June 10, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – June
But does poetry actually change anything? Does it need to? Maybe poets are, as Percy Bysshe Shelley writes, “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Or maybe W.H. Auden is right that […]
November 11, 2016
“We need to know how to go about reaching the next days of our lives”
Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” is going around again. W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” is circling through social media, as it did after September 11. Why do we turn to poems […]
September 6, 2011
Short Takes: Crying and Laughing, or Both
A kind of poetic justice, in which an Ottawa prosecutor’s rhyme helped to convict an impaired driver in court. Plugged into Google Correlate (a tool which lets you free-draw graph […]
July 1, 2011
A Divagation on the Self-Portrait
It’s hard for me to come to a poem like Adam Zagajewski’s “Self-Portrait” (included in the latest issue of The Kenyon Review) without thinking of those lines from Charles Wright’s […]