Laure-Anne Bosselaar: In Response to a Student Asking Where to Find Poetry During Difficult Times
In your friend’s voice. Or silence.
In all those years it takes for a barn to collapse.
In the terrified tenderness of a first kiss.
In a last kiss too.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Letter to the Others in the Dark
I am writing not to send you light,
but to let you know you are not alone
in the darkness. I am here, too,
scribbling with no sight, no certainty
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?”
Baron Wormser: “Gilgamesh Hector Roland” | On Zbigniew Herbert
If only we had the strength to acknowledge our weaknesses, how different we might be as creatures.
Baron Wormser: After Poetry Month
The poet tries to be canny while practicing an uncanny art.
Baron Wormser: A Poetry Proposal
There is no shortage of poems and no shortage of strategies to deliver the poems. The failing lies in our wariness. It’s true: to embrace poetry is to embrace a degree of uncertainty. Yet what else is life?
Rachel Hadas: Lessons of Poetry
It is easier to lecture about the time and place of a book, the culture that produced it, the special historical or linguistic problems involved in it. It is harder…to face the book as a masterpiece and to help the student understand why it is a masterpiece….
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Parentage
I’m from the ocean’s melancholy, dragging
its anchors back & forth, never quiet, never
still, waves so restless they can’t mirror the moon.
Video: Why we create music
“Music is the highest form of human communication.”
James Wright: Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me
The old grasshoppers
Are tired, they leap heavily now,
Their thighs are burdened.
I want to hear them, they have clear sounds to make.
Virginia Woolf: Becoming an Artist
Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.
John Samuel Tieman: Variations
I heard the history
of the Huberman Stradivarius
how it was stolen and painted
with shoe polish to hide it
Lynn Emanuel: Some Notes on Intoxication and Simile
If my mother had not been an alcoholic, I might not have been a poet.
Louie Skipper: How did John Keats breathe
Where is the bronze statue to the drunk
who shared a cell
in the Concord jail with Thoreau?
