ne of the founders of modernist poetry, Ezra Pound, advised poets and artists to “make it new.”
This year’s brutal winter surely calls for a poem such as today’s selection, a peek at the inner workings of spring. Susan Kelly-DeWitt lives and teaches in Sacramento.
Nancy Willard, who lives in New York state, is one of my favorite poets, a writer with a marvelous gift for fresh description and a keen sense for the depths of meaning beneath whatever she describes. Here’s a poem from her newest book.
The bread of life, well, what is it, anyway? Family, community, faith? Here’s a lovely reminiscence about the way in which bread brings us together, by Richard Levine, who lives in Brooklyn.
Anyone who has followed this column since its introduction in 2005 knows how much I like poems that describe places.
Our sense of smell is, as you know, not nearly as good as that of our dogs, but it can still affect us powerfully. A good writer, like Tami Haaland of Billings, Montana, can show us how a single odor can sweep us back through time.
There are thousands of poems about caring for the old, but I have never before seen one like this, in which a caregiver wades with an elderly person out into deep water, literally and figuratively. It’s by Marie Thurmer, a poet now living in Nebraska.
April Lindner is a poet living in Pennsylvania who has written a number of fine poems about parenting. Here’s an example that shows us just one of the many hazards of raising a child.
On a perfect Labor Day, nobody would have to work, and even the “associates” in the big box stores could quit stocking shelves. Well, it doesn’t happen that way, does it? But here’s a poem about a Labor Day that’s really at rest, by Joseph Millar, from North Carolina.
Here’s a fine poem about the stages of grief by Helen T. Glenn, who lives in Florida.
Those of us who have been fortunate enough to have been new parents will recognize the way in which everything seems to relate to a baby, who has by her arrival suddenly made the world surround her. D. Nurkse lives in Brooklyn
One of the first things an aspiring writer must learn is to pay attention, to look intently at what is going on. Here’s a good example of a poem by Gabriel Spera, a Californian, that wouldn’t have been possible without close observation.
To capture an object in words is a difficult chore, but when it’s done exceptionally well, as in this poem by A. E. Stallings, I’d rather read the description than see the object itself. A. E. Stallings is an American poet living in Greece.
