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Category: Poetry
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In an area not known for its chillGreen tips of tulips are rising out of the earthAlthough we can’t see their shy peeksAfter a bomb cyclone dropped a cargo of snowOnto everything under the sunDon’t call it a blizzard!Just imagine the tulips— the Blue Wows, the Honeymoons— Waiting patiently to show us their spring.(With a…
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Flurries of Winter I stop somewhere waiting for youAnd soon you swoosh byIn a spray of snow. Possibly under control,Probably not. Bearing straight for the lift line,Already too far away to hear, “Turn,Use your edges!” Arms wide, skis parallel,Unzipped jacket blowing back like The trailing edges of wings,How fast that little body hurls down the…
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Chen Chen told the Yale Review that he usually starts a poem with the title. I love his “Tale of the Blueberries” and his words about the process of creating, “picking up an odd clue here, an ordinary mystery there.” Titles often elude me, so just for fun (and inspiration), I looked through the Yale…
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John Ashbery’s poem “A Worldly Country” (links below) initially ran in the November 7th, 2005, issue of the New Yorker, and this week it’s the subject of the magazine’s poetry podcast with the host (and poetry editor) Kevin Young and his guest, the poet April Bernard. She chose the Ashbery to read and talk about,…
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At the first of the year I was thinking of Walt Whitman and New York, and then somehow wandered over to the West Coast with Allen Ginsberg in San Francisco. I wonder which poem(s) Ginsberg had in mind when he wrote this line in “A Supermarket in California” (1955), “What thoughts I have of you…
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David Lehman mentions a poetry prompt in his intro to The Best American Poetry 2025 that intrigued me, and that is to write a short poem starting with the final line of Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: “I stop somewhere waiting for you.” Back in 2016 at the American Scholar, Lehman held a little contest with…
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“The Republic of Poetry,” by Martín Espada, begins, In the republic of poetry,a train full of poetsrolls south in the rainas plum trees rockand horses kick the air,To read the rest, go to poets.orgDon’t you wish we lived in such a republic? Gosh, I love this poem. I came across it while reading around in…
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I’m about two-thirds of the way through the excellent anthology The Best American Poetry 2025 (Terence Winch, editor), and so far Jill McDonough’s “What We Are For” is my favorite poem, winning my heart with its mentions of “Stop & Shop” (a grocery store chain here in the northeast), “turquoise sparkle nails,” “fuzzy baby bee,”…
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Paige Lewis’s poem “I’m Not Faking My Astonishment, Honest,” begins, “Looking out over the cliff, we’re overwhelmed/by a sky that seems to heap danger upon us,” and you can read the rest of it at poets.org. I listened to the accompanying Poem-a-Day audio and laughed at her explanation. The poem does feature an overheard line,…
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