The ode is so freeing! So exuberant! And in a column about gay poets, exuberance brings us straight to Frank O’Hara.

Somehow at ten, the hypothetical future does not include so much bruising. Coi fish dish sets and mess kits seem practical. But even more hypnotizing is the hypothetical past. Potential is limitless. Changing one thing throws you into a completely different present.

I suppose I wanted to be part of the cultural moment. To feel connected to the parts of this city I never bother to appreciate. It took a lot of willpower to head down there, on my own, into the swarm of tourists and impeding rain. But I felt unsatisfied by the trip. I never got out of my head.

Mark Doty is one of the poets I go to in moments like this, when I’m struggling to wrap my arms around an experience. “Human Figures” is one of those poems. It embodies that feeling of moving through a city and trying to fit the strange, private moments of others into your understanding. Masterfully, it succeeds— tying messy, disconnections together in a spectacular arrival by the end. It is also a mysterious poem, much more moving than I expect, each time I read it.

On those hot days Eve — curious Eve — always carried a flower. She snuffed it and snuffed it, twirled it in her fingers, laid it against her cheek, held it to her lips, tickled Katie’s neck with it, and ended, finally, by pulling it to pieces and eating it, petal by petal.

Bishop is so technically astonishing in her poems, she is often considered to belong to a whole new echelon of inaccessibility: a poet’s poet. A poet whose work does more to instruct other poets on how to write than it does contribute to a dialogue about the human experience. But I think what saves her from being a poet’s poet is the effortless was she uses form.

We’ve got two lesbian poet laureates in one year! Taken together, they represent a big step for gay poets, and two very different poetic sensibilities.

I thought I saw my mother
in the lesbian bar
with a salt gray crew cut, a nose stud
and a tattoo of a parrot on her arm.
She was sitting at a corner table,
leaning forward to ignite, on someone’s match,
one of those low-tar things she used to smoke,

For your Tuesday reading pleasure, I bring you “Practicing,” by Marie Howe:

I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,
a song for what we did on the floor in the basement

In high school, I imagine we read “What Happens to a Dream Deferred” because the language is straightforward, it is useful to illustrate the use of simile, and it’s historically important. I imagine many people in my generation can almost recite it from memory.  But there’s something rote about that way I’ve learned his work. And I realize I’ve ever considered any of Hughes poetry removed from the oddly canonized place his work lives in elementary education.

My professor had a disarming South Philly twang and used a carousel slide projector in our tiny, windowless room that smelled like dry erase markers. I was one of three students in the class, and we were all afraid of his earnest intensity and his bloodshot eyes and the way he yelled at us about Vorticism and Imagism and other isms.