Essential pleasures : a new anthology of poems to read aloud
(Book + CD)

CD track listing. To my dear and loving husband / Anne Bradstreet ; Of money / Barnabe Googe ; His excuse for loving / Ben Jonson ; My picture left in Scotland / Ben Jonson ; Tichborne's elegy / Chidiock Tichborne ; Song (When I am dead, my dearest) / Christina Rossetti ; from Jubilate agno (My cat Jeoffry) / Christopher Smart ; Eros turannos / Edwin Arlington Robinson ; Wild nights--wild nights--

(249), The poets light but lamps--

(883), and The soul selects her own society--

(303) / Emily Dickinson ; Epitaph on Sir Philip Sidney / Fulke Greville ; Bethsabe's song / George Pelle ; Ode to a nightingale / John Keats ; To autumn / John Keats ; Methought I saw my late espousèd saint / John Milton ; A married state / Katherine Philips ; My true love hath my heart and I have his / Philip Sidney ; Now winter nights enlarge / Thomas Campion ; from Song of myself (1 & 52) / Walt Whitman ; Epitaph on the Earl of Leicester / Sir Walter Raleigh ; On seeing a hair of Lucretia Borgia / Walter Savage Landor ; Epitaph on a hare / William Cowper.

Part I, Short lines, frequent rhymes. Infant joy / William Blake

Sick rose / William Blake

We real cook / Gwendolyn Brooks

When we two parted / George Gordon, Lord Byron

Now winter nights enlarge / Thomas Campion

For my contemporaries / J.V. Cunningham

Wild nights - wild nights! / Emily Dickinson

"Hope" is the thing with feathers / Emily Dickinson

Soul selects her own society / Emily Dickinson

If you were coming in the fall / Emily Dickinson

Poets light but lamps / Emily Dickinson

Song (sweetest love, I do not go) / John Donne

Gospel / Rita Dove

Dust of snow / Robert Frost

To earthward / Robert Frost

Tamer and hawk / Thom Gunn

Self-unseeing / Thomas Hardy

Ring presented to Julia / Robert Hetrick

Spring and fall / Gerard Manley Hopkins

Otherwise / Jane Kenyon

Facing it / Yysef Komunyakaa

Song on porcelain / Czeslaw Milosz

In time of plague / Thomas Nashe

Fairy-land / Edgar Allan Poe

Lie / Sir Walter Raleigh

My papa's waltz / Theodore Roethke

Wish for a young wife / Theodore Roethke

Needle / Charles Simic

To Mistress Margery Wentworth / John Skelton

Question / May Swenson

To one that had little wit / George Turberville

Fine work with pitch and copper / / William Carlos Williams

Poem ("As the cat") / William Carlos Williams

To waken an old lady / William Carlos Williams

Coat / William Butler Yeats.

Part II, Long lines, strophes, parallelisms. from Ecclesiastes: or, the Preacher

City limits / A.R. Ammons

Epitaph on Sir Philip Sidney / Fulke Greville

When you're lying awake with a dismal headache / W.S. Gilbert

Supermarket in California / Allen Ginsberg

Afterwards / Thomas Hardy

Spelt from Sibyl's leaves / Gerard Manley Hopkins

Proverb / Kenneth Koch

Bavarian gentians / D.H. Lawrence

Fish / Marianne Moore

Columbus / Ogden Nash

Autumn hath all the summer's fruitful treasure / Thomas Nashe

I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra / Ishmael Reed

from Jubilante agno [my cat Jeoffry] / Christopher Smart

Lover exhorteth his lady to take time, while time is / George Tuberville

Liver / Charles Harper Webb

from Song of myself / Walt Whitman

Dog / C.K. Williams

Singing / C.K. Williams

Self portrait on a rocky mount / C.D. Wright.

