So I'm still working through a deck of poetry cards I found in my parents house last year. This week randomness dealt out some good stuff:

MooreIt could not be dangerous to be living
   in a town like this, of simple people,
who have a steeple-jack placing danger
   signs by the church
while he is gliding the solid-
   pointed star, which on the steeple
stands for hope.

“The Steeple-Jack” by Marianne Moore

Moore was born in the outskirts of St. Louis, in Kirkwood, MO. She went to Bryn Mawr College and was a teacher and a librarian. She was also editor of The Dial and considered one of the modernist poets.

WwGreat God! I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

“The World is Too Much With Us” by William Wordsworth

Wordsworth was a leader of English Romanticism movement, primarily a lyrical writer who believed specific experience served up universal meaning. He celebrated humanity, real language and this poem was his “recipe for  poetry as a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" and "emotion recollected in tranquility.’”

GinsbergAmerica I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will end the human war?

Allen Ginsberg from “America” 

Wow! So great to read this right now. The card calls Ginsberg’s “Howl” a “literary gauntlet hurled down” and calls this poem “a brutally funny indictment of the mechanized torture that awaits any sensitive soul caught like a rat in the consumer maze.” Hear Ginsberg read the poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Orar-V3y5Sk.

Week seven stats:

1 white American colonialist female
1 black American female
2 white American females
3 white American males
1 white Andalusian male
1 Chilean male
2 white English males
1 white French male
1 white Italian male
1 white Scottish male
1 white Welsh male

1 1300s poet
1 1600s poet
1 1700s poet
5 1800s poets
7 1900s poets