“I grow green with hope. I’d like to end there.”
Poems
As Impossible and Imperfect as Translation
“But poetry…has helped me to find new meaning within and across linguistic boundaries.”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti at 100: A Reading List
Beat poet and City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti turns 100 on March 24. Here’s a reading list to celebrate the centenarian.
“How common is the lightning?” Gabrielle Bellot on Yeats, Walcott, and Finding Inspiration
“I want someone to remember even just one of my songs, especially when a night is too silent, and that old gray curls back around me like a shroud, making me wonder, again, if any song of mine will be worth recalling at all.”
Rita Dove on Creating a ‘Collage of American Consciousness’ with Poetry
“The sole criterion is, how does it move us? Does it pull us out of our everyday trot?”
Why the Most Beautiful Poems Defy Understanding
“In a poem, we feel what is there, but also what is not.”
What My Father’s Death Taught Me about Poetry
Matthew Zapruder examines his relationship with poetry and with his father. Despite being two men with great facility for precise language, they were unable to use it to bridge the distance between them. In likening poems to people, Zapruder posits that the most beautiful thing about the poems most important to him is that their […]
Poems: Protection From Isolation and Solitary Confinement
What we all need now? Poetry, sweet poetry.
My Hundred
Beth Ann Fennelly suggests that to fully embrace the beauty of poetry, one must memorize it. Once committed to memory — a process that gets easier with practice — a poem forever becomes prophylactic against stressful days and lonely times: “We’ve all known solitary confinement. We’ve all inhabited isolation rooms. But the poems we know […]
At McSorley’s: Unsorted Regulars, Misfits, Liars, Heroes, and Psychos
Rafe Bartholomew discovers his father’s voice in the very place he thought was holding him back, McSorley’s Old Ale House