http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjOsEOWua6Y

Poet Angela Jaeger from NY reads on 9 May 2009 at The Lit in Cleveland, Ohio, during
Tres Versing the Panda: Three Days of Poetry Soiree.  Filmed by Jesus Crisis.

 Event sponsored by Green Panda Press (Cleveland Heights) and The Temple, Inc.

        

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DC7jZCwicPc

Poet Angela Jaeger from NY reads on 9 May 2009 at The Lit in Cleveland, Ohio, during
Tres Versing the Panda: Three Days of Poetry Soiree.  Filmed by Jesus Crisis.

 Event sponsored by Green Panda Press (Cleveland Heights) and The Temple, Inc.

        

followers
by William Merricle

Reality migrates with each fiscal quarter.
Remember when we used to run
in human disguise?

the world will end
not with a bang
or a whimper
but with a tweet


* * *


William Merricle lives in Lima, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Pudding,
Slipstream, ZeroCity, and many other publications. He is capable of 35,600
gigaflops per second.

        

I Sit and Look Out
by Walt Whitman
from Leaves of Grass, 1860

I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame,
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done,
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate,
I see the wife misused by her husband, I see the treacherous seducer of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid, I see these sights on the earth;
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny, I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea, I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill'd, to preserve the lives of the rest,
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these—All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.
    

* * *

To read other Whitman selections in the Crisis Chronicles Online Library, click here.


  

        

To Rich Givers
by Walt Whitman

 What you give me, I cheerfully accept,

A little sustenance, a hut and garden, a little money, as I rendezvous with my poems,

A traveler's lodging and breakfast as I journey through the States,—Why should I be ashamed to own          such gifts? Why to advertise for them?

For I myself am not one who bestows nothing upon man and woman,

For I bestow upon any man or woman the entrance to all the gifts of the universe.

    

* * *

[from the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass]

To read other Whitman selections in the Crisis Chronicles Online Library, click here.


  

        

Radio
by Kevin Eberhardt

Seems we’re gettin’ ahead of ourselves

Puttin’ the cart before the donkey endin’

Up right where we started ‘cause you

Can’t trust what you can’t touch it’s all

Smoke & delusion hearsay & rumor &

Hidin’ behind words to say what you

Mean with a mouth belongs to some

One else in the War of the Worlds we

Are the aliens & there is no secret

Weapon only an ‘on’ & ‘off’ switch

* * * * *

"Radio" by Kevin Eberhardt used with the poet's permission.

For more Kevin Eberhardt work, please check out his blog:
http://roundingofthestone.blogspot.com

as well as http://agentofchaos.com/ke/index.html, various
issues of The City Poetry, and Crisis Chronicles Press' Fuck Poetry.

His work can also be found accompanying images by London photographer Richard Byerley
at www.richardbyerley.com.

You may contact Kevin Eberhardt at ke767@hotmail.com.

        

Love
by William Carlos Williams
[first appeared in Poems (1909)]

        

Ernest Hyde
by Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology [1915]

My mind was a mirror:
It saw what it saw, it knew what it knew.
In youth my mind was just a mirror
In a rapidly flying car,
Which catches and loses bits of the landscape.
Then in time
Great scratches were made on the mirror,
Letting the outside world come in,
And letting my inner self look out.
For this is the birth of the soul in sorrow,
A birth with gains and losses.
The mind sees the world as a thing apart,
And the soul makes the world at one with itself.
A mirror scratched reflects no image—
And this is the silence of wisdom.



* * * * *

Click here to read more of Spoon River Anthology in the Online Library

   

        

Hamilton Greene
by Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology [1915]

I was the only child of Frances Harris of Virginia
And Thomas Greene of Kentucky,
Of valiant and honorable blood both.
To them I owe all that I became,
Judge, member of Congress, leader in the State.
From my mother I inherited
Vivacity, fancy, language;
From my father will, judgment, logic.
All honor to them
For what service I was to the people!



