(This was already typed in anyway, for someone else.  I don't expect it will
take a couple of you too long ...)


       Mushrooms

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes.  We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.

---------------------------------------

The poet is a woman, one I suspect most of you have heard of, some of you
being familiar with her later work.  This dates from between 1955 & 1965.

15 responses total.

i'm all but positive i know this one, so i'll hold off and let others have
some fun with it.

"Later" implies this is "earlier," meaning the poet might've been
in her 20's or 30's when she write it.  If it dates from 1955-1965,
she might've been born 1925-1945.  Doesn't narrow it down much.
It reminds me of May Swenson's style, but I don't remember reading
it in her collected poems.  Who else?  Anne Sexton wrote some fairly
formal stuff in her early years.  

To the best of my knowledge, I've never heard of Swenson.  Not Sexton, but
I think some people might group them together, a little - with some others.
(Again, though, on the basis of this poet's later works primarily.  The
collection I took this from is her first published one; and I'm strongly
in the minority in preferring it to later stuff.)

Adrienne Rich?

Not Rich.
I checked exact dates (though I don't have an exact date for any one poem).
A near contemporary of Sexton; I would have misremembered Sexton as older
than she was.  I also was *definitely* overgenerous on one end of the date
range I gave.  (hint, hint)

Sylvia Plath!

You got it.  From _The Colossus_.  (Since she committed suicide in 1963, I
was safe in saying it was before 1965, no?)

keats, was that your answer too?

yup. the only other poet who would have made sense was marianne moore, who
experimented with syllabic verse (note that every line above is five 
syllables). this violates moore's stylistic tendencies in other ways, though,
and you'd noted elsewhere that you were reading _the colossus_. i hadn't
bothered to look it up, but those were my suspects.

I did?  Rats.  Yes, a lot of Plath's poems in that book are syllabic -
maybe all.  In general I'm partial to structured verse of various kinds.
It's been a long time since I read any Moore, but I remember liking her
fairly well (& nothing more specific).  (I'm sure keats knows Moore and
e. e. cummings were married, but probably some people don't.)  Plath
is (or used to be) sometimes grouped with Sexton and a few others as
a "confessional poet", with some justice - I'm not well-acquainted with
the others md guessed earlier.  But when people think of her they usually
have in mind her later work ... not all that much later, obviously, but
there was quite a definite change.

confessional poets. ugh. that brings back bad memories.

I *said* I prefer Plath's earlier stuff.  (_The Colossus_ is all I have of
hers, though previously at least _The Bell Jar_.  I read some of Sexton &
a couple of the others for a class, but never felt the slightest  desire
to acquire it.)

Possibly I should add: though I like *very* little of it, I suspect some of
what they were after was worth doing; but I never really was able to see
just what they *were* after well enough to be sure of it.  I'd be somewhat
hard put to add many names after all these years.

other major figures include robert lowell, john berryman, and in some 
schools, randall jarrell, to me the most tolerable of the lot (sometimes
actually a very good poet, but not confessionally). 

ick.

Lowell is the other I would have named, I think.  If Berryman really
qualifies ... I have _The Dream Songs_ somewhere.  (Under B, actually.)

BTW, does anyone know if he's the same John Berryman who wrote some pretty
good SF stories in the late 60s or early 70s?  ("Something To Say" comes
to mind.  Rats.  Probably no one else even recognizes them.  Sigh.)

i don't believe so, but i could check around.

If you have the facilities I'd be interested.  I always sort of assumed he
was the one.  (In case it might help: these are all from _Analog_:
"Something to Say" (Aug. 1966), "Stuck" (June 1964), "The Trouble With
Telstar" (June 1963).  As you can see, I didn't check when they were
before I asked the question.  There may have been others, even in Analog;
my cataloguing never got finished, even for what I personally have.)

Thank you very much for the offer.

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