Among the most ancient uses for language are descriptions of places, when a person has experienced something he or she wants to tell somebody else about. Some of these get condensed and transformed into poetry, and here’s a good example, by Susan Kolodny, a poet from the Bay Area of California. Koi Pond, Oakland Museum […]
Our sense of smell is the one sense most likely to transport us through time. A sniff of fried fish on a breeze and I can wind up in my grandmother’s kitchen sixty years ago, getting ready to eat bluegills. Michael Walsh, a Minnesotan, builds this fine poem about his parents around the odor of […]
In many of those Japanese paintings with Mt. Fuji in the background, we find tiny figures moving along under the immensity of the landscape. Here’s an American version of a scene like that, by Stanley Plumly of Maryland, one of our country’s most accomplished poets. Off A Side Road Near Staunton Some nothing afternoon, no […]
During our more than four years of publishing this column we’ve shown you a number of poems about motherhood. Here’s another, beautifully observed by Liz Rosenberg, who lives in New York State. I Leave Her Weeping I leave her weeping in her barred little bed, her warm hand clutching at my hand, but she doesn’t […]
Here’s a poem by Susan Meyers, of South Carolina, about the most ordinary of activities, washing the dishes, but in this instance remembering this ordinary routine provides an opportunity for speculation about the private pleasures of a lost parent. Mother, Washing Dishes She rarely made us do it — we’d clear the table instead — […]
The great American poet William Carlos Williams taught us that if a poem can capture a moment in life, and bathe it in the light of the poet’s close attention, and feel fresh and new, that’s enough, that’s adequate, that’s good. Here is a poem like that by Rachel Contreni Flynn, who lives in Illinois. […]
By Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006 Wendy Videlock lives in western Colorado, where a person can stop to study what an owl has left behind without being run over by a taxi. The Owl Beneath her nest, a shrew’s head, a finch’s beak and the bones of a quail attest the owl devours the […]
By Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006 Music lessons, well, maybe 80 out of every 100 of us had them, once, and a few of us went on to play our chosen instruments all our lives. But the rest of us? I still own a set of red John Thompson piano books that haven’t been […]
By Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-06 When we hear news of a flood, that news is mostly about the living, about the survivors. But at the edges of floods are the dead, too. Here Michael Chitwood, of North Carolina, looks at what’s floating out there on the margins. The Coffins Two days into the […]
By Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-06 All over this country, marriage counselors and therapists are right now speaking to couples about unspoken things. In this poem, Andrea Hollander Budy, an Arkansas poet, shows us one of those couples, suffering from things done and undone. Betrayal They decide finally not to speak of it, the […]
