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On teaching writing to children at a Houston cancer center. Featured in The Best American Essays 2012: “The children I write with die, no matter how much I love them, no matter how creative they are, no matter how many poems they have written, or how much they want to live. They die of diseases […]

A woman recovering from a kidney transplant finds solace in poetry: “I began with C.K. Williams’s ‘Dream’ (‘Mad dreams! Mad love!’) and ended with Kyger’s ‘[He is pruning the privet]’: ‘You are not alone is this world / not a lone a parallel world of reflection / in a window keeps the fire burning.’ In […]

However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” […]

Hunter Thompson lobbied Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone to hire George, who had been writing freelance music reviews. In a letter to George, Thompson wrote, “I want Wenner to have the experience of dealing with someone more demonstrably crazy than I am—so that he’ll understand that I am, in context, a very reasonable […]

She has an underlying vocabulary of about nine favorite words, which occur several hundred times, and often several times per page, in this book of nearly six hundred pages: “whore” (and its derivatives “whorey,” “whorish,” “whoriness”), applied in many contexts, but almost never to actual prostitution; “myth,” “emblem” (also “mythic,” “emblematic”), used with apparent intellectual […]

When I was about nineteen I showed my poems to one of my teachers at Wayne. He said these were incredible poems, poems that should be published. I said, “Oh really?”—I was thrilled—“How would I go about doing that?” He walked over to his bookshelf and brought back a copy of Harper’s. He wrote down […]

Poetry magazine started in Chicago in 1912, and during the ensuing century, the magazine’s history and the history of American poetry often were joined at the hip. It published an unknown T.S. Eliot, gave early support to Langston Hughes, discovered Wallace Stevens, James Merrill, Gwendolyn Brooks. What Poetry rarely had was a history of picking […]