Mark Yakich is Gregory F. Curtin, S.J. Distinguished Professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, USA, where he has been editor of New Orleans Review since 2012. He is the author of the poetry collections Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (2004), The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (2008), and Spiritual Exercises (2019); a novel, A Meaning for Wife (2011); and Object Lessons book on Football (Bloomsbury, 2022), and a guide to reading and writing poems, Poetry: A Survivor's Guide (Bloomsbury, 2016/2022).

"This companionable anthology shows how poetry is a discussion, alive and flowing, and how poems speak to, with, and sometimes over one another. If you are a teacher, this is the anthology you wish you had as a student - a text that doesn't try to survey entire time periods or aesthetic areas, but one that places side-by-side poems that speak to each other over time as well as to today's readers. Header notes for each section provide critical commentary and guidance, with discussion and writing suggestions, framing the poems within their given topic and enticing readers"--

Introduction
READING
Poetic Aims
"Ars Poetica" by Archibald MacLeish
"Ars Poetica #100: I Believe" by Elizabeth Alexander
"Ars Poetica" by José Olivarez
"Poetry" by Marianne Moore
Biography
"Memoir" by Vijay Seshadri
"Diving into the Wreck" by Adrienne Rich
"the children of immigrants" by Lenelle Moïse
"Ontology of Change and Eng, the Original Siamese Twins" by Cathy Park Hong
Close Reading
"Introduction to Poetry" by Billy Collins
"Vertigo" by Anne Stevenson
"Viewpoint" by Mahmoud Darwish
"His Days Go by the Way Her Years" by Ye Mimi
"Someone I'm Afraid Of" by Zaki Ovais
Emotion
"Western Wind" by Anonymous
"Blues Haiku [let me be yo wil]" by Sonia Sanchez
"Not Once" by Sharon Olds
"Bird-Understander" by Craig Arnold
Pattern and Variation
"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" by William Shakespeare (from Macbeth)
"The Tyger" by William Blake
"One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop
"Ecclesiastes" by Khaled Mattawa
"katherine with the lazy eye. short. and not a good poet" by francine j. harris
Ineffability
"Limitations" by Henrietta Cordelia Ray
Excerpt from The Book of Questions by Pablo Neruda
"The Snow Man" by Wallace Stevens
"Writer" by Joe Wenderoth
Sound Work
"Love (III)" by George Herbert
"Musée des Beaux Arts" by W.H. Auden
"Altruism" by Molly Peacock
"Widening Income Inequality" by Frederick Seidel
Rhythm
"Shards" by Aline Murray Kilmer
"Dulce et decorum est" by Wilfred Owen
"Any Lit" by Harryette Mullen
"Gyre's Galax" by N.H. Pritchard
Enjambment
"ode to the flute" by Ross Gay
"Advice to Pallbearers" by Benjamin Gucciardi
"what remains two" by Truong Tran
"Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form" by Matthea Harvey
The Line
"Facing It" by Yusef Komunyakaa
"The Secret" by Denise Levertov
"In Strength Sweetness" by Elizabeth Willis
"The Boy Calls Twilight" by Shane McCrae
The Lyric
"Fragment 22" by Sappho
"Love Songs (section III)" by Mina Loy
"This Room and Everything in It" by Li-Young Lee
"Having a Coke with You" by Frank O'Hara
"Horizon" by Kim Hyesoon
"How (Not) to Speak of God" by Mary Szybist
Metaphor
"85" from The Exeter Book of Riddles
"Psalm 23"
"Now You Need Me" by Virginia Hamilton Adair
"Here I Am, Lord" by Michael Chitwood
"No Metaphor" by Bryan Walpert
"Punctum / Metaphor" by Carolina Ebeid
