Local // Gray Matters

Twenty poems that could save America

Enough with 'The Road Not Taken.' It's time for something fresh.

America never quite got poetry inside the American public school system.

Poet Tony Hoagland, who teaches at the University of Houston, blames the teachers who spent way too long explaining tricky, hard-to-access poems ("The Emperor of Ice Cream," anyone?). Who chose poems because they were hard to explain.

In his essay "Twenty Poems that Could Save America," Hoagland insists that American classrooms need a new batch of poems to invigorate teachers and students.

"The old chestnuts — 'The Road Not Taken,' 'I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died,' 'Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,' great, worthy poems all — must be removed and replaced by poems that are not chestnuts," Hoagland proclaims. 

One way for contemporary poetry to gain some mainstream relevance is to "interest itself in the stuff of mortgage crisis, insurgency sponsorship, and lithium batteries," Hoagland says.

Poetry must offer a flash of recognition for readers, a whiff of shared experience.

Why do we need poetry, anyway?

"We need its previews of coming attractions: heartbreak, survival, failure, endurance, understanding, more heartbreak," observes the poet, whose new essay collection from Graywolf Press is also titled "Twenty Poems That Could Save America."

Hoagland believes the poems on his list could, among other things, stimulate daring, teach ethics, rehabilitate language, defuse sexual anxiety and encourage curiosity. 

1. "Twenty-First. Night. Monday," by Anna Akhmatova
2. "God's Justice," by Anne Carson
3. "memory," by Lucille Clifton
4. "A Man and a Woman," by Alan Feldman
5. "America," by Allen Ginsberg
6. "Bamboo and a Bird," by Linda Gregg
7. "The Sick Child," by Randall Jarrell
8. "Black People & White People Were Said," by Kerry Johannsen
9. "Topography," by Sharon Olds
10. "Wild Geese," by Mary Oliver
11. "Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car," by Dan Pagis
12. "Merengue," by Mary Ruefle
13. "The Ballad of Orange and Grape," By Muriel Rukeyser
14. "Waiting for Icarus," by Muriel Rukeyser
15. "American Classic," by Louis Simpson
16. "Song of Speaks-Fluently," by Speaks-Fluently
17. Traveling through the Dark," by William Stafford
18. "The Geraniums," by Genevieve Taggard
19. "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer," by Walt Whitman
20. "Our Dust," by C.D. Wright


Read Gray Matters. It interests itself in the stuff of mortgage crisis, insurgency sponsorship, and lithium batteries.




Past Articles from this Author: