v. 1. America / Walt Whitman The lake isle of Innisfree ; The song of the old mother / William Butler Yeats The road not taken ; Birches ; The gift outright / Robert Frost If I told him : a completed portrait of Picasso / Gertrude Stein So & so reclining on her couch / Wallace Stevens The red wheelbarrow ; To Elsie / William Carlos Williams Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (excerpt) / Ezra Pound Bird-witted / Marianne Moore Recuerdo ; Love is not all / Edna St. Vincent Millay next to of course god america ; anyone lived in a pretty how town / e.e. cummings To Juan at the winter solstice / Robert Graves The opening of the Battle of Gettysburg / Steven Vincent Benet The Negro speaks of rivers ; Ballad of the gypsy ; Mulatto / Langston Hughes Portrait of the artist as a prematurely old man / Ogden Nash Love recognized / Robert Penn Warren King of the river / Stanley Kunitz In memory of W.B. Yeats (Part 1) / W.H. Auden

v. 2. I knew a woman ; Elegy for Jane / Theodore Roethke Rough ; Thoughts during an air raid / Stephen Spender My sisters, o my sisters / May Sarton In our time ; Despisals ; The ballad of orange and grape / Muriel Rukeyser The world is so difficult to give up ; This is the solution, to be happy with slaughter ; Here I am with mike in hand, shooting down the rapids ; I killed a fly ; What about dying? / David Ignatow Scars ; It is / William Stafford Do not go gentle into that good night ; If I were tickled by the rub of love / Dylan Thomas Happiness / John Ciardi

(v. 2. cont.) The old flame ; Skunk hour ; Epilogue / Robert Lowell Crossing over / William Meredith See it was like this when ; Underwear / Lawrence Ferlinghetti The secret of my endurance / Charles Bukowski Thanksgrieving / Howard Nemerov Sonnet for minimalists / Mona Van Duyn Shame ; Apology ; Love calls us to the things of this world / Richard Wilbur American haikus (excerpt) / Jack Kerouac with Al Cohn & Zoot Simms Monet refuses the operation / Lisel Mueller America / Allen Ginsberg Song / John Ashbery After making love we hear footsteps ; Last gods / Galway Kinnell

v. 3. The river bees / W.S. Merwin

A blessing / James Wright

The truth the dead know ; All my pretty ones / Anne Sexton

Phenomenal woman / Maya Angelou

Even in Paris (excerpt) / Richard Howard

Diving into the wreck / Adrienne Rich

Omeros (excerpt) / Derek Walcott

The song of the taste ; How poetry comes to me ; Why I take good care of my Macintosh computer / Gary Snyder

Daddy ; Ariel / Sylvia Plath

The greatest poem in the world / David Ray

An oddly lovely day alone / John Updike

Learning about Easter and Passover / Dan Jaffe

Bang, bang