This is my favorite Margaret Atwood poem (in fact, it was the catalyst for a huge change in my life long ago; the wrong change, as it turned out, but it was a catalyst nonetheless, and I respect that still):

Men with the heads of eagles
no longer interest me
or pig-men, or those who can fly
with the aid of wax and feathers

or those who take off their clothes
to reveal other clothes
or those with skins of blue leather

or those golden and flat as a coat of arms
or those with claws, the stuffed ones
with glass eyes; or those
hierarchic as greaves and steam-engines.

All these I could create, manufacture,
or find easily: they swoop and thunder
around this island, common as flies,
sparks flashing, bumping into each other,

on hot days you can watch them
as they melt, come apart,
fall into the ocean
like sick gulls, dethronements, plane crashes.

I search instead for the others,
the ones left over,
the ones who have escaped from these
mythologies with barely their lives;
they have real faces and hands, they think
of themselves as
wrong somehow, they would rather be trees.

Oh, lordy. I don't know if I'm in entirely the wrong place to be reading that right now, or entirely the right one.

I hope entirely the right one.

You're certainly not any of the men "common as flies," nor are you a pig-man, or a man who takes off his clothes to reveal yet another set of clothes.

Would you rather be a tree?

Fucking hell, the woman's amazing. It's not fair she gets to be so good at poetry and prose.

Variation on the Word Sleep

I would like to watch you sleeping.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun and three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
and that necessary

Would you rather be a tree?

Sounds good right now. Though I'm not looking to take root just yet.

Judy Grahn is one of my favorite modern poets, and the one who first made me realize that poetry could leave me gasping and breathless.

I'm not a girl
I'm a hatchet
I'm not a hole
I'm a whole mountain
I'm not a fool
I'm a survivor
I'm not a pearl
I'm the Atlantic Ocean
I'm not a good lay
I'm a straight razor
look at me as if you had never seen a woman before
I have red, red hands and much bitterness

Also, Jesse is me on lit fic definitions and on high school slacker ethic.

FWIW, there sometimes just isn't a connection between the amount of time a student spent on a paper and how good it is.

Sure. And I know I'm smart, but what I was really good at is figuring out what the teachers wanted to see, and then doing that.

Man, it makes me sad to miss so much brain spiciness in Literary because I'm out of the office for the weekend. There is far too much for me to catch up on, but I'll throw in a few cents as far as contemporary lit I think is/could someday be canon:

I'd agree with Morrison already being there. I'm all giddy to read Beloved after your raves, because until now, all I've read of hers is Paradise.

Written on the Body by Jeannette Winterson and Into the Forest by Jean Heglund. I don't know that I'd go as far to say that they could be "great books", but I've seen both of them taught in college. (I used to work in the bookstore, so I got to see what everyone was ordering. I was most excited to see these two included.) Mostly, I just want to see if anyone else has read 'em.

Lilty, I love Written on the Body. Have you read any of her other books? The Passion is my favorite (ah, Venice!), with Art and Lies and WOTB tied for second place. Her short stories are excellent too. Sadly, I really disliked her latest book.

I've tried a few more of hers, and I probably need to read them more closely, but nothing has pulled me in quite the same way as Written on the Body.

Was her latest The Powerbook ? Because I remember a vague dislike for that one.