Date: 1953
"Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart / Or squash it flat?"
preview | full record— Amis, Kingsley (1922-1995)
Date: December, 1954
"Does Somebody look bored, / His thoughts vacant as plaster, with being year / After bleeding year, our immobile word?"
preview | full record— Scott, Peter Dale (b. January 11, 1929)
Date: 1955, 1958
"It [the title of this book] is used out of context but expresses the way I felt about these poems when I wrote them---as if they were, taken together, a kind of Coney Island of the mind, a kind of circus of the soul."
preview | full record— Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. (b. 1919)
Date: 1959
"The heart's tough shell is still to crack / When, spent of all its wine and bread, / Unwinkingly the altar lies / Wreathed in its sour breath, cold and dead, / A server has put out its eyes."
preview | full record— Hill, Geoffrey (b. 1932)
Date: 1959, 1964
"run your finger along your no-moss mind / that's not a thought that's soot"
preview | full record— O'Hara, Francis Russell "Frank" (1926-1966)
Date: 1965
"The ripe brain rotting like a yellow nut / Hatching / Its babel of sea-lice, sandfly, and maggot."
preview | full record— Walcott, Derek (b. 1930)
Date: 1968
"my mind a shuttle among / set strings of the music / lets a weft of dream grow in the day time, / an increment of associations, / luminous soft threads, / the thrown glamour, crossing and recrossing, / the twisted sinews underlying the work."
preview | full record— Duncan, Robert (1919-1988)
Date: 1972
"Is this passing madness / standing neck deep / in mudflats / tidetables / pasted / to the brain?"
preview | full record— Plumb, David
Date: 1985
"If the soul is just the story that it tells, then / Did his answer, his smile, / The way he took his comb out of his back pocket / And slicked his hair back, / Spite the soul with something like the soul?"
preview | full record— Levis, Larry Patrick (1946-1996)
Date: 1985
"The Self sounds like a guy raking leaves / Off his walk. It sounds like the scrape of the rake. / The soul is just a story the scraping tells."
preview | full record— Levis, Larry Patrick (1946-1996)