Memorial Day 1 After our march from the Hudson to the top of Cemetery Hill, we Boy Scouts proudly endured the sermons and hot sun while Girl Scouts lolled among graves in the maple shade. When members of the veterans’ honor guard aimed their [...]
When Mary Ruefle's book Melody: The Story of a Child arrived in the mail several weeks ago, I could smell the musty, antique pages and the faint whiff of stale cigarette smoke before I even opened the package. The beige envelope arrived by U.S. Postal Service, without insurance and [...]
Home-Boys: Baby & Me (a Sapphic) Ex-gang members. Driveby days over. Zero Tattoos, tagging. Sippy cups, hoodies. Baby Daddies gather, stubble-cheeked, holding infants. Rock-a-bye Central. Awkward former enemies, rubbing elbows, Slow-bounce babies: parachute cradle. X-nay Gangsta language – A is for Apple, only. Alphabet shakedown. [...]
(Note: Today's Sunday Poem is part of Ted Kooser's "American Life in Poetry" series and is made possible by The Poetry Foundation) Alicia Suskin Ostriker is one of our country’s finest poets. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey. I thought that today you might like to have us offer [...]
Adventure in the Clover or Today’s Destruction, Averted Adventure in the clover cleaving the hours & the bees on a lawn thus far immune to a fungus elsewhere killing them. Why write music anymore why have a family the composer unmade the world in [...]
Noelle Kocot's latest book of poetry, The Bigger World, is a collection of character sketches. Told in a straightforward, surreal style---one that recalls folktales, ancient myths, and fairytales---Kocot has stripped each piece down to its essentials. These short, accessible poems are funny, moving, and sometimes absurd, but always entertaining. "I [...]
Gennady Aygi (1934-2006) is widely considered to be one of the great avant-garde poets from the former Soviet Union. He was born in Chuvashia, a territory located in the western part of Russia. In 1958 he was expelled from the Literary Institute in Moscow for his first book of poems, [...]
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia —The fear of long words On the first day of classes, I secretly beg my students Don’t be afraid of me. I know my last name on your semester schedule is chopped off or probably misspelled— or both. I can’t help it. I know the [...]
Today's Sunday Poem, "Tornado Child" by Kwame Dawes, is one of many powerful poems in Dawes' book Wisteria, Twilight Songs from the Swamp Country. The poems in this collection are based on Dawes' conversations with the elders of Sumter, South Carolina, who shared their memories of growing up [...]
After an Illness, Walking the Dog Wet things smell stronger, and I suppose his main regret is that he can sniff just one at a time. In a frenzy of delight he runs way up the sandy road— scored by freshets after five days of rain. [...]
I've been a long-time admirer of the writer Nick Flynn. Unlike some writers who struggle to find their subject matter, Nick has had more than his fair share of life experience--the kind that can either eat a writer alive or supply a writer with an entire career's [...]
If you're close to me in age and were a voracious reader as a young person, you undoubtedly remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books, a series created by Edward Packard and originally published by Constance Cappel's and R.A. Montgomery's Vermont Crossroads Press in 1976. The books were [...]
I must admit that I have a soft spot for the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. I scored a copy of his book Poems: 1965-1975 when I was a teenager. The collection is a compilation of Heaney's earliest books, Death of a Naturalist, Door into the Dark, Wintering [...]
This Sunday I have a humorous, poignant poem by Naomi Shihab Nye to share. Nye's found poem, which is comprised entirely of statements made by her young son, is a reminder that we're surrounded by comic, inventive language on a daily basis, but that we often [...]
The Eviction My privilege to have witnessed this, so late in the middle of the twentieth century that already it seemed historical, almost like having seen Erasmus or Thucydides: a shack at the end of a field road, an eczema of garden, domineckers on the porch-- the [...]
I have a special video version of the Sunday Poem for you today by Kevin Young, one of my favorite contemporary poets. In this short clip from the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, Young reads his poem "Aunties," which appears in his collection Dear Darkness: Poems. Young is a talented reader [...]
The Coffee Cup The newspaper, the coffee cup, the dog's impatience for his morning walk: These fibers braid the ordinary mystery. After the marriage of lovers the children came, and the schoolbus that stopped to pick up the children, and the expected death of the retired mailman Anthony [...]
Early Winter, After Sappho Some say the air of early winter moving through windows. For some, black ships coming towards the city are the quietest sounds on earth. But I say it is with whomever one loves. And very easily proved: when we are trying to [...]
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the Tucson shooting that killed six and injured Representative Gabrielle Giffords and twelve others. In place of the usual Sunday Poem, I'm delighted to share with you a new work by Deanne Stillman called "Reflections in a D’Back’s Eye," which is a literary [...]
Child of the Sun Great Great Aunt Aida trained her lapdog to attack dark-skinned men. A shake of her high-yaller head and a suck on her ivory teeth, and the Scottish terrier slipped through the fence pickets to nip at a tar baby's ankles. Somewhere in [...]
Poem Without Intimacy the other day I was shopping in one of those giant incredibly brightly lit stores you can apparently see from space wheeling a massive empty cart thinking this is a lot like thinking why do I go to sleep not having brushed my [...]
From The Desert About Jen Bervin Jen Bervin's work brings together text and textile in a practice that encompasses poetry, archival research, artist books, and large-scale art works. The Desert is a poem Bervin wrote by sewing row by row, line by [...]
Hotdog They salvaged only what was vital, leaving behind their most precious belongings, including Aunt Beale’s watercolors, which were lost, and the thousand paper cranes Dad had folded to win Mom over, placing them on her usual routes, at the post office, in the library [...]
Reindeer Report Chimneys: colder. Flightpaths: busier. Driver: Christmas (F) Still baffled by postcodes. Children: more And stay up later. Presents: heavier. Pay: frozen. Mission in spite Of all this Accomplished – MERRY CHRISTMAS! What the Donkey Saw No room in the inn, of [...]
Negative Space Where the body isn't - that's how dancers know me. Sculptors bend their clay and steel against my emptiness. Somehow, though I'm not giving it a thought, I nudge a shadow from a twist of bronze or change the way a breast and elbow size [...]