But poetry remained something you had to teach and learn. After graduation, I was handed a list of poems to teach my students in Middle School. For myself, I kept collections of T. S. Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins at bedside for spiritual growth, but rarely opened them.
Then I heard then-poet-laureate Billy Collins on NPR and caught the idea that poems are like jokes that can make you gasp, or cringe, or cry, as well as smile.
About that time, I started to subscribe to POETRY magazine. I followed up on poets I liked, and started this blog. Now, I want this page to be a place where I'm reminded by poems, as Frost once said, "of what it would impoverish us to forget."
Richard Blanco
Solace in Blanco Verse for Midlife, Midwinter Blues
was what I wrote when some lines by Blanco helped me through a couple of dark hours of self-doubt. I appreciated his collection Looking for the Gulf Motel: Not Grievance but Gratitude. He says that he wrote his memoir to see what his life looks like without line breaks.
"It Takes a Pueblo": Richard Blanco's Loving Memoir is my review of The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood. Blanco takes on the challenge of writing poems for public occasions in How to Love a Country.
Todd Boss
Poet Todd Boss: Story and Rhyme. Todd Boss gets a lot of attention from me, thanks in part to his guest appearance on NPR's cooking show The Splendid Table. He reached out on his web site, too: http://www.toddbosspoet.com/Home.html I find much to love in his dramas, his themes, and his playful inner rhymes. It was his work in POETRY that helped me to develop the idea of "Secular Psalms." I wrote again about his second collection: Poet Todd Boss's Pitch: Family's Value
Billy Collins
Billy Collins: Ten Poems Too Many? My ambivalence about Billy Collins' work drew more comments than any other post in the ten years that followed, all from people who scorn Mr. Collins. Side note: Going head-to-head with Frost, Dickinson, Angelou, and other more contemporary poets, Collins won more than half the time during the years when my 7th grade voted for poems that were both meaningful and engaging.
Bee Donley
I revered Bee, nearly 60 years old when I started my teaching career at St. Andrew's Episcopal in Jackson, MS. We lost touch when I moved. In her last years, she published books of poetry worthy of her decades as teacher of fine writing and sensitive reading. For Memorial Day: Mostly Ghosts by Bee Donley
T.S.Eliot
Just a Closer Walk with T.S.Eliot: I finally get down to reading "Little Gidding" after years of being intimidated by "Mr. Eliot." I love it! Some years later, I returned for "East Coker" and wrote Poem and Puzzle.
Robert Frost
Early Frost finds a huge leap between Frost's earliest published work and what came with "Mending Wall" in 1914. He also wrote a great deal as verse drama. Who knew? Poet / essayist Dana Gioia takes over the end of my essay in his defense of Frost from critics. I conclude: "Thanks to Gioia for introducing me to this quote, which I am evidently the last English major to learn: Poetry 'is a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.'"
Dana Gioia
Dana Gioia was head of the National Endowment for the Humanities when I heard him speak in Atlanta. His books of essays Can Poetry Matter? and Disappearing Ink speak out against an unhealthy insularity of poets since the 1950s. I write about Gioia's verse in On Holy Saturday: Poems of Remembrance.
Donald Hall
Night of the Cows is an appreciation of a long narrative poem by Donald Hall called "The Night of the Day." Is it a poem, or just an anecdote? Why do I feel the urge to re-read it every six months or so?
Marie Howe
I heard her read and discuss her poems on NPR. I went online instantly to buy her collections What the Living Do (focused on family and her brother John's death by AIDs), The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, and Magdalene. I found reviews by others who had also heard her on the radio and bought the books instantly. My reflection is called You Must Remember "This," focused on a lesson that her brother taught her about being attentive to life, its rituals, and other peoples' separate realities. I reflected separately on The Kingdom of Ordinary Time and on her use of the religious-historical figure called Mary Magdalene.
Donald Justice
I bought his "new and selected" collection when I was 40 immediately after hearing his poem "Men at Forty." Twenty years later, I had aged into appreciating his work. See Men at Sixty: Ready for the Poetry of Donald Justice.
Mary Karr
Her 2006 collection Sinners Welcome contains poems about how her son brought her out of her self, poems about the Incarnation (embodiment) of God that make familiar Bible stories uncomfortably physical, and many other poems that often express gratitude. See Discomfort and Joy. In an afterward, Karr connects all poetry to prayer. That essay figures prominently in a piece I wrote about writing a form of prayer that comes close to being a form of poetry. See Where Prayer Meets Poetry: The Collect. Karr's poetry features in Poets on Prayer, a look at poems by Karr and Christian Wiman that get inside what prayer can feel like. Impudent but not Irreverent: Mary Karr's Less Holy Bible (08/2022) focuses on a group of poems in Karr's 2018 collection The Tropic of Squalor. Mary Karr's poem "Etchings from the Plague Years" (1993) was my introduction to her work. My seminar group considered it in a theological reflection. See Vocation and Plague at our class blog, the second half of the article.
