"At the Hospital" by David Ferry

David Ferry was born in 1924 in Orange, New Jersey. He is an American poet, translator, and educator, and he has published eight volumes of poetry and a volume of literary criticism.

She was the sentence the cancer spoke at last,
Its blurred grammar finally clarified.

This poem is incredibly short, but so much is packed into one sentence. Cancer is a heavy topic: we don't like to talk about it, and when we do, there's not much good to say about it, until you get to the people who have survived or know survivors. Those people are the ones that constantly instill hope and positivity in us, but nothing about this poem breathes anything good.
The past tense "was" implies that the woman whose diagnosis is cancer is now gone. She has passed on, and the cancer won in the end. The "blurred grammar" that is finally "clarified" is generally confusing. It seems that the woman's death made cancer's sentence become understandable.
Cancer can appear rapidly, and it can take lives rapidly, but it seems that this end was foreshadowed some time ago. The "at last" could be like some breath of relief - relief that the suffering is over. Then again, the fact that we know that this woman has passed could mean that cancer only truly showed itself when she had died. The cause of death was cancer, but it is possible that it was only known that she had cancer afterwards.
Maybe the clarification determined is that there is no answer to cancer. There are the very lucky survivors, but there is not an answer to every type of cancer, and this type, whatever it may be, clarifies this overall. Clarification tends to be something we want - we want to be able to understand everything around us -, but here, the clarification of cancer's "blurred grammar" doesn't seem desirable. It seems upsetting, and it's paradoxical.
Yet the poem is so abrupt that it makes every single word more powerful, which makes this poem not so much about the woman lost but about the sentence itself. This sentence lets cancer be personified. Cancer is talking here, and cancer is in control.

"What's That Smell in the Kitchen?" by Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy is an American poet, novelist, and social activist. She was born in Detroit, Michigan on 31 March 1936. Her poetry tends to be free verse and deals with feminist and social concerns.

All over America women are burning dinners.
It's lambchops in Peoria; it's haddock
in Providence; it's steak in Chicago;
tofu delight in Big Sur; red
rice and beans in Dallas.
All over America women are burning
food they're supposed to bring with calico
smile on platters glittering like wax.
Anger sputters in her brainpan, confined,
but spewing out missiles of hot fat.
Carbonized despair presses like a clinker
from a barbecue against the back of her eyes.
If she wants to grill anything, it's
her husband spitted over a low fire.
If she wants to serve him anything
it's a dead rat with a bomb in its belly
ticking like the heart of an insomniac.
Her life is cooked and digested,
nothing but leftovers in Tupperware.
Look, she says, once I was roast duck
on your platter with parsley but now I am Spam.
Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.

Based on all that Marge Piercy stands for, it is somewhat difficult to determine who the speaker is in this poem. There is a strong and clear voice that seems to be Marge Piercy, so it is possible that in this case, Marge Piercy is the author and the speaker.
As a feminist, Marge Piercy is identifying the societal concept that women are supposed to serve others. She provides examples of food from across the nation: "lambchops in Peoria" references Illinois; "haddock in Providence" references East Coast cuisine; "steak in Chicago" references the Midwest; "tofu delight in Big Sur" identifies with California and the West Coast lifestyle; and "red rice and beans in Dallas" identifies the South. These examples help show that women burn dinner, regardless of what it is.
The anger she displays in this poem places focus on the stereotype that women must serve men because society says so. The intense imagery of plotting to kill husbands by barbecuing them or serving them poison spells vengeance.
Incompetence is the inability to do something successfully. The last line of this poem says that burning dinner is not being able to cook properly, but it is war. That's a drastic difference; incompetence involves ignorance or lack of a skill, whereas war involves intended violence. The entirety of the poem leads us to show that women can intentionally burn food because they are fighting against all that is expected of them as being a woman. Society has always stressed that wives are supposed to serve their husbands, and women will always be lower in class than men.
Marge Piercy, then, is personifying feminist ideas into a common occurrence: burning dinner.

"A Found Poem" by Maxine Kumin

Maxine Kumin was an American poet who was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the -Library of Congress from 1981-1982. She had multiple awards in her lifetime, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1973. She died 6 February 2014 at the age of eighty-eight. 

Ars Poetica
A Found Poem

Whenever I caught him down in the stall, I'd approach.
At first he jumped up the instant he heard me slide
the bolt. Then I could get the door open while
he stayed laying down, and I'd go in on my hands
and knees and crawl over to him so that
I wouldn't appear so threatening. It took
six or eight months before I could simply walk in
and sit with him, but I needed that kind of trust.

I kept him on a long rein to encourage him
to stretch out his neck and back. I danced with him
over ten or fifteen acres of fields with a lot
of flowing from one transition to another.
What I've learned is how to take the indirect route.
That final day I felt I could have cut
the bridle off, he went so well on his own.

Without a title, readers would never know that this poem is actually about poetry. I, along with all horse lovers, would see this poem as being about what horses can teach us.

The poem essentially uses a horse as a metaphor for poetry. It begins with a horse being down in a stall, which tends to symbolize that some injury has occurred. It is entirely plausible that this can be linked with the failed attempt at a good, praise-worthy poem. If your work isn't applauded by others, your pride and motivation can be wounded. The time frame of "six or eight months" can express how much time it can take to earn trust, but moreover, it can display how difficult it is to get a poem just right. Writing poetry isn't easy, and to write one that gains approval from all is even more difficult. Here, the speaker is taking the time to earn the trust back from readers so that she trusts herself and her abilities to write poetry.

Because every day spent with horses is a roller coaster of emotions and new challenges, the enjambments that occur repeatedly force us to ride with the poem. In the second stanza of the poem, we are with the speaker as they ride the horse across fields. We are experiencing the journey with them, and poetry has us experience the journey with the author.

Horses are always teaching us something new, and we are taken on a journey with them every time. Poetry is a learning experience, which is why the horse is an exemplary metaphor for it.