bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Richard Hugo (1923–1982)
Authors: Bauer Mark S 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In Your War Dream
You must fly your 35 missions again.
The old base is reopened. The food is still bad.
You are disturbed. The phlegm you choked up mornings in fear returns. You strangle on the phlegm.
You ask, “Why must I do this again?” A man replies, “Home.” You fly over one country
after another. The nations are bright like a map. You pass over the red one. The orange one ahead looks cold. The purple one north of that is the one you must bomb. A wild land. Austere. The city below seems ancient. You are on the ground.
Lovers are inside a cabin. You ask to come in. They say “No. Keep watch on Stark Yellow Lake.” You stand beside the odd water. A terrible wind keeps knocking you down. “I’m keeping watch on the lake,” you yell at the cabin. The lovers don’t answer. You break into the cabin. Inside
old women bake bread. They yell, “Return to the base.” You must fly your 35 missions again.
Cape Nothing
The sea designed these cliffs. Stone is cut away odd places like a joke.
A suicide took aim, then flew out
in the arc he thought would find the sea.
Donald Justice (1925–2004)
Authors: Bauer Mark S 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Counting the Mad
This one was put in a jacket, This one was sent home,
This one was given bread and meat But would eat none,
And this one cried No No No No All day long.
This one looked at the window As though it were a wall,
This one saw things that were not there, This one things that were,
And this one cried No No No No All day long.
This one thought himself a bird, This one a dog,
And this one thought himself a man, An ordinary man,
And cried and cried No No No No All day long.
The Man Closing Up
1
Like a deserted beach, The man closing up.
Robert Bly (1926– )
Authors: Bauer Mark S 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Depression
I felt my heart beat like an engine high in the air,
Like those scaffolding engines standing only on planks; My body hung about me like an old grain elevator, Useless, clogged, full of blackened wheat.
My body was sour, my life dishonest, and I fell asleep.
I dreamt that men came toward me, carrying thin wires; I felt the wires pass in, like fire; they were old Tibetans, Dressed in padded clothes, to keep out cold;
Then three work gloves, lying fingers to fingers, In a circle, came toward me, and I awoke.
Now I want to go back among the dark roots; Now I want to see the day pulling its long wing; I want to see nothing more than two feet high; I want to see no one, I want to say nothing,
I want to go down and rest in the black earth of silence.
Wiley Clements (1928– )
Authors: Bauer Mark S 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Military Journalist
On the road outside Inchon, in nondescript attire,
part G.I., part civilian, less likely to draw fire, heading for the line,
first horror that I saw:
a charbroiled North Korean sprouting from the maw
of a rocket-shattered Russian tank, T-thirty-four;
black flower in the sun, the first of many more.
The next I came upon I had not seen die.
There beside his gun,
a bullet through his eye, a boy no older than myself, his skull a flower, petals of bone and skin.
A momentary shower
had washed the brain within white as ivory:
I stared and then walked on; he rose and walked with me.
Burned and shattered flowers, young men who had no say, dead soldiers, theirs and ours, walk with me today.
Ned O’Gorman (1929– )
Authors: Bauer Mark S 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Peace, After Long Madness
After a long madness peace is an assassin
in the heart. Where there had been the clenched fist, the strung out sinew, the hamstrung grin, the erect eye and hand on every shadow like a spy, now the river springs from the crystal of its sleep in a sapphire lunge to the sea. A year of madness is a libation poured out of nettles and boiled herbs, of knives oiled with honey that cut silently to the spine. I was madness’s kin, no, more its parent blood, its coursing lymph, its skeleton.
I kept company with lunacy, broke bread with him, lay beside him, my head in his arms, felt him draw down the sheet to watch me as I shook and so it was one year till now.
Now the rocks become a sweetness
in the listless meadow, the lutist brays to
the ashes, flowers in the red crystal bowl push against the windowpane and I sleep again,
my hands beneath my cheek, legs straight out, eyes shut against the inward stratagem of dream and the bedsheets and counterpane lie upon me
no more leaded capes of knobbed steel, but companions of my skin, like the surface of my river is kindred
balm to the volcanoes and riven headlands that lie beneath it like pain.
Sharon Olds (1942– )
Authors: Bauer Mark S 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Satan Says
I am locked in a little cedar box
with a picture of shepherds pasted onto the central panel between carvings.
The box stands on curved legs.
It has a gold, heart-shaped lock and no key. I am trying to write my way out of the closed box
redolent of cedar. Satan comes to me in the locked box and says, I’ll get you out. Say My father is a shit. I say my father is a shit and Satan laughs and says, It’s opening. Say your mother is a pimp.
My mother is a pimp. Something opens and breaks when I say that. My spine uncurls in the cedar box like the pink back of the ballerina pin with a ruby eye, resting beside me on satin in the cedar box.
Say shit, say death, say fuck the father, Satan says, down my ear.
The pain of the locked past buzzes
in the child’s box on her bureau, under the terrible round pond eye
etched around with roses, where self-loathing gazed at sorrow.
Shit. Death. Fuck the father. Something opens. Satan says Don’t you feel a lot better?
Light seems to break on the delicate edelweiss pin, carved in two
Timothy Dekin (1943–2001)
Authors: Bauer Mark S 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Melancholy
Morning, old promise of relief, Asserts its presence with a light Unsympathetic, and too bright, And you are easier with grief,
The amber glowing through drawn shades. You sit and smoke. Through muted fire The dust shifts only to expire On quilt or rug. The bed’s unmade,
There’s nothing to be gained, or known, Or saved. Tomorrow you’ll be stronger. Rest here in peace a little longer.
Some cannot make it on their own.
Joseph Salemi (1948– )
Authors: Bauer Mark S 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Sicilian Beachhead
He had to kill her, though it was not planned— He crawled up that warm beach at night, in war. Who could foresee a young girl on the sand,
A bicyclist along the moonlit shore?
She saw him. If he let the girl go free She might raise an alarm. He was afraid.
The blued-steel bayonet came out, and he Stabbed deep and hard, the full length of its blade.
Years later, troubled by a nagging ghost
Of doubt, he’d tell himself there was no blame. If she had been a sentry at a post
No question that he would have done the same.
But every night he felt her fragile breath—
He languished, pined, and drank himself to death.
Jimmy Santiago Baca (1952– )
Authors: Bauer Mark S 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
This Dark Side
has always haunted me,
fiercely adamant in its opposition to all the good I create:
subversive and defiant.
While my spirit revels in light, it
gorges on cesspool pleasures leaving my spirit at times a fly
and maggot-infested carcass, dissembling my dreamwork, disintegrating it back to sand wind scatters, blows
back into my face
I have to lower in shame.
Imagine a ladder of light, a trellis of branches rising out of my soul in blossoming radiance, carving its own latticed speech in the sky toward the sun.
Imagine
my dark side freeing the termites to gnaw down these branches.
My soul
falls like a black oak tree cracked by an ice storm.
It stares up with a skull’s nightmare grimace of cruel suffering on its frozen face.
But hovering at dawn,
hope like a butterfly floats around it,
a powdery rainbow dust effusing the air with pervasive peace.
And then
the morning yawns forth like whispering lilac on the air.
Michael Lauchlan (1954– )
Authors: Bauer Mark S 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
What You Hadn’t
One pain forgives another;
mashed thumb obliterates headache. Malaria returned, dragged your liver with all your other failures
from that ugly flat
where you burned so many pots of stew and chased your daughter’s beaus away.
“If we hadn’t lost the house,” I might say now, or “if you hadn’t driven the car
onto the basketball court.”
But there you sat, dozed, watched the televised war,
the burn scar from the barrel of the B.A.R. warning me not to be a softy.
Then you wept to the skinny boy
you pressed against it into your vast belly, against your sweat and breath,
saying, “Never touch a gun.”
So desperate,
cursed to drink by birth and war, beaten, slicing ham and cutting steaks in a disappointing sixties,
you’d nothing left to give a boy
but a clip with the shells dumped out.
Kelly Ann Malone (1963– )
Authors: Bauer Mark S 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Devices on Standby
I’ve tucked away two forty-fours. They’re deep within a wall.
Their bullets line my dresser drawers and wait for me to call.
Two vials filled with cyanide are safe within their space.
I’ve stashed them in a pot outside beneath the Queen Anne’s lace.
Two gleaming knives to slit my wrists sit nestled in a shed.
I’ll use them if my grief persists to soak my ivory bed.
Two slipknots made of sturdy rope sit limp upon a chair.
It helps me when I cannot cope to know that they are there.
You ask me why they come in two’s? the need for added stress?
In case the first one that I choose is launched without success.
I’ve had these items in my house for over forty years.
I’ve hid them from my kids and spouse, my neighbors and my peers.
I tried to do it years ago, but then I had a boy.
Kevin Young (1970– )
Authors: Bauer Mark S 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Coke® (The Real Thing)
His nose is open—
he wants him
some white girl, needs to score—
Might want to quit
her, but he’s
an addick
& she’s his dealer & only takes
ten percent.
Says she’ll hook
him up with Warhol—White
lines Blowin through my mind
And now I’m having
fun baby— Don’t be so nosy, he’s got it under
control. Just a chippie. Needs advice like another hole in his nose—
Coda Anne Stevenson (1933– )
Authors: Bauer Mark S 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Letter to Sylvia Plath
They are great healers, English springs. You loved their delicate colourings— sequential yellows, eggshell blues— not pigments you preferred to use, lady of pallors and foetal jars
and surgical interiors.
But wasn’t it warmth you wanted most?
These Grantchester willows keep your ghost, young and in love and half way through
the half-life that was left to you.
The Cam still crawls through patient grass, preserving ephemerals in glass.
A bull thrush shouts from a willow thicket, Catch it! Catch it! Catch it! Catch it!
Catch what? An owl in a petalled dress? The gnarl at the root of a distress?
Dear Sylvia, we must close our book.
Three springs you’ve perched like a black rook between sweet weather and my mind.
At last I have to seem unkind and exorcise my awkward awe.
My shoulder doesn’t like your claw.
Crisis And Childhood
Authors: Weinstein Philip 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Faulkner had probably just returned from the annual deer hunt at General Stone’s lodge, thirty miles west of Oxford, Mississippi, on the edge of the Delta. He was two months past his thirtieth birthday and had reason to be feeling good. Thanks to Phil Stone’s friendship over the years, he had grown accustomed to spending time with the larger Stone family—wealthy, privileged, and planterly, as Faulkner’s family was not. One of the pleasures of this connection was the renewed hunting it afforded. He may even have remembered Phil’s telling of his first bear—a vignette so vivid that it was as though it had happened to Faulkner too. Just fifteen years old, Phil had seen the bear, stood his ground, fired, and closed his eyes. When he opened them, the bear was sprawled out before him, dead. The other hunters put Phil through the ritual “blooding” that attends a boy’s first kill. They smeared his face with the bear’s blood, initiating him into the yearly hunting of wild creatures, in the company of men. Throughout his life, Faulkner would find ways to reenact the ceremony of hunting in the big woods, in the company of men. It confirmed—graciously, wordlessly— his sense of himself.
Sensationalist Literature and Expert Advice: Selling Sex And The Single Girl
Authors: Scanlon Jennifer 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Regardless of Helen Gurley Brown’s flair for writing or David Brown’s connections in the publishing industry, Sex and the Single Girl would prove a difficult sell. None of the large publishing houses would touch it. One requested a “toned-down” version, but when the revised version also proved too controversial, David advised Helen that they should submit only the original and not give in until they secured a contract for the manuscript as written. He felt certain that anything short of that would damage both the book’s and the author’s integrity. David’s close friend Oscar Dystel, the head of the paperback publisher Bantam Books, kept the manuscript for several weeks, then turned Helen down over dinner. “I nearly choked on my lasagna,” she wrote about the experience years later. “You must never turn anybody down at dinner.” Both Helen’s mother and David’s father read the manuscript and requested that she abandon the idea of publishing it. “It may be a sensation and get a great deal of publicity,” Cleo wrote. “So do murder and rape!”
Packaging a Message— And a Messenger
Authors: Scanlon Jennifer 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Helen Gurley Brown’s youthful longing for money, plenty of it, matured into an adult yearning for even more of it. “Work is where the money is—and money is lovely,” she wrote in an outline of her second book, Sex and the Office. “[I] am getting annoyed,” she continued, “with people who try to shush me about money. They’re making excuses for not having worked to hit the jackpot or are terribly rich already!” David Brown, encouraged by the phenomenal success of Sex and the Single Girl, equally desirous of seeing Helen earn tremendous amounts of money, and savvy to the commercial worlds in which they operated, set to work immediately to sell the message (single girls are sexy and wonderful) and the messenger (Helen Gurley Brown). “In a sense,” Helen would claim about David, “I’m a product of his imagination.” And David’s imaginings, when it came to branding Helen or the “Sex and the . . . “ theme, appeared limitless.
Two Writers Sharing: Sterling A. Brown, Robert Frost, and “In Divés’ Dive”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In the recent proliferation of conference papers, critical articles, and books discussing the pioneering innovation and enduring significance of Sterling A.Brown’s poetry, literary critics and historians have enthusiastically shown a propensity toward tracing the resonance of “influence” in his work. The persistence of this practice can hardly be faulted because, starting in the early 1960s, Brown began explicating himself to younger generations whom he felt were unacquainted with his seminal efforts to define the distinctiveness of African American literature and culture. In numerous formal and informal interviews, poetry readings, and public lectures, Brown professed an indebted- ness to precursing and contemporary writers, including English poets (Ernest Dowson, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman).
Listen Br’er Sterling: The Critic as Liar [A Pre(r)amble to Essays on Sterling Brown]
Authors: Benston Kimberly W 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Can a literary and critical reputation be built on the basis not just of what someone has written but also what s/he has said, on kaleidoscopic traces of the tongue gone pure? Anyone interested in the future of African-American literary and cultural understanding must trust so, as a store of discursive and methodological wisdom remains lodged in the memories, tapes, and inscriptions of Sterling Brown’s public presentations, extemporaneous tutorials, and other teacherly “rambles.” From his “telephone booth” room at Williams’ Berkshire Hall and his Lincoln University digs at “The Monastery” to the downstairs apartment at Fisk’s Spence House and nearby Gillie’s Barbershop, and finally at the Kearney St. house of the Howard years and untold lecture halls, libraries.
Sterling Brown: An Ethnographic Odyssey
Authors: Skinner Beverly Lanier 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
I would like to propose a method for reading the poetry of Sterling A. Brown in light of Brown’s complete oeuvre. My proposed method is informed by interdisciplinary inquiry, including recent ethnographic theory and qualitative research methodology and an emerging cultural studies discourse that I and others term black cultural critique. This approach is not intended to overlook any aspect of the aesthetic values or artistic achievement of Brown’s poetic output. Rather, this approach intends to offer an additional, interdisciplinary, theoretical con- text in which to appreciate Brown’s poetic achievement. My thesis is that Sterling Brown was a postmodern ethnographer who by the 1940s had pioneered solutions to three major problems with which today’s cultural anthropologists are grappling: (1) what form ethnographic writing should take, (2) what meth- odology can result in competent ethnographies of non-hegemonic, oral-based cultures, and (3) how the authority of native informants can be acknowledged in ethnographies.
Sterling A. Brown’s Literary Essays: The Black Reader in the Text
Authors: O’Meally Robert G 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
A realist not only by artistic and critical persuasion, but by temperament, Sterling A. Brown has shown concern throughout his career with poetry as an art of communication—not just among airy Muses and free spirits, but among real people in this world, actual writers and their readers. Publishers, editors, reviewers, and “blurbists” shape this communication process, as do those per- sons whose lives are depicted in literature. Brown’s critical writings deal mainly with the literary portrayal of Afro-Americans.
