Date: 1972

"Is this passing madness / standing neck deep / in mudflats / tidetables / pasted / to the brain?"

— Plumb, David

Date: 1972

"as the Whale dives / snapping our mind / like a lifeboat ?"

— Plumb, David

Date: 1980

"The back of the mind is a small hotel / And when the residents go on picnics / Or take buckets and spades down to the sea / The betrayals begin."

— Longley, Michael (b. 1939)

Date: 1981

"What's my head but a rat's nest / of dubious texts?"

— Harwood, Gwen (1920-1995)

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?"

— 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."

— Levis, Larry Patrick (1946-1996)

Date: 1986

"But it was only the heart's / racketing flywheel stuttering I want, I want // until exhaustion, until I was a guest in the yoke / of my body by the last margin of land where the river // mingles with the sea & far off daylight whitens, / a rending & yielding I must kneel before, as // bar...

— Hull, Lynda (1954-1994)

Date: 1988

"Mind in its purest play is like some bat / That beats about in caverns all alone, / Contriving by a kind of senseless wit / Not to conclude against a wall of stone."

— Wilbur, Richard (1921- )

Date: 1988

"The mind is like a bat."

— Wilbur, Richard (1921- )

Date: 1989

"we all rose / every black one of us still alive / and went to meet that man / the same man who had erased our blackboard, crashed our computer heads, / burned our books and cooked our elders in superstitions and trivial / remembrances slave traders called fairytales from when massa was animals"

— Kalamu ya Salaam (b. 1947)