Jane Kenyon
While Jane Kenyon's posthumous Collected Poems has been important to me for many years, I've written about her work only once, in an article I called Shrink Age, focused on what English teachers might have to offer the world on the subject of aging parents. I wrote this years before Dad died and Mom showed the first symptoms of dementia.
Philip Larkin
No Failure of Imagination: Atheists Find Something More was my response to a staged interview between a Jesuit and his buddy the atheist Christopher Hitchens. They found common ground in a quotation from novelist Ian McEwan,"Other people are as alive as you are. Cruelty is a failure of imagination." They found more common ground enjoying the poem "Church Going" by Philip Larkin. That led me to read Larkin's collected poems. See Curmudgeon with a Heart of Gold: Philip Larkin. In The Joys of Larkin, I report on an essay about "Happiness in Larkin" The author insists that her title isn't a joke.
Dave Mason
Note to Self: Look for more Poetry by Dave Mason is my discovery of a poet cited as expressing Christian faith in his poetry, though the work that put me onto him had no overtly religious subjects. The article ends with Leslie Monsour's clever indictment of us poet wannabes. After buying a collection by Mason, I responded to one long, atmospheric poem, "The Collector's Tale," in an article I called Verse Noire by Dave Mason .
Mary Oliver
"A Doorway into Thanks": Mary Oliver's Thirst is my greatest hit. I'm not so complimentary of Ms. Oliver's work as some of my readers would like, but I appreciate that her poetry is a kind of prayer, and it opens our eyes in the way that makes all good poetry "religious" or "spiritual." I created a worship liturgy mostly from poems in this collection.
Linda Pastan
Linda Pastan's Poetry for Giving Thanks considers mostly poems from Pastan's collection The Last Uncle, which I took with me to read in the car while I waited for what turned out to be one of my last Thanksgiving dinners with Mom and Dad. See also: Linda Pastan's Last Uncle and My Last Aunt. When I took the same book with me for the cross-country drive to my Aunt Blanche's funeral, Pastan spoke to me. For the adult seminar Education for Ministry, I created a liturgy for worship from Pastan's poetry. I review her collection Queen of a Rainy Country in an article called Linda Pastan: Not Quite Ordinary. After her death in 2023, I wrote about her last two collections in Linda Pastan Doesn't Get Old. See also: Shrink Age: Poets Caring for Elderly Parents , poems on the topic by Pastan and Jane Kenyon.
Lawrence Raab
Boomer's Poetry: Lawrence Raab's Probable World. Of this gentle spirit with wry imagination, I write: "His imagination was shaped by comic books and movies, and his poems include space aliens, mutant humanoid crab monsters, dogs, Jimi Hendrix. Reflecting on his not serving in the army, he is not proud, he writes. His poems also touch on Bosnia, terrorism, and Columbine. Also, dogs, God, Emily Dickinson, youth, a father who died early." I've re-read his works many times.
Rumi
Rumi at 800: Muslim Poet for Us All tells what I learned from hearing Christopher Theofinidas's symphonic/choral setting of poetry by Rumi, some research, and from a collection of the poems. I had reason to wonder whether I was responding to Rumi, or to the translators' overlays on Rumi. But I distill these lessons: "Our dissatisfactions are good for us: we are separated from God, and dissatisfaction is a sign of our longing for completeness in God. Other desires are good, too, stopping-points on the way to completeness in God. One poem includes the lines, 'If anyone asks how did Jesus raise the dead / Kiss me on the lips and say, "like this."'"
Clint Smith
Before Clint Smith III was staff writer for The Atlantic, best-selling author, and go-to guest for public affairs media, he was a poet and a teacher. My reflection on his first book of poetry includes responses from my own students at the time. Poetry of Clint Smith in Counting Descent gets more reads than any other article this decade. I look back over his second collection Above Ground in an article I call My Dinner with Clint Smith.
John Updike
Updike's Endpoint: Light at Sunset. Updike's biographer struck a chord with me when he commented that Updike's last published work, this slim poetry collection that came out after his death, may be the best of all the tens of thousands of pages he published. Always haunted by death, Updike seems to have been liberated by the doctors' death sentence. (Updike gets his own page on this blog.)
Derek Walcott
After living with his Selected Poems for most of 2022, I wrote Never Get Used to Derek Walcott's Poetry. Fourteen years before that, I read about him, and wrote Note to Self: Check into Poetry by Derek Walcott. That's where I preserved this wonderful explanation of what rhyme does:
Rhyme remains the parenthesis of palms
Shielding a candle's tongue, it is the language's
Desire to enclose the loved one in its arms.
Tom Wayman My gateway to Wayman was "What Good Poems Are For" (1986) from Christian Wiman's anthology Home. Wayman imagines that a poem is like a potted plant on a sunlit window sill in a cabin by a lake, a decoration you might not notice -- but, were it absent, you'd miss it. Many of his poems concern experiences in factories, doing manual labor. My appreciation of him is Tom Wayman Works
William Carlos Williams
Composer Steve Reich set Williams texts in a major work for chorus and symphony orchestra, The Desert Music. Fascinated by that, I bought the Selected Poems. Try as I might, dipping in every so often during the last thirty years, I never got into it. Then the movie Paterson earned some rave reviews, its story concerning an unpublished poet named Paterson who lives in Paterson. I bought Williams's book-length poem of the same name, along with a collection by Ron Padgett, who supplied the verse for the movie. Sorry, I didn't get far in either book. But I gleaned enough to enhance my enjoyment of the movie. Jim Jarmusch's movie Paterson is a gentle rumination on poetry, love, place. (Read my reflection, Paterson: Movie and Poem )
Christian Wiman
Beyond Belief in My Bright Abyss concerns a book of essays by this poet, once fundamentalist, then atheist, now a kind of believer again. There's also my review of the poet's verse collected in Every Riven Thing. Wiman's poem about a convenience store features prominently in Poets on Prayer, which includes a look at poems by Mary Karr that get inside what prayer can feel like.
Dean Young
Six months after Young's death from COVID in August 2022, I started to read his collection Bender, which I bought because I remembered liking him so much when I wrote about his poems years ago. It was Young's work that first got me to thinking of "secular psalms." In a reflection on Poetry 2007, among responses to other poets, I enjoy Young's "Undertow," which includes a dog that thinks, "maybe a life of fetch is not a wasted life." I write that Dean Young's "Easy as Falling Downstairs" sends the reader's eyes zig-zagging across the page while it considers how our minds zig-zag: "Like a psalm, it encompasses the vastness of creation before it seems to focus into a kind of love poem," I write. I used that poem in another article, Gyrovagueness, from Benedict's word for monks who can't seem to settle down.
Teaching Poetry
When I would present poetry in the context of "March Madness," complete with brackets and competitions, the results were better than I had dreamed. See 7th Grade Payoffs from Poetry Playoffs. Poet Kwame Alexander is also a poetry missionary to classrooms, and a conversation with him on NPR excited me to think that poetry may be all you need to teach language to Middle School. See "Let the Poetry do the Work" (2017/07)
Secular Psalms in Poetry Magazine
Much of my writing about poetry relates to the idea that even poems about hurtful things are like the psalms, celebrating and showing gratitude for the experience of life. Discussions and essays by poets about religion naturally interested me. Here are several blog posts along those lines:
Poetry, November 2007 I respond to poet Dean Young's "Easy as Falling Down Stairs," about how the mind flits from one thing to another, in a world that is itself "tectonically" in motion. The poem struck me as a secular psalm, an expression of gratitude for experience and for a Something Beyond or Beneath it, an idea I developed further in other postings.
Poetry, November 2007 and summer 2008. The summer issue contains a poem by Carl Dennis, with this premise: Suppose you knew this would be the world's last day: What would you do differently? I write: "What strikes me after reading it is how this thought experiment is a kind of agnostic sermon that touches on the essential religious question, "Why bother?" Likewise, an earlier issue of Poetry (November 2007) contains some verses that strike me as being secular psalms, seeing details of the world as part of a gloriously and painfully unified whole." "Leaf Litter on Rock Face" by Heather McHugh digs into a simple image, leaves on stone, and finds a spirit in matter. "Adam's Prayer" by Amanda Jernigan develops in Adams' voice. In "Just Now," Peter Campion's anxieties about terrorism become focused on a ladybug."Cat, Failing" comes close to being something you'd put in a condolence card for someone mourning the loss of an old sickly pet, but it reaches beyond "awww" to "ah!" when it touches on something essentially human in the experience of approaching death. Dean Young's "Easy as Falling Downstairs" sends the reader's eyes zig-zagging across the page while it considers how our minds zig-zag: "Like a psalm, it encompasses the vastness of creation before it seems to focus into a kind of love poem," I write. I enjoy his "Undertow" even more, and it includes a dog that thinks, "maybe a life of fetch is not a wasted life."
Poetry December 2008 Poet Roddy Lumsden considers kids at the beach for whom "now" is a landscape, not a little pinpoint. Todd Boss listens to his little boy singing on his way to the bathroom early one morning. Fred D'Aguiar, reared in Ghuyana, writes of the train as a monster. We get whimsical poems about God's answering machine and Glenn Morazzani's "Therapy from the Garden."
