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FURTHER READING
Poems by Elaine Equi
Bent Orbit
The Libraries Didn't Burn
Spring
Endymion, Book I, [A thing of beauty is a joy for ever]
by John Keats
A Blessing
by James Wright
Alcove
by John Ashbery
Another Attempt at Rescue
by M. L. Smoker
Birds Again
by Jim Harrison
Black Petal
by Li-Young Lee
Butterfly Catcher
by Tina Cane
Chansons Innocentes: I
by E. E. Cummings
City That Does Not Sleep
by Federico García Lorca
Diary [Surface]
by Rachel Zucker
Each year
by Dora Malech
Equinox
by Joy Harjo
From you have I been absent in the spring... (Sonnet 98)
by William Shakespeare
If a Wilderness
by Carl Phillips
In cold spring air
by Reginald Gibbons
In the Memphis Airport
by Timothy Steele
Lines Written in Early Spring
by William Wordsworth
Morning News
by Marilyn Hacker
Prologue of the Earthly Paradise
by William Morris
Song On May Morning
by John Milton
Spring
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Spring and All [By the road to the contagious hospital]
by William Carlos Williams
Spring Day [Bath]
by Amy Lowell
Spring in New Hampshire
by Claude McKay
Spring is like a perhaps hand
by E. E. Cummings
spring love noise and all [excerpt]
by David Antin
Spring Snow
by Arthur Sze
Springing
by Marie Ponsot
The Enkindled Spring
by D. H. Lawrence
[O were my love yon Lilac fair]
by Robert Burns
Related Prose
Books Noted:
Elaine Equi, Click and Clone
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National Poetry Month  
by Elaine Equi

When a poem
speaks by itself,
it has a spark

and can be considered
part of a divine
conversation.

Sometimes the poem weaves
like a basket around
two loaves of yellow bread.

"Break off a piece
of this April with its
raisin nipples," it says. 

"And chew them slowly
under your pillow.
You belong in bed with me."

On the other hand,
when a poem speaks
in the voice of a celebrity

it is called television
or a movie.
"There is nothing to see,"

say Robert De Niro,
though his poem bleeds
all along the edges

like a puddle 
crudely outlined
with yellow tape

at the crime scene
of spring.
"It is an old poem," he adds.

"And besides,
I was very young
when I made it."



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From The Cloud of Knowable Things by Elaine Equi. Copyright © 2003 by Elaine Equi. Published by Coffee House Press. Used with the permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
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