Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “poetry”
Hurricane season 2020 is, like much of 2020, extremely destructive. Enjoy this poem by Gregory Orr: Trauma (Storm) Hunkered down, nerve-numb, in the carnal hut, the cave of self, while outside a storm rages. Huddled there, rubbing together white sticks of your own ribs, praying for sparks in that dark where tinder is heart, where tender is not.
Claudia Rankine’s poetry is unique, and powerful. This video is from an interview on PBS, five years ago.
The places where Edmonia’s bones were fractured still hold violent reverberations. When it rains I massage the static hum out of each point of impact. There is nothing heavier than flesh that wishes to be on another axis, except perhaps stone she shaped. Tonight she tells me, it’s impossible to bring a lover to the small death she deserves. An …
I love this poem, by Nicky Beer. Poetry is sustaining me right now. Even the ghosts Even the ghosts of police need something to do. They take careful inventories of the insects trespassing our ears as we sleep. They surveil the silent, splayed footprints of raccoons. They are threatened by the rain, its sheer numbers. A soul is trapped in …
We’re all impatient about these coronavirus hairdos. My hair is starting to reach my shoulders, a place it hasn’t reached in decades. Sigh. Please enjoy this haircut poem. Shear by Christina Stoddard I want a haircut that can win a bar fight.I want a haircut that will throw my things on the lawn so I can finally get out of …
The poem, “Lines Written Near San Francisco,” by Louis Simpson, is a work of stunning anxiety. Perfect for pandemic times, I’m afraid. My favorite passage: Whitman was wrong about the People, But right about himself. The land is within. At the end of the open road we come to ourselves. Read the whole thing here.
This poem by Maggie Smith resonated strongly with me. “This place could be beautiful, right?” Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative …
The refusal to acknowledge names – particularly women’s names – runs deep. And hurts, deeply. This poem was written by Lucille Clifton upon her own visit to a plantation. She noticed a cemetery for enslaved people. The dead were unnamed. Inside the plantation house, she was shown documents that enumerated enslaved people, but just men. The women were unnamed. at …
Your great mistake is to act the dramaas if you were alone. As if lifewere a progressive and cunning crimewith no witness to the tiny hiddentransgressions. To feel abandoned is to denythe intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,even you, at times, have felt the grand array;the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowdingout your solo voice. You must notethe way the soap …
My mother loves butter more than I do, more than anyone. She pulls chunks off the stick and eats it plain, explaining cream spun around into butter! Growing up we ate turkey cutlets sauteed in lemon and butter, butter and cheese on green noodles, butter melting in small pools in the hearts of Yorkshire puddings, butter better than gravy staining …