In this installment, Adrian Blevins reads “Infant Sorrow” by William Blake. Blevins’s The Brass Girl Brouhaha (2003) won the 2004 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Blevins is also the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers' Foundation Award for poetry, the Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction, and a Bright Hill Press chapbook award for The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes (1995; 1996). Her poems and essays have appeared in The Utne Reader, The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Ontario Review, Poet Lore, The Drunken Boat, Salon.com, and other magazines and journals. New work is forthcoming in Southern Cultures, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Rivendell, and Poetry.

William Blake, "Infant Sorrow"

My mother groan'd! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my father's hands,
Striving against my swaddling bands,
Bound and weary, I thought best
To sulk upon my mother's breast.

In this installment, Jennifer Grotz reads “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats. Grotz is the author of Cusp (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), winner of the Bakeless Prize for Poetry and the Natalie Ornish Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters and the letterpress chapbook Not Body (Urban Editions 2001). Her poems, reviews, and translations appear in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best American Poetry. She is the newly appointed assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and is currently completing a Ph.D. at the University of Houston where she organizes the Krakow Poetry Seminar, an international gathering to discuss the cross-pollination of American and Polish poetries.

John Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale"

1.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

2.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

3.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

4.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

5.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

6.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.

7.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

8.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

In this installment, Michelle Boisseau reads “To Autumn” by John Keats. Boisseau was educated at Ohio University (B.A., M.A.) and the University of Houston (Ph.D.). Her books of poetry include Trembling Air (University of Arkansas Press, 2003); Understory, winner of the Morse Prize (Northeastern University Press, 1996);and No Private Life (Vanderbilt, 1990). She is also author of the popular text Writing Poems (Longman), in its 6th edition.  Her poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Threepenny Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Poetry, and Ploughshares. Her work has received a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship and awards from the Poetry Society of America. She is a professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City where she also is associate editor of BkMk Press and the coordinator of the Creative Writing program.

John Keats, "To Autumn"

1.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

2.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

3.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

In this installment, Jonah Ruskin reads “Ah! Sun-flower” by William Blake. Jonah Raskin is the author of eight books, including most recently American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' and the Making of the Beat Generation, which The San Francisco Chronicle named one of the best 100 books of 2004. The chair of the Communication Studies Department at Sonoma State University (SSU) and the book critic for the Santa Rosa, California, Press Democrat, he has published three poetry chapbooks, "Jonah Raskin's Greatest Hits," "More Poems, Better Poems," and "Bone Love." At SSU, he teaches media law and journalism and co-ordinates the student internship program.

William Blake, "Ah! Sun-flower"

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller's journey is done;

Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow
Arise from their graves and aspire
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.