As the title indicates, the series of poems published in Calligrammes was written over several years, but the volume was not published until after the author’s death. As one of France’s avant-garde writers, Apollinaire experimented with new forms of expression,… Read More ›
The Buckow Elegies are 22 poems that Bertolt Brecht wrote during the summer of 1953, when he was staying at a country house that he had bought early the previous year. The poems were published gradually over the next two… Read More ›
A hymn of praise to the Brooklyn Bridge, Mayakovsky’s poem (Bruklinskii Most) expresses the awe that he, as an artist and a technophile, feels when he experiences the sight of this symbol of New York City and American ingenuity. The… Read More ›
This early composition (Breyten bid vir homself) perfectly captures Breytenbach’s irreverent tone, as it deliberately parodies a poem by the renowned Afrikaans poet N. P. van Wyk Louw, Ignatius Prays for His Order (Ignatius bid vir sy orde). Speaking on… Read More ›
Shaul Tchernichovsky’s first idyll, Boiled Dumplings (Levivot Mevushalot), was composed in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1902 and has been celebrated for its coherence, vibrancy, bittersweet humor, and multiplex form, as well as for its engagement with weighty matters significant at the… Read More ›
Black Woman Naked woman, black woman Clothed with your colour which is life with your form which is beauty! In your shadow I have grown up; the gentleness of your hands was laid over my eyes. And now, high up… Read More ›
One of Cuban writer Nancy Morejón’s most anthologized and best-known works is Mujer Negra. According to the author, this compelling poem came to her in a dream of a woman appearing at her bedroom window. The next morning, Morejón recorded… Read More ›
Cobra Norato, written in 1928 and first published in 1931, is considered not only Raul Bopp’s masterpiece, but also one of the most important literary works of Brazilian modernism. In this long poem, Bopp develops a dramatic epic with fairy-tale–like… Read More ›
The Black Heralds (also published as The Black Messengers) expresses the metaphysics of human pain and suffering that informed much of César Vallejo’s poetry. In contrast to Romantic writers who considered poetry a means to commune with the sublime, Vallejo… Read More ›
Alfredo Giuliani’s unrhymed free-verse poem Compleanno (Birthday) was first published in I novissimi: poesie per gli anni ’60 (1961), the famous and influential anthology of neo-avant-garde poetry that Giuliani himself edited, containing his own poetry and that of four other… Read More ›
“Beside a Chrysanthemum” (1947) is one of Suh Jung-ju’s most famous poems. It was originally published in his third collection of poetry, Selected Poems (1955), in which Suh tries to revisit traditional Korean sensibility, distancing himself from the Baudelairean art-for-art’s-sake… Read More ›
“Bargain” (“Solde”), from Damas’s first collection, Pigments (1937), reveals the effects of centuries of exploitation by white European colonials. Damas’s message is even more direct in this poem than in Hiccup; the speaker is an adult who has fully assimilated… Read More ›
Initially, one might read the opening line of this four-stanza poem as a reference to Aimé Césaire’s own recourse to barbarity as a means of violent rebellion: “This [barbarity] is the word that sustains me / and smacks against my… Read More ›
Jibanananda Das’s famous love poem Banalata Sen was first published in the journal Kavita (Poetry) in 1935 and later anthologized in a 1942 collection to which it gave its name. It is widely regarded as one of Das’s finest poems… Read More ›
Written shortly after Mayakovsky’s first meeting with Lily Brik in 1915, this poem takes its tone from Catullus’s “I love, and I hate” and its mood from the gothic tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, to whom the poem alludes… Read More ›
This poem begins with the observation that no marker preserves the memory of the Jews and others whom the Germans killed at Babi Yar, a ravine outside the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, on September 29, 1941. Yevtushenko’s words (and the… Read More ›
I’m not saying that was yesterday. With worthless Summer money in our pockets we are again on the chaff of scorn, in the autumn maneuvers of time. And the escape route to the south does not come to us, like… Read More ›
Rainer Maria Rilke’s Autumn Day After the summer’s yield, Lord, it is time to let your shadow lengthen on the sundials and in the pastures let the rough winds fly. As for the final fruits, coax them to roundness. Direct… Read More ›
AT A FUNERAL – DENNIS BRUTUS Black, green and gold at sunset: pageantry And stubbled graves: expectant, of eternity, In bride’s-white, nun’s-white veils the nurses gush their bounty Of red-wine cloaks, frothing the bugled dirging slopes Salute! “hen ponder all… Read More ›
Ars Poetica – Pablo Neruda Between shadow and space, between harnesses and virgins, endowed with a singular heart and fatal dreams, impetuously pale, withered in the forehead and in mourning like an angry widower every day of my life, oh,… Read More ›
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