Part III, Ballads, repetitions, refrains. Cruel mother

House that Jack built

There was a man

Western wind

It was raining in the capital / John Ashbery

Burglar of Babylon / Elizabeth Bishop

Chemin de Fer / Elizabeth Bishop

Low barometer / Robert Bridges

Green grow the rashes, O / Robert Burns

Jabberwocky / Lewis Carroll

Epitaph on a hare / William Cowper

If you / Robert Creeley

Bunches of grapes / Walter de la Mare

When I was fair and young / Queen Elizabeth I

Concord hymn / Ralph Waldo Emerson

Lullaby of a lover / George Gascoigne

Darkling thrush / Thomas Hardy

Oxen / Thomas Hardy

Invictus / W.E. Henley

Battle-hymn of the Republic / Julia Ward Howe

Seventh / Attila Jozsef

Fado / J.D. McClatchy

Ballad of Aunt Geneva / Marilyn Nelson

Village of reason / Michael Palmer

Samurai song / Robert Pinsky

Nature, that washed her hands in milk / Sir Walter Raleigh

Eros Turannos / Edwin Arlington Robinson

Miniver Cheevy / Edwin Arlington Robinson

Song (When I am dead, my dearest) / Christina Rossetti

Up-hill / Christina Rossetti

When that I was and a little tiny boy / William Shakespeare

Ballad / Charles Simic

song from The princess (The splendour falls) / Alfred Tennyson

Slumber did my spirit seal / William Wordsworth

Blame not my lute / Thomas Wyatt.

Part IV, Love poems. N.V.N. / Anna Akhmatova

Dover Beach / Matthew Arnold

Variation on the word Sleep / Margaret Atwood

Yoke / Frank Bidart

Marriage for the millennium / Eavan Boland

To my dear and loving husband / Anne Bradstreet

Serenade at the villa / Robert Browning

Follow your saint / Thomas Campion

Body, remember / Constantine Cavafy

Valediciton: forbidding mourning / John Donne

Good morrow / John Donne

Fine knacks for ladies / John Dowland

How many paltry, foolish, painted things (Sonnet 6) / Michael Drayton

Three sorts of serpents do resemble thee / Michael Drayton

Love song: I and thou / Alan Dugan

Little brown baby / Paul Laurence Dunbar

Putting in the seed / Robert Frost

Measuring the tyger / Jack Gilbert

Mock orange / Louise Gluck

Yoko / Thomas Gunn

Those winter Sundays / Robert Hayden

Skunk / Seamus Heaney

Familiarization is not good - it / Lyn Hejinian

Delight in disorder / Robert Herrick

Upon Julia's clothes / Robert Herrick

His excuse for loving / Ben Jonson

My picture left in Scotland / Ben Jonson

Garden by moonlight / Amy Lowell

Letter / Amy Lowell

To his coy mistress / Andrew Marvell

She / James McMichael

Methought I saw my late espoused saint / John Milton

Lover: a ballad / Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Illusion / Carol Muske-Dukes

Hardness scale / Joyce Peseroff

To my excellent Lucasia, on our friendship / Katherine Philips

Epistle to Miss Blount / Alexander Pope

River-merchant's wife: a letter / Ezra Pound

Artfully adorned Aphrodite / Sappho

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought (Sonnet 30) / William Shakespeare

What is your substance, whereof are you made (Sonnet 53) / William Shakespeare

To me, fair friend, you never can be old (Sonnet 104) / William Shakespeare

My true love hath my heart and I have his / Philip Sidney

final soliloquy of the interior paramour / Wallace Stevens

Love song / William Carlos Williams

Sappho / William Carlos Williams

My muse now happy, lay thyself to rest (Sonnet 103) / Mary Wroth

Madam, withouten many words / Thomas Wyatt

They flee from me / Thomas Wyatt

Her triumph / William Butler Yeats

Crazy Jane gown old looks at the dancers / William Butler Yeats.

Part V, Stories. Man-moth / Elizabeth Bishop

Poison tree / William Blake

Chimney-sweeper (from Songs of innocence) / William Blake

Harlem happiness / Sterling Brown

My last duchess / Robert Browning

Waiting for the barbarians / Constantine Cavafy

Badger / John Clare

tomatoes / Stephen Dobyns

Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock / T.S. Eliot

Days / Ralph Waldo Emerson

Gilgamesh, I: the story / David Ferry

Home burial / Robert Frost

Tributaries / Louise Gluck

Story about the body / Robert Hass

Frederick Douglass / Robert Hayden

Woofer (When I consider the African-American) / Terrance Hayes

Love unknown / George Herbert

Vulture / Robinson Jeffers

Dying speech of an old philosopher / Walter Savage Landor

Paul Revere's ride / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Michelangelo: To Giovanni da Pistoia when the author was painting the vault of the Sistine Chapel / Gail Mazur

What he thought / Heather McHugh

Bible study: 71 B.C.E. / Sharold Olds

Dulce et decorum est / Wilfred Owen

Alone / Edgar Allan Poe

Captain Carpenter / John Crowe Ransom

Dickhead / Michael Ryan

Ozymandias / Percy Bysshe Shelley

Not waving but drowning / Stevie Smith

Old man leaves party / Mark Strand

Lost pilot / James Tate

Ulysses / Alfred Tennyson

Casey at the bat / Ernest Lawrence Thayer

Tichborne's elegy / Chidiock Tichborne

Hen / Ellen Voigt

Dedication for a plot of ground / William Carlos Williams

This is just to say / William Carlos Williams

Night wash / Anne Winters

Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight / Yvor Winters

Ars poetica: some recent criticism / James Wright.