Other articles deal with poets who discuss religion and poetry:
This Old Verse: Ted Kooser's Poetry Manual highlights some wonderful lines that the former poet-laureate uses for examples. Kooser suggests "a metaphysical or even religious function for poems. He admits that, if he lives another twenty years, he may even come to believe in a God who cares about what he does. Until then, though, he feels more and more certain that all things are connected, and poems -- especially through metaphor -- help us to see that."
Vermeer, Updike, and a Poetry Editorial finds support for the idea that good poetry is inherently religious.
Faith is as Rational as Language (or Poetry) again considers how some scorners of religion dismiss is as metaphor -- as if metaphor weren't truth.
Bees, Butterflies, Worldview and Metaphor deals with an essay by poet D.H.Tracy about poets who take ideas seriously. The article includes bits from James Merrill, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Robert Pinsky.
A painting by Tanner and a poem by Levertov at an Advent "spiritual workshop" brought a little poetry out of me.
What Struck me in Poetry Magazine
Joining Moments, Enjoying the Moments deals mostly with a poem by Joel Brouwer, "A Report to the Academy," and an argument in the same issue of POETRY by "die-hard formalist" Clive James. I conclude: "All of this is exemplified in Bouwer's poem. It doesn't rhyme, but its twenty-six lines run consistently ten syllables. It's a simple anecdote developed through moments of growing consciousness that reach their conclusion not through rhetoric or argument, but by images that repeat with variations. In the end, it's just a few moments that suggest more than moments: a momentous acceptance in the man's life. And we feel good about it."
But... poet Joel Brouwer came up again, this time in a brouhaha over his criticism of a poet named Roy Jacobstein's poem about "Dog Races in Florida." I disagreed both with Brouwer and another poet named George Rappleye. After I posted my article, Rappleye commented. See Round and Round with Poets and Dogs.
Poetry March 2007 issue included fragments of poetry by Sophocles assembled under topics such as "the sea"; a poet Richard Kenney's speculation about alien beings' inhabiting our bodies for entertainment purposes; and Kay Ryan's neat use of repeated sound to mimic the way we see a slice of the other side of the tracks between train cars passing by. I complain about a poem that seems all fragments, all slices of life, with no coherence or compensating pleasure.
Poetry May 2007 considers Bob Hicok's poem imagining fathers and sons together in a poetry workshop, more about a father "whose absence was his presence" than about poetry. Another poem by Hicok fantasizes about jumping in a river to save a drowning mother and child. Anne Stevenson writes of the "adhesiveness of things" when her persona opens her grandmother's silverware drawer. Geoffrey Brock's poem with the suggestive title "Homeland Security" puts us in the mind of the young father deciding at 4:30 a.m. whether to let his infant son cry a little longer. I say it's "political without being polemical."
Poetry June 2007. John Koethe's "Chester" finds meaning in waking with a pet at the foot of the bed; A.E. Stalling's poem "Misspent" compares our days to coins we can't even recall spending; David Yezzi's "The Good News" resonated for me with the experience of meeting an old friend after 30 years.
The summer 2007 issue of POETRY included three poems by Tony Hoagland that get beyond the wise guy attitude that cloyed in his collection WHAT NARCISSISM MEANS TO ME. Hoagland writes, "It's time to catch up on praise." Like Updike, and like Walcott (see elsewhere on this page), he writes that description "lingers, / and loves for no reason." The rest of the issue includes Q&A with Richard Wilbur, John Updike, Todd Boss, Billy Collins, and Alice Friman who wanted to be "smarty ass clever" in her poem "Art and Science," hoping that the clever "busyness" would straighten out to a single note, like Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D.
Poetry February 2008 The issue contained early verse by Samuel Beckett, whose modernist purity struck me as preferable to what I saw of modernism in an exhibit of Stieglitz and O'Keeffe that same month. The issue also contained a photo-and-poetry portfolio about Soviet Era Poland.
Poetry September 2008 I appreciate two poems by Alan Shapiro that explode the myth that anything orderly and clean is bourgeois and inauthentic" "Gas Station Restroom" and "24/7" about a convenience store. There's also an article by Clive James about Shakespeare's Sonnets. I conclude: "The next best thing to reading a poem and getting it, is reading someone else's writing that open[s] up the art to you."
Poetry October, November 2008
"There is no I in teamwork / but no we in marriage / only a grim area" anagrams the poet Craig Arnold in his poem "Uncouplings." I enjoy Philip Levine's poem about worship for mountains. Mostly I tell of works by Sarah Lindsay that take off from real events to reach in some unexpected direction. There's a poem about telling bad news to the bees; about the death of a single small animal - last of its kind; and the image of a singer found in an archaeological dig. Reviews of poems Billy Collins, whose method is similar, opens the article.
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