It is quite refreshing to listen to these recitations of poems.

It feels like watching a good scene of your favorite movie.

The first two are quite good.

And the "Frederick Douglas" is the top.

These young people are in a national contest, called "Poetry Out Loud."

Frederick Douglass 

BY ROBERT HAYDEN'

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful

and terrible thing, needful to man as air,   

usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,   

when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,   

reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more   

than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:   

this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro   

beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world   

where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,   

this man, superb in love and logic, this man   

shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues, rhetoric,   

not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,

but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives   

fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

February 14 is the chosen birthday of Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), one of America’s greatest champions of individual liberty. Here are five facts you should know about this writer, orator, statesman, and abolitionist:

1. Douglas was born into slavery in Maryland circa 1818. (Like many slaves, he never knew his actual date of birth and so chose February 14 as his birthday.) He was given the name Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey but decided to change it when he became a free man. Although he was set on keeping his first name “Frederick”, he asked his friend Nathan Johnson to help him choose a last name. Johnson had been reading Sir Walter Scott’s narrative poem, Lady of the Lake, and recommended the name of a main character: Douglass.

2. In his youth, Douglass taught himself to read, aided by scraps of reading material he found and with the help of some white children he came into contact with in his neighborhood. Soon after, while hired out to a Maryland farmer, he surreptitiously taught other slaves to read the New Testament at a weekly Sunday school. It was during these meeting that he plotted his first escape attempt, for reading and writing sparked a desire for freedom. “Once you learn to read,” he would later write, “you will be forever free.” In 1845 he wrote about his life of bondage in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. The book became an instant bestseller and the preeminent example of the literary genre known as slave narrative.

3. After escaping to the North, Douglass settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts where he became a preacher in an African Methodist Episcopal Zion church. Honed in the pulpit, his oratorical skills would make him one of the most sought after abolitionist speakers of his day. Douglass was associated with a school of the antislavery movement that believed slavery should be ended through moral persuasion, and he attempted to use his writings and speaking events to educate slaveholders and Southerners about the evils of slavery.

4. Douglass spent nearly two years traveling in Great Britain speaking for the abolitionist cause. He was even encouraged to settle in England because his fame made it risky for him to return to the U.S., where federal law gave his slavemaster the right to seize Douglass. Two of his English friends, however, raised $710.96 to buy his freedom. At the age of 28, Douglass finally became a free man.

5. Even before the Civil War brought an end to the American slavery, Douglass became active in the women’s suffrage movement. He became so famous within the women’s rights movement that in 1872 he was nominated for Vice President of the United Statesat the Equal Rights Party convention. Although he declined the nomination and refused to campaign, he became the first African American to be listed on a presidential election ballot. In 1888, he also received one vote from the Kentucky Delegation at the Republican Convention in Chicago, making him the first African American nominated to be a U.S. presidential candidate for a major political party (he had also received a single vote to be a U.S. presidential candidate during the National Liberty Party Convention in 1848).

This poem on Frederick Douglas or on freedom is about the ultimate expression

with regard to what freedom is all about.

Every word and each sentence is so compelling with so much depth that

I can't help being awed and being fully awake as a free human being.

The words literally wake me up.

The poem should make every human being on earth stop and think about

what freedom truly means.

The black girl who recited this poem did a great job. Bravo!

"this man   

shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues, rhetoric,   

not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,

but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives   

fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing."

This man could be any one of us who wanted to settle

in America rather than going back to Korea.

What an expression!

Forgetfulness 

by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go
Followed obediently by the title, the plot,
The heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
Which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
Never even heard of,

As if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
Decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
To a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
And watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
And even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

Something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
The address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
It is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
Not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
Whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
Well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
Who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
To look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
Out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Analysis of Forgetfulness

Forgetfulness is a well crafted poem that is conversational in certain aspects yet offers much more in the way of figurative language, mythological allusion and good old folk wisdom. 

The single sentence which covers the first two stanzas immediately introduces the reader to the central theme, that of forgetfulness, what else? It's typical of Billy Collins to suggest, tongue in cheek, that the first memory to be lost is that of the author's name.

What then follows is the logical flow of all things that constitute a novel. The adverb obediently does change the understanding a little, as if all these memories are following one another like sheep, or military marchers.

And that word suddenly alters the reader's mindset by implying that memories can go just like that, in the blink of an eye.

• So there is already set up the idea of something unpredictable yet inevitable about memory loss and this energy between the two remains throughout.

By using the metaphor of retirees for memories this idea is reinforced. Each memory has gone south to this fishing village where phones don't exist. That's a revelation, a dark revelation because it's the wiring of the brain that sees to our memories, our communication of memory, and in that village there are no wires, no communication.

More agony and irony follow as another single sentence stretches over the next two stanzas. Kissing goodbye to something is dramatic especially if they're connected to the arts. The nine muses originate in Greek mythology and are the daughters of Mnemosyne, the goddess of....Memory. Ironic.

The quadratic equation is a random fact that is personified packing its bag (heading for the same fishing village by my calculation) and perhaps won't be missed that much. 

All this memory loss doesn't mean that forgetfulness cannot be resisted. It can - why not try to store to memory the order of the planets? OK, but the deal is that as you gain planetary knowledge you lose other things, like a state flower, an uncle's address and Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay.

This suggests that the memory has finite limits and that inevitably some of them you will not be able to recall for they have simply gone. They're not hiding, your body cannot keep memories, only your brain and that is subject to the vagaries of time.

The allusion to Greek myth continues as the river Lethe takes away your memories (the L stands for Lethe, the underworld river that flowed around the cave of Hypnos.Those who drank its waters experienced complete forgetfulness. Lethe is also the name of the Greek god of Oblivion and Forgetfulness).

On and on the memories flow away from consciousness...taking even you yourself to a place where others congregate in a state of utter forgetfulness.

The conclusion seems to be that this is some kind of nightmare scenario. We're wired to remember, wired for instant recall of fact, yet the truth is that some day our memories will simply not be there. That's a poignant thought.

Temporary lapses can be dealt with but as we all get older our memory will falter, that is a universal truth that can be devastating on a personal level. So the final image, of the drifting romantic moon in a night sky, comes with melancholy and irony - it's a love poem that has been forgotten - and yet the comic element endures. Perhaps the speaker turns away with a wry grin and a shake of the head.(from Internet)

Writ on the Steps of Puerto Rican Harlem

BY GREGORY CORSO

There’s a truth limits man

A truth prevents his going any farther   

The world is changing

The world knows it’s changing

Heavy is the sorrow of the day

The old have the look of doom

The young mistake their fate in that look   

That is truth

But it isn’t all truth

Life has meaning

And I do not know the meaning   

Even when I felt it were meaningless

I hoped and prayed and sought a meaning

It wasn’t all frolic poesy

There were dues to pay   

Summoning Death and God   

I’d a wild dare to tackle Them

Death proved meaningless without Life

Yes the world is changing   

But Death remains the same   

It takes man away from Life   

The only meaning he knows   

And usually it is a sad business   

This Death

I’d an innocence I’d a seriousness

I’d a humor save me from amateur philosophy

I am able to contradict my beliefs   

I am able able

Because I want to know the meaning of everything

Yet sit I like a brokenness   

Moaning: Oh what responsibility   

I put on thee Gregory

Death and God

Hard hard it’s hard

I learned life were no dream

I learned truth deceived

Man is not God   

Life is a century   

Death an instant