Part VI, Odes, complaints, and celebrations. Rights of woman / Anna Laetitia Barbauld

For the twentieth century / Frank Bidart

Tyger / William Blake

Boy breaking glass / Gwendolyn Brooks

Startled into life like fire / Charles Bukowski

What is a day / Thomas Camlion

Homage to my hips / Lucille Clifton

Kubla Khan / Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Some days / Billy Collins

Caesarea / Alfred Corn

Lines written during a period of insanity / William Cowper

to Brooklyn Bridge / Hart Crane

Yet do I marvel / Countee Cullen

Buffalo Bill's / E.E. Cummings

For the last wolverine / James Dickey

Days of me / Stuart Dischell

Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae / Ernest Dowson

My mother would be a falconress / Robert Duncan

America / Allen Ginsberg

Prayer / Jorie Graham

Church monuments / George Herbert

Virtue / George Herbert

Ode for hi / Robert Herrick

Corinna's going a-Maying / Robert Herrick

God's grandeur / Gerard Manley Hopkins

Pied beauty / Gerard Manley Hopkins

Negro speaks of rivers / Langston Hughes

Rondeau / Leigh Hunt

On the death of Dr. Robert Levet / Samuel Johnson

Ode to himself / Ben Jonson

Hour-glas / Ben Jonson

Ode on a Grecian urn / John Keats

Ode to a nightingale / John Keats

To autumn / John Keats

To my twenties / Kenneth Koch

On seeing a hair of Lucretia Borgia / Walter Savage Landor

Past ruin'd Ilion Helen lives / Walter Savage Landor

Piano / D.H. Larence

Where is the angel? / Denise Levertov

Shunk hour / Robert Lowell

In Houston / Gail Mazur

Drunk in the furnace / W.S. Merwin

Moy sand and gravel / Paul Muldoon

Poet's work / Lorine Niedecker

Naphtha / Frank O'Hara

Pslam / George Oppen

Chemo side effects: memory / Elise Partridge

Bethsabe's song / George Peele

Nick and the candlestick / Sylvia Plath

On the cards and dice / Sir Walter Raleigh

Diving into the wreck / Adrienne Rich

Archaic torso of Apollo / Rainer Maria Rilke

For my father / Philip Schultz

Glories of our blood and state / James Shirley

Lamentation on Ur / Tom Sleigh

Behaving like a Jew / Gerald Stern

Madame La Fleurie / Wallace Stevens

Snow man / Wallace Stevens

Land of counterpane / Robert Louis Stevenson

Star / Jane Taylor

Italian music in Dakota / Walt Whitman

Turtle / William Carlos Williams

Lines / William Wordsworth

Lake isle of Innisfree / William Butler Yeats.

Part VII, Parodies, ripostes, jokes, and insults. On being fired again / Erin Belieu

Dream song / John Berryman

Several voices out of a cloud / Louise Bogan

Doctor fell / Thomas Brown

On some South African novelists / Roy Campbell

You don't know what love is / Raymond Carver

Marriage / Gregory Corso

Epigrams 42, 60, 62 / J.V. Cunningham

How we heard the name / Alan Dugan

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot / T.S. Eliot

Zero-account / David Gewanter

Of money / Barnabe Googe

Afterwards / Seamus Heaney

Variations on a theme by William Carlos Williams / Kenneth Koch

This be the verse / Philip Larkin

How pleasant to know Mr. Lear / Edward Lear

I, being born a woman and distressed / Edna St. Vincent Millay

Reasons that induced Dr. Swift to write a poem called the Lady's dressing room / Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

To be liked by you would be a calamity / Marianne Moore

Married state / Katherine Philips

Hustler speaks of places / Carl Phillips

Lake isle / Ezra Pound

Epitaph on the Earl of Leicester / Sir Walter Raleigh

Chard Whitlow / Henry Reed

Academic / Theodore Roethke

Who's on first? / Lloyd Schwartz

Old Jake / Alan Shapiro

Thoughts about the person from Porlock / Stevie Smith

Pleasures of merely circulating / Wallace Stevens

Eating poetry / Mark Strand

Lady's dressing room / Jonathan Swift

Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, dec'd. / Mark Twain

Grecian kindness / John Wilmot

Upon nothing / John Wilmot

Personals / C.D. Wright

Scholars / William Butler Yeats.