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)

Date: w. 1702-1713, published 1989

"At modern Rome an easy Nymph was bred / In tender tales & soft Romances read / These on the brain a wild impression brought / & made her sure she saw what ere she thought."

— Parnell, Thomas (1679-1718)

Date: 1990

"now you see the / two doctors, behind / you, in mind's eye, / probe into your anus, / or ass, or bottom, / behind you, the roto- / rooter-like device / sees all up, concludes / 'like a worn-out inner tube'"

— Creeley, Robert (1926-2005)

Date: 1990

"The noise the body makes / when the body meets / the soul over the soul's ocean and penumbra / is the old sound of up-and-down, in-and-out, / a lump of muscle chug-chugging blood / into the ear; a lover's / heart-shaped tongue; / flesh rocking flesh until flesh comes; / the butcher working / at ...

— Lee, Li-Young (b .1957)

Date: 1990

"The soul too / is a debasement / of a text, but, thus, it / acquires salience, although a / human salience, but / inimitable, and, hence, memorable."

— Lee, Li-Young (b .1957)

Date: 1990

"The soul is a corruption / and a mnemonic."

— Lee, Li-Young (b .1957)