Actions and Travels is a series of readings, bringing together canonical and contemporary poems, looking at some of the things I love in poetry. You can read the poems here:
IntroductIon: Reading and writing poetry
John Keats, This Living Hand
Chapter One: Simplicity and resonance
Reading list
Emily Brontë, ‘Spellbound’
Robert Frost, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ and ‘After Apple-Picking’
Bill Manhire, ‘Across Brooklyn’
Rebecca Gayle Howell, ‘A Catalogue of What You Do Not Have’
Anon., ‘Westron Wynde’
Eileen Duggan, ‘The Tides Run Up the Wairau’
William Butler Yeats, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’
Chapter Two: The ornate and the sumptuous
Reading list
Rebecca Hawkes, ‘Technicolour Dreamcake’
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 30 [‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought’]
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan; or, a Vision in a Dream: A Fragment’
John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’
Michele Leggott, ‘Helix’
Hera Lindsay Bird, ‘Lost Scrolls’, ‘Monica’
Chapter Three: Concision, composition and the image
Reading list
Ezra Pound, ‘In a Station of the Metro’
William Carlos Williams, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’
Jenny Bornholdt, ‘Photograph’, ‘Being a Poet’ and ‘In Memory’
Ursula Bethell, ‘Detail’
Frank O’Hara, ‘Why I Am Not a Painter’
Hone Tuwhare, ‘Hotere’
essa may ranapiri, ‘she cut her face shaving’
Kay Ryan, ‘Linens’
Alice Oswald, Memorial (link to an extract from the book-length whole)
Chapter Four: Sprawl
Reading list:
Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’ and ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’
Allen Ginsberg, ‘A Supermarket in California’ and ‘America’
Arthur Sze, ‘Before Completion’ and ‘The Chance’
Paula Green, ‘After Modernism’ and ‘Letter to Anne Kennedy’
Chapter five: Form
Reading list
Marianne Moore, ‘The fish’
Edna St Vincent Millay, ‘What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why’
Terrance Hayes, ‘American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin’ [‘I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison’]
Jericho Brown, ‘Duplex’
Elizabeth Bishop, ‘One Art’
Nick Ascroft, ‘Five Limericks on Grief’
Natalie Diaz, ‘My Brother at 3 A.M.’
Erin Scudder, ‘Sextina’
A.E. Stallings, ‘Sestina: Like’
Chapter Six: Argument and conversation
Reading List:
Catullus, ‘Odi et amo’
John Donne, ‘The Flea’
Andrew Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’ and ‘A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Eolian Harp’
Wisława Szymborska, ‘Conversation with a Stone’
Luke Kennard, ‘Wolf on the Couch’ and ‘Wolf Nationalist’
Annie Finch, ‘Coy Mistress’
Chapter Seven: Conversations with the past
Reading list
Richard Wilbur, ‘The Ride’
Sappho, poem 31 (translated by Anne Carson)
Catullus, poem 51
Diana Harris, ‘Lovely I have none’
Janet Charman, ‘After Sappho’
Catullus, poems 5 and 7
Ben Jonson, ‘Song to Celia’ [‘Come my Celia’] and ‘To the Same’ [‘Kiss me sweet’]
C. K. Stead, from ‘The Clodian Songbook’, poems 4 and 5
Tiffany Atkinson, from Catulla et al, ‘Catulla’ and ‘Basia Mille’
Mark Ford, ‘Viewless Wings’
Chapter Eight: Poetry in a house on fire
Reading list
Maggie Smith, ‘Good Bones’
Ash Davida Jane, ‘Good People’
Craig Santos Perez, ‘Love Poems in a Time of Climate Change: Sonnet XVII’
Tayi Tibble, ‘Identity Politics’ and ‘Assimilation’
Patricia Lockwood, ‘Rape Joke’
Helen Rickerby, ‘Notes on the Unsilent Woman’
Chapter Nine: Letters and odes
Reading list
Brian Batchelor, ‘Dear Voyage’
Emily Berry, ‘Letter to Husband’
Ezra Pound, ‘The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter’
Horace, Ode 3.13 [‘O fons Bandusiae’]
Annaleese Jochems, ‘Horse’
William Blake, ‘The Sick Rose'
Sharon Olds, ‘Spoon Ode’
Tom Disch, ‘Ode to a Blizzard’
Heather Christle, ‘Acorn Duly Crushed’
Stephanie Burt, ‘Epigram 60 (Lucky Orestes)’
Chapter Ten: Poetry and the Afterlife
Reading list:
Louise Glück, ‘Afterword’
Sylvia Plath, ‘Edge’
James K. Baxter, ‘Jerusalem Sonnets, 11’
John Keats, ‘When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be’
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18 [‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’]
John Donne, ‘The Relic’, ‘The Will’
Sam Sax, ‘Bury’, ‘Will’ and ‘Will’
Charlie Clark, ‘Pseudo-Martyr’
Alistair Elliot, ‘A Touch of Death’, ‘Talking to Bede’
