Al Ortolani: Two Poems
I imagined my mother by a fishpond
with garden rocks and submerged reeds,
a pool stocked with orange comets,
fantails, and spotted carp.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Every Poem
the window lets the light change
so every time you re-enter the poem,
it feels different—familiar, but new
John Zheng: Poetry as Enchantment by Dana Gioia
“If poetry is the most ancient and primal art, if it is a universal human activity, if it uses the rhythmic power of music to speak to us in deep and mysterious ways, if the art is a sort of secular magic that heightens the sense of our own humanity, then why is poetry so unpopular?”
Sean Sexton: Worth
I’ve wasted these days in the darkening hurry of the hours,
let myself—dryhanded, and ignorant—determine one aim in
deference to another.
Baron Wormser: After Poetry Month
The poet tries to be canny while practicing an uncanny art.
Michael Simms: Rhythm Benders | The Musicality of American Poetry
A poem is rooted in the rhythms of pulse, breath and movement.
Chard deNiord: To the Muse
You wakened me to a dream of waking
in which I approached you and sang
your name.
George Drew: Federico García Lorca, You Have Ruined My Day
this, in the end, might as well have been a poem about savage reckonings
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Tonight’s Dinner Companions
you, old poet, gone, whose lines I often
say aloud against the ocean’s constant shush
James Davis May: Portuguese Man-of-War
Look at this one,
its sail translucent, its inky tentacles
taut as a line of verse. After the thing dies,
they go on, stinging whatever touches them.
David Kirby: Taking it home to Jerome
Everything else was to come, everything about love:
the sadness of it, knowing it can’t last, that all lives must end,
all hearts are broken.
Louise Hawes: My muse at seventy-something
My muse is fast; her legs, long, relentless,
churn like propellers. She seldom stops to
explain where we’re going.
Doug Anderson: What if I wrote a poem
About being seventy-seven
and trying not
to speculate how long I’ve got left
Sharon Fagan McDermott | Fragments: An Ars Poetica
within the word “ventriloquist,”
there’s “trout” and “rust” and “silver”