"Apocatastasis" by G.C. Waldrep
Ambiguity
"All Your Horses" by Kay Ryan
"An Argument about Horses" by Kedaranth Singh
"Language Lesson 1976" by Heather McHugh
"Paradoxes and Oxymorons" by John Ashbery
Dickinson
"Tell all the truth but tell it slant (1283)" by Emily Dickinson
"After great pain, a formal feeling comes (372)" by Emily Dickinson
"Because I could not stop for Death (479)" by Emily Dickinson
"I cannot live with You (640)" by Emily Dickinson
Classics
"Cantico del Sole" by Ezra Pound
"Romantic Poetry" by Diane Seuss
Myths
"We Were All Odysseus in Those Days" by Amorak Huey
"Waiting for Icarus" by Muriel Rukeyser
"Ganymede" by Jericho Brown
"Confession" by Leila Chatti
"Creation Myth" by Mathias Svalina
Great Books
"A Great Book can be read again and again." from A Pillow Book by Suzanne Buffam
"One Book" by Mary Ruefle
Whitman
"I Saw in Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing" by Walt Whitman
"A Supermarket in California" by Allen Ginsberg
"Ode to the Whitman Line 'When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd'" by Kimiko Hahn
Imagery
"Haiku" by Jyoin
"The Garden by Moonlight" by Amy Lowell
"Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" by James Wright
"Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver
"My voice will weigh on you" by Irma Pineda
"Eight Buffalo" by Cecilia Llompart
Roses
"[somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond]" by E. E. Cummings
"One Perfect Rose" by Dorothy Parker
"Hothouse" by Raymond McDaniel
Prose Poetry
"Crate" by Francis Ponge
"The Adventures of a Turtle" by Russell Edson
"Part of Eve's Discussion" by Marie Howe
"Hive Minds" by Jennifer L. Knox
"A BOX." by Gertrude Stein
Narrative
"Borges and I" by Jorge Luis Borges
"The Silence" by Timothy Liu
"Hunting Words with My Father [Preface]" by Mukoma wa Ngugi
"38" by Layli Long Soldier
Criticism and Theory
"No Theory" by David Ignatow
"Platonic Love" by Curt Anderson
Pessoa
"Autopsychography" by Fernando Pessoa
"Others Narrate with Lyres or Harps" by Fernando Pessoa
"The Tobacco Shop" by Fernando Pessoa
Political Poetry
"The Tragic Condition of the Statue of Liberty" by Bernadette Mayer
"Ginsberg" by Julia Vinograd
"The Last Analysis; or, I Woke Up" by Jameson Fitzpatrick
"The War Works Hard" by Dunya Mikhail
Excerpt from The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion by Edmond Jabès
Aesthetics
"Why We Oppose Pockets for Women" by Alice Duer Miller
"Opposition" by Mitsuharu Kaneko
"Dramaturgy" by Jason Schneiderman
Reader Response
"Napoleon" by Miroslav Holub
"A Rugged Coast" by Edward Mullany
"The Politics of Narrative: Why I Am A Poet" by Lynn Emanuel
"The Price of a Finger" by Wang Ping
Classroom Reading
"Early Poem" by Lucy Ives
Poetry Readings
"At the Student Poetry Reading" by Kim Stafford
"Nondisabled Demands" by The Cyborg Jillian Weise
"Poetry Reading" by Anna Swir
Spirituality
"Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note" by Amira Baraka
"Your Animal" by Gerald Stern
"Goodtime Jesus" by James Tate
"Making Applesauce with My Dead Grandmother" by Bianca Stone
"Down Jacket God" by Moon Bo Young
"Substance, Shadow, and Spirit" by T'ao Ch'ien
Flight
"Waiting for a Ride" by Gary Snyder
"Gate A-4" by Naomi Shihab Nye
"Reading Moby-Dick at 30,000 Feet" by Tony Hoagland
"Lanro Temple" by Chen Xianfa

WRITING
First Principles
"so you want to be a writer?" by Charles Bukowski
"no more grandma poems" by Yolanda Wisher
Form
"The Fish" by Marianne Moore