The Professor and the Activists: A Memoir of Sterling Brown
Authors: Thelwell Ekwueme Michael 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
A couple of years ago I attended a conference on Sterling Brown, organized by the English Department at Howard University. The event was part of the ongoing campaign being conducted by the estimable Eleanor Traylor, the department’s relentlessly resourceful chair and intellectual leader, to amass the wherewithal to endow a chair in literature in the poet’s name.
“Steady and Unaccusing”: An Interview with Sterling A. Brown
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Wright John S 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Since the early 1980s a series of symposia, public and academic awards, and other recognitions have testified to continuing popular and scholarly interest in Sterling A. Brown, poet, literary critic, teacher, anthologist, and raconteur. The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, for example, received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for 1980 from Saturday Review. The Modern Language Association, at its December 1981 meeting, paid tribute to Brown’s many years of distinguished service as a man of letters. A Black World special issue (September 1970) and Michael Harper and Robert Stepto’s Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship (1979) became the first two of many anthologies, critical studies, and journal special issues dedicated to him, for his enduring poetic innovations and his pioneering cultural criticism. At Howard University, on Febru- ary 14, 1997, a symposium assessed the extent to which Brown’s thinking reflected and influenced African-American and American views on culture and literature. His sensitive creative work and astute analyses are captured in four published collections of poetry, six critical studies and anthologies, and over forty essays and speeches, together with the regular book review column he wrote in the early issues of Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. The following interview—conducted August 2, 1980, but unpublished until now—was one he hoped personally to extend and revise. Nevertheless it offers in retrospect, we think, more testimony that Sterling A.
Br’er Sterling and the Blues: An Interview with Michael S. Harper
Authors: Lock Graham , Harper with a preface by Michael S 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Sterling Brown inscribed my copy of The Negro Caravan “For Michael, one of my very best fellow-poets, readers, and friends, from Sterling. Be seeing you soon, son. See you soon, June, 1975.” We were in Providence, Rhode Island; he had received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree at Brown University’s com- mencement. I had met him in the fall of 1972 in New York City, where he was honored as Dean of African American Letters by the Black Academy. The novel- ist Ernest J. Gaines and I were seated at one of the head tables, Gaines for his novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and me for my second volume of poetry, History Is Your Own Heartbeat. I was told by insiders that the judges were Jay Saunders Redding and John A.
Clarifying Philosophy: Sterling A. Brown and the Nonviolent Action Group
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The origins of the Nonviolent Action Group, known by its acronym, NAG, now seem shrouded in the mysteries of historical anonymity. Such a fate is undeserved for an organization that, through its association with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), played a significant role in funneling black student insurgency into the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s. Even today, those who recall their own participation in the movement are hard pressed to state unequivocally names of founding NAG members, the organization’s actual birth date, its longevity, its precise site of origin, and the specific activities it engaged in. Despite such apocrypha, NAG once lived and thrived. In our postmodern world, where truth is not absolute but relative, an importance for NAG emerges from the collective memory of four individuals who gathered on a June afternoon in 2005 to relive their student experiences nurtured in the political activism of that era.
A Conversation with John H. Bracey, Esther Terry, and Mike Thelwell
Authors: Tracy Steven C 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
When I first arrived at the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst over a dozen years ago for a job interview, one of the first things I noticed was a large portrait of Sterling A. Brown in the office of department head Esther Terry. It sat on a table, propped up against the wall, directly across from Professor Terry’s desk, a reminder, perhaps, both that Brown was watching the proceedings with an expert and exacting eye and that he was there as a resource and for support in case (read: when) the road got rocky. Professor Terry always spoke in glowing terms about the experiences she and her husband had had with Professor Brown—those memories resided on hallowed ground. She smiled spontaneously when his name arose, with the pride of someone whose mentor was a hero of epic expansiveness, albeit unsung in the literary mainstream at the time.