Stanley Plumly’s most recent book of poems is Orphan Hours (W.W. Norton, 2012). His collection Old Heart won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. In 2015, his book of prose The Immortal Evening won the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism. Plumly is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland. In 2010 he was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Nature’s Nature
May/June 2019
White Rhino
The last of my kind, one of the last lovers of flowers and the lawns of the northern grasses, and certainly one of the few able to rub backsides with […]
Nature’s Nature
May/June 2019
Middle Distance
Looking out at Constable’s distances, nothing I wanted to be, what I am. He grows on you, Constable, so childish at the beginning, toy farms, slow pastures, the small trees […]
Nonfiction
Summer 2007
This Mortal Body
Yet can I gulp a bumper to thy name,—O smile among the shades, for this is fame! 1. On June 22, 1818, two years to the day before he sat […]
Poetry
Spring 2004
Elevens
1. The sun flatlining the horizon, the wind off the Atlantic hard enough to swallow— arctic, manic and first thing— the morning beach walk north lasting less than half an […]
Poetry
Autumn/ September 1968
January at Saddler’s Mill
The bird out of the mind quickens into the cold sky almost before the second breath. The cold quick of the eye has been here before: the whole white face […]
July/Aug 2020
Spring Photo
It isn’t so much the capture of snow falling and melting all at once in the background, streaking as if on a window, like little souls passing—not so much the […]
Poetry
Mar/Apr 2016
Elegy
Theres that age when we can’t look at the face of the dead anymore, a brother or sister, my sister, since by blood it’s your face too—no, that’s too easy: […]
Poetry
Mar/Apr 2016
Against Sunset
The California sun an hour, maybe half-an-hour still high, depending on how fast it falls: where does it go except into the sea, to burn out blue, blue-green, then finally […]
Poetry
Mar/Apr 2016
Dutch Elm
I miss the elms, their “crowns of airy dreams,” as Virgil calls them, their towering cathedral branching spread into a ceiling above the lonely sidewalks of Ohio where the first […]
Poetry
Mar/Apr 2016
Dream
Theres a scene in which were standing in a room, talking, almost touching, and she’s looking almost past me through the window, into the never future: she’s telling me to […]
Walking with Poets
Nov/Dec 2015
Early Nineteenth-Century English Poetry Walks
1 I remember the rain, a cold coin-colored all-day rain, hard as coins, straight down, June, just outside of Keswick, walking like a tourist in a light raincoat, soaked through, […]
Poetry
Summer 2014
Terminal Insomnia
Maybe it’s the night-shift-like long hours, maybe it’s the dark, or nothing more than mirror water in the street, the habit of the soul to think, or the wave, its […]
Poetry
Summer 2014
Late Winter Dusk
Out of my mouth a thrush, a spotted leaf, invisible among all evening things, the sun having passed almost completely through the piping of the new snow in the trees. […]
A SYMPOSIUM ON EMILY DICKINSON
Summer 2014
Wings
Emily Dickinson brings up birds in some 220 of her roughly 1,800 poems. Mostly she mentions them as contributions to the texture: as an analogue, a simile, a comparison, a […]
Poetry
Summer 2014
Jack Gilbert
The one time I met him was at Halpern’s 30th Street & 5th Avenue apartment, nineteen seventy something, on a roof that doubled as a sort of garden space where, […]
Nonfiction
Spring 2014
Jerusalem
On December 28, 1817, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon hosts what he refers to in both his diaries and Autobiography as “the immortal dinner.” The stated reasons for the dinner […]
Nonfiction
Winter 2014
George and John
The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George by Denise Gigante. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. 467+pp. $35.00, hardcover. Whatever else is required of it and whatever else […]
Poetry
Summer 2012
From the Window of the Quiet Car
1 Insular as a Quaker meeting. How in silence the speed of the several landscapes quickens, how the money green of the intermittent trees multiplies. How the brick industrial ruins […]
Poetry
Summer 2012
Four Hundred Mourners
The sizes of the crowds in those burn-baby-burn days were at best estimates, depending on who— the police, the press, the thousands in protest— was counting. The body count, we […]
Poetry
Summer 2012
Afterward
Sometimes, for all time, we just tire of the struggle, of what Stevens calls "the celestial ennui of apartments," from the umpteenth floor looking down through the ultimate open window. […]
A Symposium on John Keats
Fall 2011
The Odes for Their Own Sake
Between the end of April and the beginning of June 1819, John Keats wrote the spring odes that ultimately made his name and fame: and they include, in the common […]
Poetry
Summer 2011
Umberto D.
Umberto Domenico Ferrari is waiting for a train not to stop, hugging to his chest his mix of mutt and spot-eyed Jack Russell, who has been faithful as well as […]
Poetry
Summer 2011
Look for Me
If you want me again look for me anywhere but here, preferably out of the country, say, Italy, up by the glacial lakes, among the ghostly Alps and the green […]
Poetry
Summer 2011
My Lawrence
The future, rain in every syllable and cell, comes home later and later, until it's half past morning and time to go to work all over again. David Herbert Lawrence's […]
Poetry
Summer 2002
Cold Pastoral
Lee May's Weeds in April's Attaché starting with jimson and green dragon in isolated studies cast, Caravaggio-like, against black space or high white hint-of-blue, pictures of parts of the plant […]
Poetry
Summer 2002
Bill’s Hangover
First thing in the morning first things: first light, first sober notes of pigeons and some traffic, first grays and pinnate shadows, first last blossoms of ice just visible on […]
Poetry
Summer 2000
Comment on Thom Gunn’s ‘In Santa Maria Del Popolo’ concerning Caravaggio’s “The Conversion of St. Paul”
As much as art about seeing in the dark and when the setting sun will bring the painting back to life from where it hangs in the chapel’s night recess, […]
Poetry
Summer 2000
In the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague
Winter riot of waves the way these stones pile up, as if the dead, twelve deep in places, had risen cold and left in anger. Something threatening in their supernatural […]
Poetry
Autumn 1993
White Oaks Ascending
In the mind-weave, at a thousand, ten thousand feet, they all lean in on one another, snowy, hollow, still gothic with winter. And the few torn leaves starved neutral back […]
Poetry
Autumn 1993
Conan Doyle’s Copper Beeches
In the story they’re in a clump at the front hall door, as huge as an extinction, yet Holmes, the literalist, ignores them, focused on the options of the case. […]
Poetry
Autumn 1993
The Art of Poetry
No apologies, no explanations, a few words strung together on a line, a tolerance of inches off the wave, a radio wave, invisible though audible, like a lake held in […]
Stanley Plumly
A Conversation With Stanley Plumly by KR poetry editor David Baker Stanley Plumly was born in 1939 in Barnesville, Ohio, and grew up in the rural Quaker countryside of Ohio […]