Excerpt from Chapter E of Eunoia by Christian Bök
"Personals" by C.D. Wright
"what's not to liken?" by Evie Shockley
Sonnet
Excerpt from Nets by Jen Bervin
"Sonnet 19" by John Milton
"Sonnet 132" by Gaspara Stampa
"Love is Not All (Sonnet XXX)" by Edna St. Vincent Millay
"shattered sonnet #3 " by Olena Kalytiak Davis
"American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin" by Terrance Hayes
Identity
"This Be The Verse" by Philip Larkin
"Where Do You Come From?" by Meena Alexander
"Poppies in October" by Sylvia Plath
"The Red Poppy" by Louise Glück
Self-Expression
Excerpt from Song of Myself (1892 version) by Walt Whitman
"Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou
"'You Should Write a Poem About That,' They Say" by Emilia Phillips
"The Self in Poetry: A GNAT (Grossly Non-Academic Talk) with a Weaving Metaphor" by Rachel Zucker
Memory
"The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost
"Standing by a Shelf" by Brandon D. Johnson
"Theories of Time and Space" by Natasha Trethewey
"My Father's Mother Asks Him to Forget the War" by John Z. Guzlowski
"Digging" by Seamus Heaney
Sublimation
"When I Am Asked" by Lisel Mueller
"the mother" by Gwendolyn Brooks
"How to Write the Great American Indian Novel" by Sherman Alexie
"Dreams" by Ashley Durant
Imitation
Excerpt from Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart
"Arrival" by Jeffrey Harrison
"To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell
"Coy Mistress" by Annie Finch
"Variations on a Theme by Elizabeth Bishop" by John Murillo
Avant-Garde
"To make a dadaist poem" by Tristan Tzara
Revision
"Revision" by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat
Poet-Teachers
"Pencil" by Marianne Boruch
"Theme for English B" by Langston Hughes
Professionalization
"With Tenure" by David Lehman
"Portrait of an Administrator with Strategic Plan and Office Supplies" by Jehanne Dubrow
Literary Magazines
"Rejections" by Etheridge Knight
Publication
"Publication Date" by Franz Wright
Series, Sequence
"On Living" by Nazim Hikmet
"Children (from Holocaust)" by Charles Reznikoff
Excerpt from My Life by Lyn Hejinian
"Series as Opposed to Sequence" by Mary Leader
Collections
"Dedication" by Czeslaw Milosz
Poetic Practices
"You Fixed It" by Zeina Hashem Beck
"Writing Prompt" by Michael Torres
Moods
"Catullus: Odio et Amo" by Frank Bidart
"Catullus: Excrucior" by Frank Bidart
"Catullus: Id faciam" by Frank Bidart
Excerpt from Please Bury Me in This by Allison Benis White
"Self-Portrait with Profanity" by Safia Elhillo
"A Brief for the Defense" by Jack Gilbert
"Happiness" by Jane Kenyon
Depression
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot
"McDonalds Is Impossible" by Chelsea Martin
"Psychoanalysis: An Elegy" by Jack Spicer
"Cotton in a Pill Bottle" by Dean Young
"To Sleep" by John Keats
"Solitary Observation Brought Back from a Sojourn in Hell" by Louise Bogan
Meditation
"Zazen on Ching-t'ing Mountain" by Li Bai
"To Be a Good Buddhist Is Ensnarement" by Jenny Xie
"Meditation at Lagunitas" by Robert Hass
"Meditation Denying Everything" by Katie Peterson
Procrastination
"The Unwritten" by W.S. Merwin
End Notes
"Ornithology" by Ron Koertge
"All the Generations Before Me" by Yehuda Amichai
"Things No One Knows" by Wanda Coleman
Excerpt from OBIT by Victoria Chang
"Mourning" by Carolyn Forché
"Under a Certain Little Star" by Wislawa Szymborska

Notes
Acknowledgements
Index of Titles and First Lines