The aim of American imagists poets http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-02721-5.html was to provide the reader with a landscape of words. A precise and specific description, where each poem was like a part of a painting, with the signing of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. Before them, Carl Sandburg wrote poems in a new and original style, depicting the moments of violent verses in American life, even with the use of the language of the slums. Walking a little back in time, you can listen to the verses of a poet of the countryside and rural life, those of Robert Frost, full of calm literary classicism.
Edgar Lee Masters has given us the Spoon River Anthology, with a remarkably accurate description of humanity that walked the streets of a small provincial town. This description was also born by reading the epitaphs engraved on the graves of a cemetery, to know what had happened to those deceased. The loss of God and the sense of loss of all human beings, are those expressed by Edwin Arlington, the man who plays the atmosphere of moral decadence. Romanticism, even in America was born a realist school, where scientific progress fueled the birth of accuracy needs, describing the reality, even poetic, with attention to landscapes and traditions.
Events related to the American Revolution, had obviously influenced the literature, which had become patriotic and political, where the principles of the Enlightenment and the new ideas of progress, had opened new expressive horizons. Many years had passed since some colonies were divided by wilderness Virginia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania https://www.amazon.com/POEMS-PENNSYLVANIA-VERSES-Irving-Sidney/dp/B002EFX90C were evidence of the evolutionary possibilities of the colonies. Those were places where you began to write poetically what is felt inwardly, living different lives, from generation to generation, which described new emotions, with a language that came from too far away.
THE AFTERLIFE OF FAME – Poem by David Trinidad
Is dark a neglected mansion with vanishing court rats in the empty pool, and antiquated actress languishing as ghost of her famous self, flickers in the projector’s beam, or framed in silver haunts every room face unrecognizable? Name forgotten? O float me to Oblivion in my swan bed with my bandaged wrists, and doors shorn of locks with swirl of my cigarette smoke, and glitter of my jewels, and silent flutter of my weightless tulle.
PENNSYLVANIA – Poem by Rebecca Suzanne
How does someone with a heavy heart have such a lighthearted laugh? I get tongue tied around you. I trip over my laces. We pretend we don’t notice the road rash. We pretend it’s just from my palms meeting the pavement too many times. You are trains and buses, always ready to leave. We used to go on road trips and I’d stare at you staring out the window. Staring at the sky. Staring at the trees. Staring at the hills. I could never meet your eye. You overlooked every attempt. Every grand gesture. I don’t drive too far now. I learned distance isn’t just in miles. You’re not just busy, you’ve gone missing. I’m scared I might see you’re green eyes staring back at me, if I look out the window. I’m scared they won’t recognize me anymore.
PEOPLE WHO MUST – Poem by Carl Sandburg
I have been in Pennsylvania, in the Monongahela and Hocking Valleys. In the blue Susquehanna, on a Saturday morning I saw a mounted constabulary go by, I saw boys playing marbles. Spring and the hills laughed. And in places along the Appalachian chain, I saw steel arms handling coal and iron, and I saw the white-cauliflower faces of miner’s wives waiting for the men to come home from the day’s work. I made color studies in crimson and violet over the dust and domes of culm at sunset.