'That apple bride was sweet, and I want to bring it back to him'
A while back we published a column in which I talked about my delight in the many names of kinds of apples, and mentioned Louise Bogan's marvellous mid-century poem 'The Crossed Apple'. Here's yet another fine apple-name poem for my collection, by Susan Rothbard, who lives in New Jersey.
THAT NEW
by Susan Rothbard
At the market today, I look for Piñata
apples, their soft-blush-...
25th December 2016
'She knows she is not looking at the sky. But she calls out, still'
What would our lives be like if we didn't have imagination? Here's a poem by Rachel Richardson, who lives in California, from her book, Hundred-Year Wave, from Carnegie Mellon University Press.
ASTRONOMER
by Rachel Richardson
A child climbs into a cardboard house,
shuts its doors and ...
21st December 2016
'I want to be at both houses'
Here's a short but loaded poem by a six-year-old from South Carolina, Jo'lene Dailey, from RYPA, the Rattle Young Poets Anthology. Rattle is a prominent literary journal. How many children have felt t...
14th December 2016
'Gazing into the world: at our walls, my red cup, my sleepless hair'
I suppose there have been other poems about a baby's first look at and into the world, but they couldn't be more touching than this, by Faith Shearin, who lives in West Virginia, and whose most recent...
6th December 2016
'Every night I tell her about the fish who died for her'
We've been selecting poems for this column for more than ten years and I can't remember ever publishing a poem about a cat. But here at last is a cat, a lovely old cat. Ron Koertge lives in California...
28th November 2016
'The windshield the anvil, the trike the hammer, the marriage the forge'
Garrison Keillor has used a number of George Bilgere's poems on The Writer's Almanac, and I've used several in this column, and it seems neither of us can get quite enough of this writer's clear, hone...
9th November 2016
'The witnesses are not to be found, the steps lead nowhere'
The workings of memory are something that every writer thinks a lot about, and in this poem Peter Everwine, a California poet we've featured before, looks very closely into those workings. His most re...
17th October 2016
'I sit in the dirt and put my hands in your tracks'
Travel can sharpen our awareness, can keep us on the alert, and here's a poem by Patricia Traxler from her new book Naming the Fires, from Hanging Loose Press. Traxler lives in Salina, Kansas.
...
10th October 2016
'I can't cross over. Then you really will be gone'
Barbara Crooker, who lives in Pennsylvania, has become one of this column's favorite poets. We try to publish work that a broad audience of readers can understand and, we hope, may be moved by, and th...
4th October 2016
'She dances through this two-year window'
Nick Norwood's most recent book is Gravel and Hawk, published by Ohio University Press. This poem has sorrow at the top and happiness at the bottom, which means there's a lot of living in between. It'...
26th September 2016
'The long, low waves of plains that dissolved time'
Here's a poem by Debra Nystrom about what it feels like to be a schoolgirl in rural America. No loud laughter echoing in the shopping mall for these young women. The poet lives in Virginia and this is...
20th September 2016
'He still waves the flopping spring of his crop, still stares through dimming goggles'
I'd guess that many of us like old toys. As a boy I had a wind-up tin submarine that dove and surfaced, and a few years ago I saw one just like it in the window of an antique store, making me, of cour...
12th September 2016
'Come winter they have a way of disappearing, disguised as dirty light'
Stuart Dybek was born in Chicago, where there are at least a couple of hundred hotels a poet might stroll past, looking up at the windows. Here's a poem from his book, Streets in Their Own Ink, from F...
5th September 2016
'Weather had toughened the soft leather, and one lace had broken short'
Sylvia Ross is from California's Chukchansi people, and this poem, from the anthology Red Indian Road West (Scarlet Tanager Books), is as moving a description about the lasting warmth of hand-me-downs...
26th August 2016
'I drinking deep of everything I saw, now mine to keep'
Roy Scheele, one of Nebraska's finest poets, has a new chapbook called The Sledders: Thirty Sonnets, from Three Sheets Press. One of any writer's most valuable tools is memory, and this poem shows it ...
23rd August 2016
'A hissing fury at the bottom of the garbage can, a vampire bathed in light'
Readers of this column have probably noticed how much I love poems that give us new ways of looking at things, and in this example Faith Shearin does just that. I especially like "four-legged relative...
15th August 2016
'The girl draws a webbed foot from her pocket and places it in his hand'
Here's a fine, deftly made poem by Meg Kearney, of New Hampshire, in which the details deliver the emotions, which are never overtly named other than by the title. It's my favorite kind of poem, and i...
5th August 2016
'I could smell your breath, your musty fur'
As children, just about everyone has experienced the very real fear of an imaginary monster. But what if our mothers could have spoken to our childhood fears? Carrie Shipers of Wisconsin, the author o...
2nd August 2016
'Imagine being so light as to float above water in love'
We hope that you will visit, from time to time, our archived columns at www.americanlifeinpoetry.org, where you may find other poems by the poets we feature. Today's is the third we've published by Sh...
12th July 2016
'What struck me first was their panic'
There's an old joke about a truck with a five-ton licence and ten tons of canaries on board. The driver had to keep getting out and banging his fist on the side to keep half the canaries flying. Here ...
