Digital+Poetry+Project

Digital Poetry Project Your List of Possible Poems:

"The Leap", James Dickey (suicide, hoop skirts, childhood, and what it means to be a woman in the 50s) (http://www.jstor.org/pss/818332)

// James Dickey // The only thing I have of Jane MacNaughton Is one instant of a dancing-class dance. She was the fastest runner in the seventh grade, My scrapbook says even when boys were beginning To be as big as the girls But I do not have her running in my mind, Though Frances Lane is there, Agnes Fraser, Fat Betty Lou Black in the boys-against-girls Relays we ran at recess: she must have run Like the other girls, with her skirts tucked up  So they would be like bloomers, But I cannot tell; that part of her is gone. What I do have is when she came, With the hem of her skirt where it should be  For a young lady, into the annual dance Of the dancing class we all hated, and with a light Grave leap, jumped up and touched the end Of one of the paper-ring decorations To see if she could reach it. She could, And reached me now as well, hanging in my mind From a brown chain of brittle paper, thin And muscular, wide-mouthed, eager to prove Whatever it proves when you leap In a new dress, a new womanhood, among the boys Whom you easily left in the dust Of the passionless playground. If I said I saw In the paper where Jane MacNaughton Hill, Mother of four, leapt to her death from a window Of a downtown hotel, and that her body crushed-in The top of a parked taxi, and that I held Without trembling a picture of her lying cradled In that papery steel as though lying in the grass, One shoe idly off, arms folded across her breast, I would not believe myself. I would say The convenient thing, that it was a bad dream Of maturity, to see that eternal process
 * The Leap **

Most obsessively wrong with the world
Come out of her light, earth-spurning feet Grown heavy: would say that in the dusty heels Of the playground some boy who did not depend On speed of foot, caught and betrayed her. Jane, stay where you are in my first mind: It was odd in that school, at that dance. I and the other slow-footed yokels sat in corners Cutting rings out of drawing paper Before you leapt in your new dress And touched the end of something I began, Above the couples struggling on the floor, New men and women clutching at each other And prancing foolishly as bears: hold on  To that ring I made for you, Jane-- My feet are nailed to the ground By dust I swallowed thirty years ago-- While I examine my hands.

"Convergence of the Twain", Thomas Hardy (Titanic + iceberg = man's arrogance down the tubes) "Photograph of My Father in His 22nd Year", Raymond Carver (What a son can learn about his father through looking at old pictures of him) "To Helen", Edgar Allen Poe (Poe's first crush dies and EAP gets epic) "Helen", H.D. "Easter Wings", George Herbert "The Pulley", George Herbert "On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer", John Keats "Out, Out", Robert Frost "Musee des Beaux Arts", W.H. Auden "Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God", John Donne "Dover Beach", Matthew Arnold "Tell all the Truth but Tell it slant", Emily Dickenson "Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave", Thomas Hardy "We Wear the mask", Paul Lawrence Dunbar "The Unknown Citizen", W.H. Auden "Digging", Seamus Heaney "One Art", Elizabeth Bishop "Dreams", Paul Lawrence Dunbar

"Dream within a Dream", Poe "The Fall of Rome", W.H Auden "When God Lets My Body Be" ee cummings "A Passing Glimpse" Robert Frost "What's the Railroad to Me" Henry David Thoreau "The Mosquito", John Updike "Richard Cory", EA Robinson "If", ee cummings "Terence, This is Stupid Stuff", Housman