Thursday, March 12th, 2015
With this column American Life in Poetry celebrates its tenth anniversary. Thanks to all of you for supporting us, week in and week out! When I was a boy, I was advised that if a wasp landed...
Thursday, March 5th, 2015
Many of us have built models from kits—planes, ships, cars. Here’s Robert Hedin, a Minnesota poet and the director of The Anderson Center at Tower View in Red Wing, trying to assemble a little order while his...
Thursday, February 26th, 2015
Several years ago, Judith Kitchen and I published an anthology of poems about birds, and since then I keep finding ones I wished we’d known about at the time. Here’s one by Barbara Ellen Sorensen, who lives...
Thursday, February 19th, 2015
The Dalai Llama has said that dying is just getting a new set of clothes. Here’s an interesting take on what it may be like for the newly departed, casting off their burdens and moving with enthusiasm...
Thursday, February 12th, 2015
Kurt Brown was a talented poet who died in 2013, and his posthumous selected and new poems opens with this touching late poem to his wife, Laure-Anne. The Kiss That kiss I failed to give you. How...
Thursday, February 5th, 2015
Dogs are smart enough to get people to take care of them, a skill that a lot of people haven’t learned, but they’re still wild at the heart. Paul S. Piper lives in Washington. Dog and Snow...
Thursday, January 29th, 2015
We describe people we admire by throwing around words like “indomitable spirit,” but here’s an example and a proof by Don Welch, a Nebraska poet. Shuffling Out Toward Morning After an hour in the infusion lab, Taxol...
Thursday, January 22nd, 2015
Kwame Dawes is the editor of Prairie Schooner and one of my colleagues at the University of Nebraska. Had I never had the privilege of getting to know him I still would have loved the following poem,...
Thursday, January 15th, 2015
I’ve read lots of poems about the loss of beloved pets, but this one by J.T. Ledbetter, who lives in California, is an especially fine and sensitive one. Elegy for Blue Someone must have seen an old...
Thursday, January 8th, 2015
Just as it was to me, Insha’Allah will be a new word to many of you, offered in this poem by Danusha Laméris, a Californian. It looks to me like one of those words that ought to...