I love ampersands, California, and Watermelons... perennially.

from _The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revisited_ ed. Allen & Butterick
copyrights: 1982!

The Stillness of the Poem

The stillness of the jungle
a clearing amid the vines
which distant bird sounds enter,
timidly. The overpowering silence
of the jungle clearing
into which Rhinoceri &
other wild beasts are always
charging suddenly from the canebrake
to reveal themselves
one instant
in all their natural savagery
or fear,
their nature made known to us
out of the jungle's quiet.

The stillness of the poem
a moment full of silence &
portent, like
the sudden halt of great machines.
Silence that becomes a fabric
to clothe the consciousness
... the events & observations of
a walk up Market Street
are admitted, as if
from a great distance,
the White Rhinoceros
charging
suddenly, in the form of a sailor
with a shopping bag
whom nobody notices.

Ron Loewinsohn b. 1937
University of California, Berkeley.

http://berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/1998/0715/loewinsohn.html

Front-Of-House, Frank-O'-Hara
"To the Harbormaster"

I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To you
I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you. (1957)

...and ASHBERY! from "How Much Longer Will I Be Able To Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher..."

As if reading had any interest for me, you...
Now you are laughing.
Darkness interrupts my story
Turn on the light.

Meanwhile what am I going to do?
I am growing up again, in school, the crisis will be very soon.
And you twist the darkness in your fingers, you
Who are slightly older...