Word: poem
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...principal or even computer salesman who claimed that insufficient data is the root of the problem. With an Internet connection, you can gather the latest stuff from all over, but too many American high school students have never read one Mark Twain novel or Shakespeare play or Wordsworth poem, or a serious history of the U.S.; they are bad at science, useless at mathematics, hopeless at writing--but if they could only connect to the latest websites in Passaic and Peru, we'd see improvement? The Internet, said President Clinton in February, "could make it possible for every child with...
Written in 1962, her poem "Prospective Immigrants Please Note," applied in its historical moment most immediately to the civil rights movement and the women's right movement. For our purposes here, it also applies to the questions of intellectual elitism and upward social mobility--two doors facing potential incoming freshmen this April just as squarely as they are facing graduating seniors. For you who stand in front of such decisions...
...This poem should be hand screened on the covers of those glaringly blank, red pre-frosh folders. It is a valuable lesson for those at any transitional stage, in front of any door: Whether you go through or do not go through, know that the risks, the double-vision, the possibilities, the deterrents and the costs will be there nonetheless. They are the things to deal with. The door is only a detail...
From "Catwoman's Window Sill," we can catch a glimpse of yet another application of the noir label. Catwoman presents to the public, for the first time, her "Poem Noir" collection; it is her "darkest poetry ever! Enter at your own risk." In this verse which has "escaped the confines of [her] muse," we catch sullen moments such as the opening stanza of "Poem Noir I": "I'm in a bad mood/Fit to kill/One might say/Not that I would/Just don't give me a weapon." Perhaps not quite as arresting as Raymond Chandler, but at least killing things...
...particularly racist precinct of rural Louisiana, Komunyakaa, who is black, was drafted into the Vietnam War and assigned to write for the Southern Cross, a newspaper for infantrymen. Thirty years later, the artillery fire still echoes in his work. In "Ia Drang Valley," a slender, striking war poem both lyrical and blunt, a soldier dreams himself into a Goya painting of a firing squad: "I stand/ before the bright rifles,/ nailed to the moment." Komunyakaa's other great theme is race, and not just his own. In "Quatrains for Ishi" he follows a Native American from his capture...