on Monday, or Thursday,
for Monday or Thursday need.
If I want Repairing –
or something to lock me up –
or a happy key to open me –
or fire when school has made me crispy-cold –
coming home
I choose
from Very Best Friends on the very wide shelf
my father put on a wall
for me.

9. We Real Cool
We real cool. We
Left School. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. we
Die soon.

10. Billy Collins
1941 to present:
Using a sarcastic, funny
writing voice, he creates
simplistic stanzas to try to
create images that pull
the reader away from real
life. Bruce Weber of the
New York Times calls him
the most popular poet in
America.

11. On Turning Ten
The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I’m coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light –
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.
You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
at seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.
But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never felt so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,

12. and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.
This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.
It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

13. 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.

14. Passengers
At the gate, I sit in a row of blue seats
with the possible company of my death,
this sprawling miscellany of people –
carry-on bags and paperbacks –
that could be gathered in a flash
into a band of pilgrims on the last open road.
Not that I think
if our plane crumpled into a mountain
we would all ascend together,
holding hands like a ring of sky divers,
into a sudden gasp of brightness,
or that there would be some common spot
for us to reunite to jubilize the moment,
some spaceless, pillarless Greece
where we could, at the count of three,
toss our ashes into the sunny air.
(continued)

15. It’s just that the way that man has his briefcase
so carefully arranged,
the way that girl is cooling her tea,
and the flow of the comb that woman
passes through her daughter’s hair . . .
and when you consider the altitude,
the secret parts of the engines,
and all the hard water and the deep canyons below . . .
well, I just think it would be good if one of us
maybe stood up and said a few words,
or, so as not to involve the police,
at least quietly wrote something down.

16. Rita Dove
1952 to present:
She speaks with a direct
voice in her poems and
with dramatic intensity.
In addition to writing
prose and poetry, she has
written text for musical
composers and is an
accomplished modern
cello musician.

17. Variation on Pain
Two strings, one pierced cry.
So many ways to imitate
The ringing in his ears.
He lay on the bunk, mandolin
In his arms. Two strings
For each note and seventeen
Frets; ridged sound
Humming beneath calloused
Fingertips.
There was a needle
In his head but nothing
Fit through it. Sound quivered
Like a rope stretched clear
To land, tensed and brimming,
A man gurgling air.
Two greased strings
For each pierced lobe:
So is the past forgiven.

18. Happenstance
When you appeared it was as if
magnets cleared the air.
I had never seen that smile before
or your hair, flying silver. Someone
waving goodbye, she was silver, too.
Of course you didn’t see me.
I called softly so you could choose
not to answer – then called again.
You turned in the light, your eyes
seeking your name.

19. Heart to Heart
It’s neither red I want, I want –
nor sweet. but I can’t open it:
It doesn’t melt there’s no key.
or turn over, I can’t wear it
break or harden, on my sleeve,
so it can’t feel or tell you from
pain, the bottom of it
yearning, how I feel. Here,
regret. it’s all yours, now –
but you’ll have
It doesn’t have to take me,
a tip to spin on, too.
it isn’t even
shapely –
just a thick clutch
of muscle,
lopsided,
mute. Still,
I feel it inside
its cage sounding
a dull tattoo:

20. Robert Hass
1941 to present:
He writes in a manner that
allows clarity of
expression, conciseness,
and strong imagery.
Topics are those found in
everyday life. He is also
very fond of Japanese
haiku poems.

21. Child Naming Flowers
When old crones wandered in the woods, I don’t know how we survive it.
I was the hero on the hill On this sunny morning
in clear sunlight. in my life as an adult, I am looking
in a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe.
Death’s hounds feared me. It is all the fullness that there is
in light. A towhee scratches in the leaves
Smell of wild fennel, outside my open door.
high loft of sweet fruit high in the branches He always does.
of the flowering plum.
A moment ago I felt so sick
Then I am cast down and so cold
into the terror of childhood, I could hardly move.
into the mirror and the greasy knives,
the dark
woodpile under the fig trees
in the dark.
It is only
the malice of voices, the old horror
that is nothing, parents
quarreling, somebody
drunk.

22. Emblems of a Prior Order
Patient cultivation,
as the white petals of
the climbing rose
were to some man
a lifetime’s careful work,
the mess of petals
on the lawn was bred
to fall there as a dog
is bred to stand –
gardens are a history
of art, this fin-de-siècle
flower & Dobermann’s
pinscher, all deadly
sleekness in the neighbor’s
yard, were born, brennende
liebe, under the lindens
that bear the morning
toward us on a silver tray.

23. Measure
Recurrences.
Coppery light hesitates
again in the small-leaved
Japanese plum. Summer
and sunset, the peace
of the writing desk
and the habitual peace
of writing, these things
form an order I only
belong to in the idleness
of attention. Last light
rims the blue mountain
and I almost glimpse
what I was born to,
not so much in the sunlight
or the plum tree
as in the pulse
that forms these lines.

