I took the Coursera class in Modern and Contemporary American Poety. It just finished this week. I enjoyed the class, despite no background whatsoever in poetry – modern or otherwise. I created a poem using my favorite line from each poem, as follows. It’s not bad, I think.

To gather Paradise-

The Truth must dazzle gradually

But let a Splinter swerve–

And will never be any more perfection than there is now,

Must you taste everything? Must you know everything?

“I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so!”

Will we walk all night through solitary streets?  The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.

I learned to sit at desk and condense

Nothing in it, but my hand.

Something you should know–

As a child I was abandoned, in a story made of trees.

Rose, harsh rose,

your stalk has caught root

The apparition of these faces in the crowd

Her eyes explored me.

The glass broken, bright green.

Pieces of a green bottle.

Forgive me

so much depends upon

The rose carried weight of love but love is at an end–of roses.

— As if that answered anything. — Ah, yes.

What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle

The difference is spreading.

Water astonishing and difficult

the wound in the decision.

that having been blessed let us bless it.

Who comes first. Napoleon the first.

I am entitled to be deeply shocked.

Copy conscientiously.

Famously she descended, her red hair

Accept love’s fruit: be sleek

And look in the mirror at middle-age

That’s all that I remember.

If we must die, O let us nobly die.

How shall we greet him?

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

Day dwindles, drowning and at length is gone

How large is her refusal; and how slight

with nothing on. Nor on her mind.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

I see him coming and I go blind,

it’s all a sea, I swim out of it in afternoons of sun hot meditation

fishermen don’t hang fish eye soppy in my Ramadam

John, I said, which is not his name, the darkness surrounds us

Getting unpredictable and strange.

We have no word

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do

Secluded from his friends, in earnest talk with a young girl

But is the earth as full as life was full, of them?

that’s what it is! Sequences —

That their merely being there means something;

Will have to dispel the notion of being like all the others.

Life goes by quite merrily,

It’s time to write some letters, good cold air

The event was nothing like their report of it.

The fog burned off and I went for a walk alone.

I am, the irrational residue.

Pressure is applied. As far as you go

And do I smile, such cordial light

I wear my hair like a wild man, it puts the straights off.

Looking for hipsters.

I have nothing to say and I am saying it.

There is no spicier weekend.

This cheese is more calm than anything solitary.

We clearly are loud. We are the postal system.

You were begotten in a vague war

No, don’t worry. Your life will change.

He lets cleverness exceed decent levels.

This thing, this land.

Yes? Yes. How?

I found myself astray in a dark wood.

Ring the busy bell.

I looked at myself and thought

All manatees are created equi-distant.

pomegranates under the rubberband

It all started when we were brought here.