Save America With Poetry! Day Four.

Despite all the supposed differences and difficulties

 between men and women,
 twisted and exaggerated endlessly,

for better or worse,

 we continue to find one another.

A Man and A Woman

- Alan Feldman

Between a man and a woman

The anger is greater, for each man would like to sleep

In the arms of each woman who would like to sleep

In the arms of each man, if she trusted him

Not to be schizophrenic, if he trusted her not to be

A hypochondriac, if she trusted him not to leave her

Too soon, if he trusted her not to hold him

Too long, and often women stare at the word men

As it lives in the word women, as if each woman

Had a man inside her and a woe, and has

Crying fits that last for days, not like the crying

Of a man, which lasts a few seconds, and rips the throat

Like a claw––but because the pain differs,

Much as the shape of the body, the woman takes

The suffering of the man for helplessness, the woman’s lack of it

For hardness, the man’s tenderness for deception,

The woman’s lack of acceptance, an act of contempt

Which is really fear, the man’s fear for fickleness,

Yet cars come off the bridge in rivers of light

Each holding a man and a woman.

from: The Happy Genius

Twenty Little Poems That Could Save America

Imagining a renewed role for poetry in the national discourse, and a new canon.

by Tony Hoagland.

Here are TONY HOAGLAND’S twenty poems: Twenty-First. Night. Monday., by Anna Akhmatova God’s Justice, by Anne Carson memory, by Lucille Clifton A Man and a Woman, by Alan Feldman America, by Allen Ginsberg Bamboo and a Bird, by Linda Gregg A Sick Child, by Randall Jarrell Black People & White People Were Said, by Kerry Johannsen Topography, by Sharon Olds Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car, by Dan Pagis Merengue, by Mary Ruefle Ballad of Orange and Grape, by Muriel Rukeyser Waiting for Icarus, by Muriel Rukeyser American Classic, by Louis Simpson The Geraniums, by Genevieve Taggard Song of Speaks-Fluently, by Speaks-Fluently Traveling Through The Dark, by William Stafford When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer, by Walt Whitman Our Dust, by C. D. Wright