* * * * *

Click here to read more of Spoon River Anthology in the Online Library

   

        

Elsa Wertman
by Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology [1915]

I was a peasant girl from Germany,
Blue-eyed, rosy, happy and strong.
And the first place I worked was at Thomas Greene's.
On a summer's day when she was away
He stole into the kitchen and took me
Right in his arms and kissed me on my throat,
I turning my head. Then neither of us
Seemed to know what happened.
And I cried for what would become of me.
And cried and cried as my secret began to show.
One day Mrs. Greene said she understood,
And would make no trouble for me,
And, being childless, would adopt it.
(He had given her a farm to be still.)
So she hid in the house and sent out rumors,
As if it were going to happen to her.
And all went well and the child was born—They were so kind to me.
Later I married Gus Wertman, and years passed.
But—at political rallies when sitters-by thought I was crying
At the eloquence of Hamilton Greene—
That was not it. No! I wanted to say:
That's my son!
That's my son.



* * * * *

Click here to read more of Spoon River Anthology in the Online Library

   

        

Robert Davidson
by Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology [1915]

I grew spiritually fat living off the souls of men.
If I saw a soul that was strong
I wounded its pride and devoured its strength.
The shelters of friendship knew my cunning
For where I could steal a friend I did so.
And wherever I could enlarge my power
By undermining ambition, I did so,
Thus to make smooth my own.
And to triumph over other souls,
Just to assert and prove my superior strength,
Was with me a delight,
The keen exhilaration of soul gymnastics.
Devouring souls, I should have lived forever.
But their undigested remains bred in me a deadly nephritis,
With fear, restlessness, sinking spirits,
Hatred, suspicion, vision disturbed.
I collapsed at last with a shriek.
Remember the acorn;
It does not devour other acorns.



* * * * *

Click here to read more of Spoon River Anthology in the Online Library

   

        

Jim Brown
by Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology [1915]

While I was handling Dom Pedro
I got at the thing that divides the race between men who are
For singing "Turkey in the straw" or "There is a fountain filled with blood"—
(Like Rile Potter used to sing it over at Concord);
For cards, or for Rev. Peet's lecture on the holy land;
For skipping the light fantastic, or passing the plate;
For Pinafore, or a Sunday school cantata;
For men, or for money;
For the people or against them.
This was it:
Rev. Peet and the Social Purity Club,
Headed by Ben Pantier's wife,
Went to the Village trustees,
And asked them to make me take Dom Pedro
From the barn of Wash McNeely, there at the edge of town,
To a barn outside of the corporation,
On the ground that it corrupted public morals.
Well, Ben Pantier and Fiddler Jones saved the day—
They thought it a slam on colts.



* * * * *

Click here to read more of Spoon River Anthology in the Online Library

   

        

Penniwit, the Artist
by Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology [1915]

I lost my patronage in Spoon River
From trying to put my mind in the camera
To catch the soul of the person.
The very best picture I ever took
Was of Judge Somers, attorney at law.
He sat upright and had me pause
Till he got his cross-eye straight.
Then when he was ready he said "all right."
And I yelled "overruled" and his eye turned up.
And I caught him just as he used to look
When saying "l except."



* * * * *

Click here to read more of Spoon River Anthology in the Online Library

   

        

Ida Chicken
by Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology [one of 33 poems added to the 1916 edition]

After I had attended lectures
At our Chautauqua, and studied French
For twenty years, committing the grammar
Almost by heart,
I thought I'd take a trip to Paris
To give my culture a final polish.
So I went to Peoria for a passport—
(Thomas Rhodes was on the train that morning.)
And there the clerk of the district Court
Made me swear to support and defend
The constitution—yes, even me—
Who couldn't defend or support it at all!
And what do you think? That very morning
The Federal Judge, in the very next room
To the room where I took the oath,
Decided the constitution
Exempted Rhodes from paying taxes
For the water works of Spoon River!



* * * * *

Click here to read more of Spoon River Anthology in the Online Library

   

        

Thomas Rhodes
by Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology [1915]

Very well, you liberals,
And navigators into realms intellectual,
You sailors through heights imaginative,
Blown about by erratic currents, tumbling into air pockets,
You Margaret Fuller Slacks, Petits,
And Tennessee Claflin Shopes—
You found with all your boasted wisdom
How hard at the last it is
To keep the soul from splitting into cellular atoms.
While we, seekers of earth's treasures,
Getters and hoarders of gold,
Are self-contained, compact, harmonized,
Even to the end.



* * * * *

Click here to read more of Spoon River Anthology in the Online Library