Search This Site
Recent Posts
Knopf Doubleday Info
- About Knopf Doubleday
- Contact Knopf Doubleday
- Knopf Doubleday Bookseller Center
- Knopf Doubleday Media Center
- Ordering Information
- Sitemap
Author Sites
- A L Kennedy
- A. S. Byatt
- Alexander McCall Smith
- Alexander Neubauer
- Amanda Smith
- Amy Greene
- Andre Agassi
- Andrea Wulf
- Ann Packer
- Anne C. Heller
- Anne Rice
- Anne Tyler
- Avi Steinberg
- Bret Easton Ellis
- Carl Hiaasen
- Carolina De Robertis
- Carolyn Burke
- Carolyn Cooke
- Christopher Reich
- Chuck Palahniuk
- Dan Brown
- David Allen Sibley
- David Shields
- Dianne Dixon
- Dominic Sandbrook
- Doulgas Starr
- Gish Jen
- Graeme Gibson
- Haruki Murakami
- Henning Mankell
- Howard Markel
- James Curtis
- James Ellroy
- Joan Nathan
- Joe R. Lansdale
- John Burdett
- John Casey
- John Darnton
- John Grisham
- Jon Krakauer
- Jonathan Coe
- Jonathan Lethem
- Julie Orringer
- Kate Buford
- Kevin Young
- Lee Sandlin
- Lorraine Adams
- Maeve Binchy
- Margaret Atwood
- Martin Clark
- Michael Feeney Callan
- Michael Harvey
- Michael Lindsay-Hogg
- Michael Rubens
- Nick Harkaway
- Pat Conroy
- Paul Shaffer
- Peter Mayle
- Richard Kluger
- Richard Schickel
- Richard Zacks
- Rodney Crowell
- Simon Sebag Montefiore
- Stephen Budiansky
- Stephen L. Carter
- Stephen S. Hall
- Steve Yarbrough
- Stieg Larsson
- Sue Miller
- Susan Conley
- The India Site (Patrick French)
- Thomas Sanchez
- Tom McCarthy
- Tom McGuane
- Tom Vanderbilt
- Vera Pavlova
- Vladimir Nabokov
April 27: Description of Her Eyes by Franz Wright
On love, from Franz Wright.
Description of Her Eyes
Two teaspoonfuls,
and my mind goes
everyone can kiss my ass now—
then it’s changed,
I change my mind.
Eyes so sad, and infinitely kind.
Read more poems from The Beforelife
More about The Beforelife
Read an interview with Franz Wright
6 Responses to “April 27: Description of Her Eyes by Franz Wright”
Leave A Comment:
Celebrate Poetry Tumblr
Celebrate Poetry Event
Poetry Sites
- 32 Poems
- About.com Poetry
- Atlantic Unbound Poetry
- Broadsided
- Cruelest Month
- Electronic Poetry Center
- FSG Poetry
- Harriet: The Blog
- Jacket Magazine
- Lannan
- Literary Kicks
- No Tell Motel
- Norton’s Poems Out Loud
- Octopus Magazine
- Poetry Archive
- Poetry Daily
- Poetry Foundation
- Poetry International
- Poetry Slam
- Poetry Society of America
- Poets & Writers
- Poets House
- Poets.org
- Read Write Poem
- Sillman’s Blog
- The Poetry Project
- UbuWeb
Knopf's Poem-A-Day 2011
April 1: The opening lines of Amy Tan's "I Love a Broad Margin"April 2: Philip Levine's "Unholy Saturday"
April 3: Deborah Digges's "The Coat"
April 4: David Young's "The House Was Quiet on a Winter Afternoon"
April 5: W.S. Merwin's "The Folding Cliffs"
April 6: Cynthia Zarin's "Late Poem"
April 7: Leonard Cohen's "These Heroics"
April 8: Marge Piercy's "Wellfleet Shabbat"
April 9: Anthony Hecht's "Devotions of a Painter"
April 10: Emily Dickinson Letters
April 11: Kevin Young's "Ash Wednesday"
April 12: Edward Hirsch's "Happiness Writes White"
April 13: Amy Clampitt's "Green"
April 14: Walt Whitman's "The Artilleryman’s Vision"
April 15: Wallace Stevens's "A Dove in the Belly"
April 16: James Merrill's "The Candid Decorator"
April 17: Emily Brontë's "No coward soul is mine"
April 18: Julia Hartwig's "Yet We Desire It above All"
April 19: Kenneth Koch's "To My Fifties"
April 20: Stephen Sondheim's "Green Finch and Linnet Bird"
April 21: Stan Rice's "Tornado at Night"
April 22: Kwon Homun's "Two Poems On Fishing"
April 23: Franz Wright's "Rooms"
April 24: Brooks Haxton’s “Three Lilies”
April 25: C.P. Cavafy's "The Mirror in the Entrance"
April 26: W. B. Yeats's "Down by the Salley Gardens"
April 27: Peter Davison's "The Level Path"
April 28: Sharon Olds's "True Love"
April 29: Langston Hughes's "Daybreak in Alabama"
April 30: Farewell, with poems by Jane Hirshfield and Simon Armitage
Knopf's Poem-A-Day 2010
April 1: Edward Hirsch’s “Self-portrait”April 2: Marge Piercy’s “Seven Horses”
April 3: Dan Chiasson’s “Banquette” and “Next”
April 4: Marie Ponsot’s “Transport”
April 5: Alexander Neubauer’s Poetry in Person, featuring Derek Walcott
April 6: Mark Strand’s “Mirror”
April 7: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Spring”
April 8: Philip Levine’s “MY FATHERS, THE BALTIC”
April 9: Vera Pavlova’s “A Remedy for Insomnia”
April 10: Stan Rice’s “The Fragment of Statue”
April 11: Marina Tsvetayeva’s “Poems Grow”
April 12: Kevin Young’s “EYES + EGGS [1983]“
April 13: Janusz Szuber’s “About a Boy Stirring Jam”
April 14: Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died”
April 15: Franz Wright’s "My Pew"
April 16: Mary Jo Salter’s “Welcome to Hiroshima”
April 17: Yehuda Halevi’s “A man in your fifties—and you still would be young?”