24. Ted Kooser
1939 to present:
It is said of Mr. Kooser that
he has written more perfect
poems than any other poet
of his generation. He is
acclaimed for his
plainspoken style, gift of
metaphor, and of his finding
beauty in ordinary things.
He is currently an English
professor at the Univ. of
Nebraska at Lincoln.

25. Sparklers
I scratched your name in longhand
on the night, then you wrote mine.
I couldn’t see you, near me,
laughing and chasing my name
through the air, but I could hear
your heart, I think, and feel your breath
against the darkness, hurrying.
One word swirled out of your hand
as you rushed hard to write it
all the way out to its end
before its beginning was gone.
It left a frail red line
trembling along on the darkness,
and that was my name, my name.

26. Walking to Work
Today, it’s the obsidian
ice on the sidewalk
with its milk white bubbles
popping under my shoes
that pleases me, and upon it
a lump of old snow
with a trail like a comet,
that somebody,
probably falling in love,
has kicked
all the way to the corner.

27. Daddy Longlegs
Here, on the fine long legs springy as steel,
a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill
that skims along over the basement floor
wrapped up in a simple obsession.
Eight legs reach out like the master ribs
of a web in which some thought is caught
dead center in its own small world,
a thought so far from the touch of things
that we can only guess at it. If mine,
it would be the secret dream
of walking alone across the floor of my life
with an easy grace, and with love enough
to live on at the center of myself.

28. A Birthday Poem
Just past dawn, the sun stands
with its heavy red head
in a black stanchion of trees,
waiting for someone to come
with his bucket
for the foamy white light,
and then a long day in the pasture.
I too spend my days grazing,
feasting on every green moment
till darkness calls,
and with the others
I walk away into the night,
swinging the little tin bell
of my name.

29. Stanley Kunitz
1905 to 2006:
He is considered to be
the most distinguished
and accomplished poet
in our country. At age 95
he became the oldest
person to receive the
title of United States
Poet Laureate.

30. Twilight
I wait. I deepen in the room.
Fed lions, glowing, congregate
In corners, sleep and fade. For whom
It may concern I, tawny, wait.
Time flowing through the window; day
Spilling on the board its bright
Last blood. Folding (big, gauzy, gray),
A moth sits on the western light.
Sits on my heart that, darkened, drips
No honey from its punctured core,
Yet feed my hands and heeds my lips.
The Moon, the Moon, is at the door!

31. Hermetic Poem
The secret my heart keeps
Flows into cracked cups.
No saucer can contain
This overplus of mine:
It glisters to the floor,
Lashing like lizard fire
And ramps upon the walls
Crazy with ruby ills.
Who enters by my door
Is drowned, burned, stung, and starred.

32. Change
Dissolving in the ceramic vat
Of time, man (gristle and fat),
Corrupting on a rock in space
That crumbles, lifts his impermanent face
To watch the stars, his brain locked tight
Against the tall revolving night.
Yet is he neither here nor there
Because the mind moves everywhere;
And he is neither now nor then
Because tomorrow comes again
Foreshadowed, and the ragged wing
Of yesterday’s remembering
Cuts sharply the immediate moon;
Nor is he always: late and soon
Becoming, never being, till
Becoming is a being still.
Here, Now, and Always, man would be
Inviolate eternally;
This is his spirit’s trinity.

33. Mary Oliver
1935 to present:
She often writes about the
quiet side of nature,
noticing the smallest of
details. She was good
friends with Edna Millay’s
sister and helped organize
the late poet’s papers after
her death. The New York
Times once described Ms.
Oliver as America’s best-
selling poet.

34. The Journey
One day you finally knew It was already late
what you had to do, and began, enough, and a wild night,
though the voices around you and the road full of fallen
kept shouting branches and stones.
their bad advice – But little by little,
though the whole house as you left their voices behind,
began to tremble the stars began to burn
and you felt the old tug through the sheets of clouds,
at your ankles. and there was a new voice
“Mend my life!” which you slowly
each voice cried. recognized as your own,
But you didn’t stop. that kept you company
You know what you had to do, as you strode deeper and deeper
though the wind pried into the world,
with its stiff fingers determined to do
at the very foundations, the only thing you could do –
though their melancholy determined to save
was terrible. the only life you could save.

35. The Sun
Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful
than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon
and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone –
and how it slides again
out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

36. Streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance –
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love –
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure
that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you
as you stand there
empty-handed –
or have you too
turned from this world –
or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

37. Themes in 2000’s Poetry:
•Multicultural Voices
•Ethnic Identity
•Nature / Simplicity
•Ordinary Objects