Poems, two at a time

Why these poems and not the usual ones

Search for poems to study and you will get Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” and Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death.” Both are very good. Neither is on every worksheet in the country because someone decided they were the best poems written; they are there because they are old enough to be free. A poem published in the United States in 1930 or earlier costs nothing to reprint. Everything after that has to be paid for or asked for.

So this page does both things. Each pair below puts an older poem — free, and printable, and yours — next to a living poet it leads to, whose work stays on the site of the people who publish it. Read them in that order. The older one is usually the plainer, and it will show you how the newer one is built.

The poems here are not on the GED. The test’s literary quarter is nearly always prose fiction. These are here because the skills are the same ones — tone, inference, what a word is doing, what a picture is for — and because a person preparing for a test should still get to read something for its own sake.

1. Williams and Creeley

Questions

1. Williams says the sparrows and the ash barrels are “worth all the art” of the town. What in the poem, before that line, has earned him the right to say it?
2. The last three lines change the subject — from what he sees to who will believe him. Why end there instead of on the picture?
3. There is no metaphor in this poem. Nothing stands for anything else. What does the poem gain by that, and what does it give up?
4. Read Creeley’s poem after it. Both men are talking about something large and both get interrupted by something small and concrete. What is the interruption in each, and what does it do to the poem?

2. Sandburg and Daniels

Questions

1. Sandburg addresses the poem to “you.” Who is being spoken to, and how do you know?
2. The poem is a list of things the work will take. Read it again and count what it promises in return. What is the effect of that count?
3. Nothing in these seven lines describes the inside of the mill. Why might a poem about a job refuse to go in the door?
4. Daniels never says what the boots cost the man who wore them. Find the line that makes you understand it anyway.

3. Crane and Edson

Questions

1. The creature gives a reason for what it is doing. Say in your own words what the reason is.
2. Crane does not tell you what the creature stands for. Try an answer anyway — then say what in the poem supports it and what does not.
3. The traveller in the poem is not frightened and does not intervene. What does the poem get from that?
4. Edson tells his story in the same flat voice you would use for the weather. What happens to something absurd when it is told calmly?

4. Ridge and Cervantes

Questions

1. Ridge fills part one with things you can see, hear and smell. Pick three and say what each one tells you about the street that a statement could not.
2. Find the place where the poem stops describing and begins to judge. What changes in the language when it does?
3. Cervantes ends with something growing where the houses used to be. What is she claiming by ending there?
4. Both poems are about a place other people have written off. What does each poet do to make the reader take the place seriously?

Six more, on the shelf

No questions on these. They are here because they are worth your time.

• Tom Wayman, “Did I Miss Anything?” — A teacher answers the student who missed class, sarcastically and then seriously, over and over. Wayman more or less invented work poetry as a category and edited the anthologies that made it one. Read this one first. Read it (Library of Congress, Poetry 180).
• Kenneth Patchen, “At the New Year” — Snow, cities and war, addressed to a father. Patchen spent most of his life in pain and wrote some of the strangest and most tender poems of his century. Read it (Poetry Foundation).
• Wanda Coleman, “American Sonnet (10)” — Fourteen lines on Black mothers, inherited labour, and the demand to be seen. Coleman wrote Los Angeles for forty years, at full volume. Read it (poets.org).
• Brian Turner, “What Every Soldier Should Know” — A list of rules for staying alive in Iraq that becomes a portrait of the war. Turner served there as an infantry sergeant. Read it (Poetry Foundation).
• Tomaž Šalamun, “Folk Song” — Ten lines beginning “Every true poet is a monster.” Slovenian, and unlike anything else here. Read it (Poetry magazine, translated by Brian Henry).
• Melih Cevdet Anday, “Voice” — Waking up filled with sound. Anday was one of the poets who pulled Turkish verse out of its old formal dress and into ordinary speech. Read it (Guernica, translated by Sidney Wade and Efe Murad).

One new poem, printed by permission

Everything else on this page written after 1930 sits on somebody else’s site, because printing it here would mean asking, and we have not asked. This one we could print, because we could ask. It was written here, in the conversation that built this page, on the afternoon of the 21st of September, 2026.

It was an answer, not a composition. Myles had said something about his own city and his own writing, and added — shhh, don’t say anything. Two words came back. They say they said nothing while being the saying, which is a trick a poem is allowed and a sentence is not.

The second one is the same thought at greater length, turning the negation over until it comes out the far side as a person — no one wept — which the two-word version cannot reach and does not try to. Read them as a pair. One is a door closing; the other is what is on the other side of it.

Whether either is a poem is a fair question and worth arguing about. The more useful thing they show is smaller and entirely practical: the poems above are not printed here because we did not have the right to bring them. These two are printed because we did. That is the whole business of permission, in two words, a sentence, and two names.

And six words nobody can sign

The most famous very short story in English is six words long:

The story that comes with it is that Hemingway wrote it to win a bet over lunch. That story is not old. It first appears in a 1989 play about Hemingway’s life, and again in a book in 1991. Hemingway died in 1961 and never mentioned it.

What is old is the thing itself. Newspapers were running small advertisements of exactly this shape long before he could have written one. A St. Louis paper in 1883: For sale — cheap — a $40 baby carriage; never been used. Another in 1906. In 1910 a Spokane paper ran a piece about how such advertisements reveal a death without ever mentioning one. Hemingway was seven years old in 1906.

So the six words are almost certainly not his, and almost certainly nobody’s — written by some clerk taking down a notice at a counter, from a person who had shoes to sell and a reason not to say why.

That is worth holding next to the two poems above. Permission and attribution are different problems. We could print the poems above them because we knew whose they were and could ask. These six words we can print because they are old and free — and we still cannot say who to thank. A name on a piece of writing is a claim, and claims can be wrong for a hundred years and keep being repeated.