Emily Dickinson, ‘This is my letter to the world’
George Eliot, ‘The Choir Invisible’
Return to home page
IntroductIon: Reading and writing poetry
John Keats, This Living Hand
Chapter One: Simplicity and resonance
Reading list
Emily Brontë, ‘Spellbound’
Robert Frost, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ and ‘After Apple-Picking’
Bill Manhire, ‘Across Brooklyn’
Rebecca Gayle Howell, ‘A Catalogue of What You Do Not Have’
Anon., ‘Westron Wynde’
Eileen Duggan, ‘The Tides Run Up the Wairau’
William Butler Yeats, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’
Chapter Two: The ornate and the sumptuous
Reading list
Rebecca Hawkes, ‘Technicolour Dreamcake’
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 30 [‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought’]
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan; or, a Vision in a Dream: A Fragment’
John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’
Michele Leggott, ‘Helix’
Hera Lindsay Bird, ‘Lost Scrolls’, ‘Monica’
Chapter Three: Concision, composition and the image
Reading list
Ezra Pound, ‘In a Station of the Metro’
William Carlos Williams, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’
Jenny Bornholdt, ‘Photograph’, ‘Being a Poet’ and ‘In Memory’
Ursula Bethell, ‘Detail’
Frank O’Hara, ‘Why I Am Not a Painter’
Hone Tuwhare, ‘Hotere’
essa may ranapiri, ‘she cut her face shaving’
Kay Ryan, ‘Linens’
Alice Oswald, Memorial (link to an extract from the book-length whole)
Chapter Four: Sprawl
Reading list:
Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’ and ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’
Allen Ginsberg, ‘A Supermarket in California’ and ‘America’
Arthur Sze, ‘Before Completion’ and ‘The Chance’
Paula Green, ‘After Modernism’ and ‘Letter to Anne Kennedy’
Chapter five: Form
Reading list
Marianne Moore, ‘The fish’
Edna St Vincent Millay, ‘What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why’
Terrance Hayes, ‘American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin’ [‘I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison’]
Jericho Brown, ‘Duplex’
Elizabeth Bishop, ‘One Art’
Nick Ascroft, ‘Five Limericks on Grief’
Natalie Diaz, ‘My Brother at 3 A.M.’
Erin Scudder, ‘Sextina’
A.E. Stallings, ‘Sestina: Like’
Chapter Six: Argument and conversation
Reading List:
Catullus, ‘Odi et amo’
John Donne, ‘The Flea’
Andrew Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’ and ‘A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Eolian Harp’
Wisława Szymborska, ‘Conversation with a Stone’
Luke Kennard, ‘Wolf on the Couch’ and ‘Wolf Nationalist’
Annie Finch, ‘Coy Mistress’
Chapter Seven: Conversations with the past
Reading list
Richard Wilbur, ‘The Ride’
Sappho, poem 31 (translated by Anne Carson)
Catullus, poem 51
Diana Harris, ‘Lovely I have none’
Janet Charman, ‘After Sappho’
Catullus, poems 5 and 7
Ben Jonson, ‘Song to Celia’ [‘Come my Celia’] and ‘To the Same’ [‘Kiss me sweet’]
C. K. Stead, from ‘The Clodian Songbook’, poems 4 and 5
Tiffany Atkinson, from Catulla et al, ‘Catulla’ and ‘Basia Mille’
Mark Ford, ‘Viewless Wings’
Chapter Eight: Poetry in a house on fire
Reading list
Maggie Smith, ‘Good Bones’
Ash Davida Jane, ‘Good People’
Craig Santos Perez, ‘Love Poems in a Time of Climate Change: Sonnet XVII’
Tayi Tibble, ‘Identity Politics’ and ‘Assimilation’
Patricia Lockwood, ‘Rape Joke’
Helen Rickerby, ‘Notes on the Unsilent Woman’
Chapter Nine: Letters and odes
Reading list
Brian Batchelor, ‘Dear Voyage’
Emily Berry, ‘Letter to Husband’
Ezra Pound, ‘The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter’
Horace, Ode 3.13 [‘O fons Bandusiae’]
Annaleese Jochems, ‘Horse’
William Blake, ‘The Sick Rose'
Sharon Olds, ‘Spoon Ode’
Tom Disch, ‘Ode to a Blizzard’
Heather Christle, ‘Acorn Duly Crushed’
Stephanie Burt, ‘Epigram 60 (Lucky Orestes)’
Chapter Ten: Poetry and the Afterlife
Reading list:
Louise Glück, ‘Afterword’
Sylvia Plath, ‘Edge’
James K. Baxter, ‘Jerusalem Sonnets, 11’
John Keats, ‘When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be’
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18 [‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’]
John Donne, ‘The Relic’, ‘The Will’
Sam Sax, ‘Bury’, ‘Will’ and ‘Will’
Charlie Clark, ‘Pseudo-Martyr’
Alistair Elliot, ‘A Touch of Death’, ‘Talking to Bede’
Emily Dickinson, ‘This is my letter to the world’
George Eliot, ‘The Choir Invisible’
Return to home page
