Tag: Poems

“But poetry…has helped me to find new meaning within and across linguistic boundaries.”

Beat poet and City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti turns 100 on March 24. Here’s a reading list to celebrate the centenarian.

“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.”

“The sole criterion is, how does it move us? Does it pull us out of our everyday trot?”

“In a poem, we feel what is there, but also what is not.”

What we all need now? Poetry, sweet poetry.

Rafe Bartholomew discovers his father’s voice in the very place he thought was holding him back, McSorley’s Old Ale House

This week’s Longreads Member pick is Chapter 1 from Nicholson Baker’s 2009 novel, The Anthologist, published by Simon & Schuster. The excerpt comes recommended by Hilary Armstrong, a literature student at U.C. Santa Barbara and a Longreads intern. She writes: Someone I love once told me that they don’t understand poetry. It’s all random line breaks and rhythms […]

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 […]