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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lloyd Schwartz
Lloyd Schwartz
The author of three collections of poetry, Lloyd Schwartz is also the Classical Music Editor of The Boston Phoenix and a regular commentator on NPR's Fresh Air...
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FURTHER READING
Related Prose
Ars Poetica: Poems about Poetry
Ars Poetica
Epistles, Book II, Ars Poetica
by Horace
A Book Of Music
by Jack Spicer
Adam's Curse
by W. B. Yeats, read by James Wright
Always on the Train
by Ruth Stone
And It Came to Pass
by C. D. Wright
Ars Poetica
by Archibald MacLeish
Ars Poetica
by Eleanor Wilner
Ars Poetica (cocoons)
by Dana Levin
Art Class
by James Galvin
Arthur's Anthology of English Poetry
by Laurence Lerner
Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry
by Howard Nemerov
Blue or Green
by James Galvin
Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks
by Jane Kenyon
Broadway
by Mark Doty
Diving into the Wreck
by Adrienne Rich, read by Anne Waldman
Endnote
by Hayden Carruth
Envoi
by William Meredith
Ground Swell
by Mark Jarman
How to Read a Poem: Beginner's Manual
by Pamela Spiro Wagner
If It All Went Up in Smoke
by George Oppen
Instructions to Be Left Behind
by Marvin Bell
Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins
Languages
by Carl Sandburg
O Black and Unknown Bards
by James Weldon Johnson
On the Subject of Poetry
by W. S. Merwin
Poet's Work
by Lorine Niedecker
Poetry
by Marianne Moore
Poetry Is a Destructive Force
by Wallace Stevens
Prefix: Finding the measure
by Robert Kelly
Some Part of the Lyric
by Gregory Orr
Speech Alone
by Jean Follain
Take the I Out
by Sharon Olds
Teaching the Ape to Write Poems
by James Tate
The Allure of Forms
by Coral Bracho
The Bargain
by Cyrus Cassells
The Bear
by Galway Kinnell
The Poem as Mask
by Muriel Rukeyser
The Poems I Have Not Written
by John Brehm
The Snow and the Plum — II
by Lu Mei-P'o
The Uses of Poetry
by William Carlos Williams
This Bridge, Like Poetry, is Vertigo
by Marie Ponsot
What He Thought
by Heather McHugh
Why I Am Not a Painter
by Frank O'Hara
Workshop
by Billy Collins
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A True Poem  
by Lloyd Schwartz

I'm working on a poem that's so true, I can't show it to anyone.

I could never show it to anyone.

Because it says exactly what I think, and what I think scares me.

Sometimes it pleases me.

Usually it brings misery.

And this poem says exactly what I think.

What I think of myself, what I think of my friends, what I think about my lover.

Exactly.

Parts of it might please them, some of it might scare them.

Some of it might bring misery.

And I don't want to hurt them, I don't want to hurt them.

I don't want to hurt anybody.

I want everyone to love me.

Still, I keep working on it.

Why?

Why do I keep working on it? 

Nobody will ever see it. 

Nobody will ever see it.

I keep working on it even though I can never show it to anybody.

I keep working on it even though someone might get hurt.



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Copyright © 2000 by Lloyd Schwartz. From Cairo Traffic (The University of Chicago Press, 2000). Appears courtesy of the author.
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