April 18: Langston Hughes’s “Black Workers” and “Black Dancers”
April 19: W. S. Di Piero’s “In Our Room”
April 20: Robert Wrigley’s “Kissing a Horse”
April 21: Sharon Olds’s “When He Came for the Family” and “The Signal”
April 22: Irving Feldman’s “Stretched Out at Length”
April 23: W.S. Merwin’s “The Furrow”
April 24: David Lehman’s “Poem in the Manner of a Jazz Standard”
April 25: John Keats’s “This Living Hand”
April 26: Laurie Sheck’s A Monster’s Notes
April 27: Garrett Hongo’s “Volcano House”
April 28: Wallace Stevens’s “Large Red Man Reading”
April 29: Izumi Shikibu’s love poems
April 30: Deborah Digges's "Write a Book a Year"
Knopf's Poem-a-Day 2009
April 1: Half Moon, Small Cloud by John UpdikeApril 2: Going Back to Bed by J.D. McClatchy
April 3: Like Giving to a Blind Man Eyes by Ruth Padel
April 4: Waiting On Elvis, 1956 by Joyce Carol Oates
April 5: Exile’s Child by D. Nurkse
April 6: A Summer Outing by Du Fu
April 7: Touch-Me-Nots by Jill Bialosky
April 8: Sweet Voices and Voices by C.P. Cavafy
April 9: On the Jetty by C.P. Cavafy
April 10: Fragment on Dissembling by Lucie Brock-Broido
April 11: Page From the Koran by James Merrill
April 12: Spring Song II by Jean Garrigue
April 13: Ode to Pepper Vinegar by Kevin Young
April 14: Greeter of Souls by Deborah Digges
April 15: You’re Beautiful by Simon Armitage
April 16: Two Short Poems by Mark Strand
April 17: To See My Mother by Sharon Olds
April 18: Wallace Stevens and Donald Justice
April 19: Robert Lowell’s Poetry Class by Stephanie Hemphill
April 20: Storm by Brooks Haxton
April 21: A Good List by Brad Leithauser
April 22: The Pond by Jim Powell
April 23: Impressions of Africa by Kenneth Koch
April 24: Notes For Sixtieth Wedding Anniversary by Jane Mayhall
April 25: Some Playthings by John Hollander
April 26: There is No City that Does Not Dream by Anne Michaels
April 27: Description of Her Eyes by Franz Wright
April 28: Some Different Kinda Books by Sapphire
April 29: The Mistake by Jack Gilbert
April 30: Creeper and Fine Point by John Updike
May 1: Written Late at Night by Janusz Szuber
If Wright’s, Description of Her Eyes, can be considered a poem as well as a valid statement about what love is, then one has to accept the probability that poetry and love no longer exist.
I generally find something worthwhile in each of your daily poems, and in most poetry. Some poetry, like this one, makes me wonder how this guy won a Pulitzer, and secondly, do these poets have to publish everything that crosses their mind, no matter how inane?
Give me Wordsworth!
Wow. I have to disagree with the other posters. This is one of my favorites.
We flicker profoundly in our emotions. I take this little piece as honest; it carries the heavy and the light. The two teaspoons go to the fierce in him; his eyes then open him to the sublime of the person he is with.
I like the rhyming and allusion in “mind” and “kind.”
This poem contains a lot in a very few words and makes me think. I wonder however about the two teaspoons. Teaspoons of what? What would make a person’s mind go “everyone can kiss my ass now”? But it’s clear that the love expressed in the eyes that watch him cause him to change his mind, whatever the relationship between the two of them.
I like it!
…
Норм …