Vox Populi

A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 20,000 daily subscribers and over 8,000 archived posts.

Derrick Z. Jackson: The Fight for Clean Water — Majesty or Madness

I came upon six great blue herons grabbing herring out of the water as gulls swooped down for the leftovers. The Charles is now its own wildlife refuge.

November 26, 2025 · 7 Comments

Derrick Z. Jackson: Protecting Puffins in Maine Is an Emotional Commitment

After contorting under boulders for puffin chicks, chasing skittish tern chicks in the weeds and sitting as stone-silent sentinels in bird blinds to observe feeding and behavior, the five-person research crew on Seal Island relaxed in their work cabin in the orange and purple sunset glow.

October 15, 2025 · 6 Comments

Julia Margaret Cameron: Photograph of Julia Jackson (1867)

This poetic image depicts the woman who was the model for the beautiful Mrs. Ramsay in “To the Lighthouse”, Virginia Woolf’s great novel of 1927.

August 24, 2025 · 7 Comments

Amy Lowell: Lilacs

The bright eyes of song sparrows sitting on spotted eggs
Peer restlessly through the light and shadow
Of all Springs.

July 18, 2025 · 12 Comments

Video: The Promise of Spring

Sarah Oliphant, one of the art world’s most prolific yet best-kept secrets, has built an extraordinary legacy through her work. Her daughter, Violet Oliphant-O’Neill, now faces the challenge of forging her own artistic identity in the shadow of her mother’s success.

April 22, 2025 · 2 Comments

David Kirby: Inexhaustible

You’ve seen the photo: the marine
on the right straining like the statue
of a Greek wrestler as he hauls the flag
into place, the five on the left pushing
from their side.

February 25, 2025 · 18 Comments

Jason Baldinger: a people’s history of williamson west virginia

instead we holed up
in a burned-out department store
rechristened junk shop
sifting boxes of ten cent
black and white photos

December 5, 2024 · 5 Comments

Alexis Rhone Fancher: Watch your back my dead mother warns

I was in my late teens, off to college up north. I’m hoping you’re rid of M for good, my mother said. But he wanted to move north with me, and begged me to move in with him, that we would go to school together. Me, desperate to be a solo act. The look on his face when I turned him down, unforgettable.

December 4, 2024 · 13 Comments

Nina Padolf: In line at the food bank with my roommate a disabled vet in Pittsburgh

It’s our turn, they escort us around
each section as if we’re in prison

November 11, 2024 · 6 Comments

Barbara Hamby: Ode to Red and Speedy

Who can remember all the selves stuffed into the miraculous
sack of skin?

November 8, 2024 · 15 Comments

Derrick Z. Jackson: Wetland Protections Remain Bogged Down in Mystery 

It is mind-bog-gling, syllable pun intended, that scientists still do not know how many wetlands lost protection in last year’s crippling of the Clean Water Act by the Supreme Court. A new … Continue reading

October 21, 2024 · 7 Comments

Tena Thau: Unsanitize the genocide

In 1967, Martin Luther King was moved to break his silence over the Vietnam War (at a time when the war was still very popular among the American public), after seeing images in Ramparts magazine of Vietnamese children with napalm burns.

October 13, 2024 · 11 Comments

Rebecca Senf: Photographer Louis Carlos Bernal memorialized the barrios at the US-Mexican border

Bernal invented a style of art photography while creating an indelible record of life in Southwestern barrios.

October 6, 2024 · 9 Comments

Derrick Z. Jackson: Care for Endangered Seabirds Continues Amid a 51-Year Legacy of Optimism

Steve Kress’s smile lit up the dusk as research assistants at least 50 years younger than him regaled him with tales of their vigilance to save tern chicks on Stratton Island, Maine.

August 12, 2024 · 8 Comments

Archives