Contents
Introduction: “Poetry Emotion” by Anna Quindlen
Contributors (in alphabetical order) and their selections:
JANE ALEXANDER “In Black Earth, Wisconsin” by Andrea Musher
BROOKE ASTOR “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth
KEN AULEITA “Ode to the West Wind” by Percy Bysshe Shelley
HAROLYN M. BLACKWELL “To Be Somebody” by Langston Hughes
MARTIN CHARNIN “Laughing Down Lonely Canyons” by James Cavenaugh
MARIO CUOMO “Outwitted” by Edwin Markham
DAVID DINKINS “Stars” by Langston Hughes
E. L. DOCTOROW “A Blessing” by James Wright
GERALDINE FERRARO “If” by Rudyard Kipling
ALLEN GINSBERG “Ode to the West Wind” by Percy Bysshe Shelley
RUDOLPH GIULIANI “If I can stop one Heart from breaking” by Emily Dickinson
RICHARD F. GREIN Excerpt from “Four Quartets” by T. S. Eliot
SHELDON HARNICK “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman
BILL IRWIN “The Yachts” by William Carlos Williams
PETER JENNINGS “Man with Wooden Leg Escapes Prison” by James Tate
EDWARD I. KOCH “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe
KENNETH KOCH “The Dawn of Me” by Jeff Morley
JILL KREMENTZ “The Low Road” by Marge Piercy
ANGELA LANSBURY “Cuttin’ Rushes” by Moira O’Neill
YO-YO E. MA “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats
DAVID MAMET “The Dog” by David Mamet
JASON MCMANUS “I never saw a Moor” by Emily Dickinson
JOAN S. MCMENAMIN “Life Is Mostly” by A. L. Gordon and “He That Loveth” by Thomas a Kempis
VED MEHTA “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold
ISMAIL MERCHANT “Song” by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
RUTH W. MESSINGER “The Gift Outright” by Robert Frost
SUSAN MINOT “When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be” by John Keats
JOYCE CAROL OATES “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” by Emily Dickinson
RON PADGETT “A Step Away from Them” by Frank O’Hara
HAROLD PRINCE “Credo” by Thomas Wolfe
ANNA QUINDLEN “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” by W. B. Yeats
DAVID READ “Holy Sonnet XIV” (“Batter my heart, three-personed God”) by John Donne
RICHARD W. RILEY “Duty Was Joy” by Rabindranath Tagore
ISABELLA ROSSELLINI “Get Yourself Drunk” by Charles Baudelaire
GENE SAKS “Does It Matter?” by Siegfried Sassoon
DIANE SAWYER “If” by Rudyard Kipling
ALLY SHEEDY “On Stripping Bark from Myself” by Alice Walker
BEVERLY SILLS “It Is Not the Critic Who Counts” by Theodore Roosevelt
MARGARET CHASE SMITH “My Creed” by Margaret Chase Smith
RONALD B. SOBEL “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost
STEPHEN SONDHEIM “Come to the Edge” by Christopher Logue
LIV ULLMANN “Meditation #17” (“No Man is an Island”) by John Donne
KURT VONNEGUT “The Angel that presided o’er my birth” by William Blake
WENDY WASSERSTEIN Excerpt from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
PAUL WATKINS “Clouds” by Rupert Brooke
ELIE WIESEL “From Tomorrow On, I Shall Be Sad” by Motele
ELIZABETH WINTHROP “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver
TOM WOLFE Excerpt from “I’ve Been to a Marvelous Party” by Noel Coward