In honor of the 20th anniversary of National Poetry Month, we asked Entropy writers to share with us one of the first poems they ever read that got them excited about what poetry could do or changed the way that they thought about poetry, and one of their own poems that they are particularly proud of, still resonates with them, or an early poem.
INFLUENTIAL POEM:
Ariel
By Sylvia Plath
Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.
God’s lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow
Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,
Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks—
Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else
Hauls me through air—
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.
White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.
And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child’s cry
Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
A POEM FROM THE AUTHOR:
A sonnet I wrote in college, for Rae Armantrout’s class, no less.
Feign
They all sat much like this; unsatisfied,
sun on knees day sun’s vague heat and staring
at the wind, but I with “yes of course” lied;
the sticky consent in my voice glaring.
And at the needle head of thickening night
lay afraid of movement at the slightest
lead balls rolling in my stomach despite
night being but a day’s descent at best.
Reclaiming power over night and day
I unhinged the seated butterfly quick
its flimsy wings I plucked and threw away
into the dark; I clutched my beating stick.
But still felt false pitch in my childlike voice
for I could not know what I did by choice.
