(beginning at 11:05)
American poet known for innovating the Confessional poetry style. He was well known in his time for his public opposition to the Vietnam War.
His most well known poem is "Skunk Hour":
Nautilus Islands hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her sons a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village;
shes in her dotage.
Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victorias century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.
The seasons ill
weve lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.
And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnets filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobblers bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
hed rather marry.
One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hills skull;
I watched for love-cars . Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My minds not right.
A car radio bleats,
Love, O careless Love. . . . I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobodys here
only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.
I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.