Poetry
For more current Poetry columns
please subscribe to our complete edition: Click Here
Details in ‘How Are You Doing’ is art
One of the ways a poet makes art from his or her experience is through the use of unique, specific and particular detail. This poem by Rick Snyder thrives on such details. It’s not just baseball ...
full story
‘New Water’ adds to life’s sweetness
My maternal grandparents got their drinking water from a well in the yard, and my disabled uncle carried it sloshing to the house, one bucket of hard red water early every morning. I couldn’t res...
full story
Character shines in ‘Kissing a Horse’
A horse’s head is big, and the closer you get to it, the bigger it gets. Here is the Idaho poet, Robert Wrigley, offering us a horse’s head, up close, and covering a horse’s character, too. Kissi...
full story
‘Bread Soup’ turned into practical poem
Anyone can write a poem that nobody can understand, but poetry is a means of communication, and this column specializes in poems that communicate. What comes more naturally to us than to instruct...
full story
Loss, defeat in ‘No Children, No Pets’
Loss can defeat us or serve as the impetus for positive change. Here, Sue Ellen Thompson of Connecticut shows us how to mourn inevitable changes, tuck the memories away, then go on to see the pos...
full story
Life is full of quiet celebrations
The Illinois poet, Lisel Mueller, is one of our country’s finest writers, and the following lines, with their grace and humility, are representative of her poems of quiet celebration. In November ...
full story
Businessman, father turns into rock star
This wistful poem shows how the familiar and the odd, the real and imaginary, exist side by side. A Midwestern father transforms himself from a staid businessman into a rock-n-roll star, reclaimi...
full story
Neighbor envies older couple in ‘Raking’
The first poem we ran in this column was by David Allan Evans of South Dakota, about a couple washing windows together. You can find that poem and all the others on our Web site, www.americanlife...
full story
‘Green Tea’ holds no secret meaning
Poems of simple pleasure, poems of quiet celebration, well, they aren’t anything like those poems we were asked to wrestle with in high school, our teachers insisting that we get a headlock on T...
full story
Common turns into extraordinary in poem
Readers of this column during the past year have by now learned how enthusiastic I am about poems describing everyday life. I’ve tried to show how the ordinary can be made extraordinary through c...
full story
Nature inspires poet in ‘Moss’
Mothers and fathers grow accustomed to being asked by young children, “What’s that?” Thus parents relearn the world by having to explain things they haven’t thought about in years. In this poem th...
full story
Quiet moments evident in ‘The Dancer’
Remember those Degas paintings of the ballet dancers? Here is a similar figure study, in muted color, but in this instance made of words, not pigment. As this poem by David Tucker closes, I can fe...
full story
The constant struggle with weeds
Gardeners who’ve fought Creeping Charlie and other unwanted plants may sympathize with James McKean from Iowa as he takes on Bindweed, a cousin to the two varieties of morning glory that appear in...
full story
Thoughts of a poet
Everywhere I travel I meet people who want to write poetry but worry that what they write won’t be “any good.” No one can judge the worth of a poem before it’s been written, and setting high stand...
full story
Daughter takes after mother’s example
Most of us have taken at least a moment or two to reflect upon what we have learned from our mothers. Through a catalog of meaningful actions that range from spiritual to domestic, Pennsylvanian J...
full story
Family photos paint a thousand words
Those photos in family albums, what do they show us about the lives of people, and what don’t they tell? What are they holding back? Here Diane Thiel, who teaches in New Mexico, peers into one of ...
full story
| 25 
| 