Jaimee Kuperman is a poet living and working in the Washington, D.C., area, and she shares with many of us the experience of preparing one’s self for a visit to the dentist. Do you, too, give your teeth an especially thorough brushing before entering that waiting room?
Nothing brings a poem to life more quickly than the sense of smell, and Candace Black, who lives in Minnesota, gets hold of us immediately, in this poem about change, by putting us next to a dumpster.
A wise friend told me that since the Age of Reason we’ve felt we had to explain everything, and that as a result we’ve forgotten the value of mystery. Here’s a poem by Lisel Mueller that celebrates mystery. Mueller is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet from Illinois.
Anne Coray is an Alaskan, and in this beautiful meditation on the stillness of nature she shows us how closely she’s studied something that others might simply step over.
The persons we are when we are young are probably buried somewhere within us when we’ve grown old. Denise Low, who was the Kansas poet laureate, takes a look at a younger version of herself in this telling poem.
Here’s a fine poem about a cricket by Catherine Tufariello, who lives in Indiana. I especially admire the way in which she uses rhyme without it ever taking control of the poetry, the way rhyme can.
When we’re on all fours in a garden, planting or weeding, we’re as close to our ancient ancestors as we’re going to get. Here, while he works in the dirt, Richard Levine feels the sacred looking over his shoulder.
I like birds, and poems about birds, and several years ago I co-edited an anthology of bird poems called The Poets Guide to the Birds. I wish Judith Harris had written this lovely description of a mockingbird in time for us to include it, but it’s brand new. Harris lives in Washington, D.C.
Those of us who have gone back home to attend a reunion of classmates may have felt the strangeness of being a vaguely familiar person among others who, too, seem vaguely familiar. Dana Gioia, who served the country for four years as the Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, is an accomplished poet and a noted advocate for poetry.
Joe Paddock is a Minnesota poet and he and I are, as we say in the Midwest, “of an age.” Here is a fine poem about arriving at a stage when there can be great joy in accepting life as it comes to us.
I love poems that take pains to observe people at their tasks, and here’s a fine one by Christopher Todd Matthews, who lives in Virginia.
I’ve mentioned before how much I like poems that take the time to carefully observe people at work. Here David St. John, who lives in California, gives us a snapshot of workers protecting an orchard.
Go for a walk and part of whatever you walk through rides back on your socks. Here Peter Everwine, a California poet, tells us about the seeds that stick to us, in all their beauty and variety.