5th July 2016
'Sinuous body we've never glimpsed, that haunts about our shrubs'
This past autumn, pruning a big lilac bush, I found a snakeskin that some bird had woven into its nest. Here's a poem about another find, from Stephen Behrendt, who lives and teaches in Nebraska. His ...
27th June 2016
'She tells him she's leaving him and he bakes a pie'
Faced by a loss, and perhaps by a loss of words, many of us find something to do with our hands. Here's a poem about just that by Arden Levine, published in 2015 in an issue of Agni magazine. Ms Levin...
13th June 2016
'They show up when I think of them, as if they always are waiting for me to remember'
At some moment every day I call up a memory of one or another of my family members who have passed on, so I was especially taken with this poem by Tim Nolan, who lives in Minnesota. His forthcoming bo...
30th May 2016
'One brave screw holds the makeshift contraption together'
Here's a touching father-son poem by Jennifer Gray, who lives in Nebraska. If you're not big enough to push a real mower, well, you make a mower of your own.
Summer Mowing
He has transfo...
23rd May 2016
'In the shadows where the milk-chocolate river unfolded ... we'd strip'
Here's a fine poem about the fleshy pleasures of adolescence by Ginger Murchison, from her book a scrap of linen, a bone from Press 53. Murchison lives in Florida.
River
Late afternoons, w...
16th May 2016
'They twirl twice before the imported cheeses, fresh mozzarella in its milky liquid'
Pat Emile is assistant editor and Jill-of-all-trades for this column. Were it not for her help I couldn't keep these weekly selections coming. Here she is in another role, as a poet, stopping in a lit...
10th May 2016
'The winter flies away when the cranes cross'
Early each spring, Nebraska hosts, along a section of the Platte river, several hundred thousand sandhill cranes. It's something I wish everyone could see. Don Welch, one of the state's finest poets, ...
1st May 2016
'The way we need to learn to live with wasting'
I can't help wishing that dogs lived as long as we do. I have buried a number of them, and it doesn't get any easier. In fact, it gets harder. Here's Mark Vinz, a Minnesota poet, from his book Permane...
24th April 2016
'Mannequins weirdly sexy behind big glass windows'
My father spent his life in the retail business, and loved almost every minute of it, so I was especially pleased to see this poem by David Huddle, from his new book, Dream Sender, from Louisiana Stat...
19th April 2016
'Watching the world swim fast and shining, right before his eyes'
Richard M Berlin is a doctor and poet, or a poet and doctor, and in this poem from his book Practice, from Brick Road Poetry Press, he honours the wisdom each of us gains through experience.
...
11th April 2016
'He liked to watch the old houses stir awake'
Susan Aizenberg lives and teaches in Omaha, and the following poem is from Quiet City, published by BkMk Press. My father, and perhaps yours, too, found a little pleasure in an early morning walk.
...5th April 2016
'A parade down 5th Avenue, bonnets in lavender, powder blues'
When I was a boy, because of the song, I thought there really was an Easter parade, but the Easters came and went without one. But here's a glimpse of just a little piece of a parade by Kim Dower, who...
2nd April 2016
'Perhaps she came down for the apples'
Philip Terman is a Pennsylvania poet who, with his family, lives in a former one-room schoolhouse. And whenever there's a one-room schoolhouse you can count on just a little wilderness around it. This...
24th March 2016
'Every spring my mother says I should buy a straw hat'
In my limited experience, mothering and worrying go hand in hand. Here's a mother's worry poem by Richard Jarrette, from his fine book, A Hundred Million Years of Nectar Dances. He lives in California...
16th March 2016
'I am Mercury, bearing news, my wings a single-speed bike'
I suppose some of the newspapers which carry this column still employ young people to deliver the news, but carriers are now mostly adults. I had two paper routes when I was a boy and was pleased to f...
7th March 2016
'Maybe it's what we don't say that saves us'
After my mother died, her best friend told me that they were so close that they could sit together in a room for an hour and neither felt she had to say a word. Here's a fine poem by Dorianne Laux, ab...
25th February 2016
'The older we get the stranger my husband becomes'
It's said that each of us undergoes gradual change and that every seven years we are essentially a new person. Here's a poem by Freya Manfred, who lives in Stillwater, Minnesota, about the changes in ...
15th February 2016
'Our small talk numbing as a dial tone, serious as prayer'
A friend told me recently that he tries to keep in touch with people he's known even though they don't put any effort into doing that themselves. Here's William Trowbridge, who lives in Missouri, maki...
9th February 2016
'To crease a sheet of paper is to change its memory'
This column is more than 10 years old and I've finally gotten around to trying a little origami! Here's a poem about that, and about a good deal more than that, by Vanessa Stauffer, who teaches writin...
31st January 2016
'Light larking between wind and current will be in this sweater'
The only passage of scripture that I know by heart is from Ecclesiastes: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the g...
8th January 2016
Deer Fording the Missouri in Early Afternoon
I love to have people come up to me and say, "You'll never believe what I saw this morning," and then go on to tell me. It's their delight that I like so much. Here's a poem in that vein by Kevin Cole...
7th January 2016
