Poem Guide
By Remica Bingham-Risher
What is the human fascination with death and endings; if a civilization became extinct, why would people want to see the site of that extinction? What does studying endings–of people, nations, or...
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- Poem GuideBy Peter O’LearyT.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is one of the most famous poems in English. It’s one of the first encounters readers have with modern poetry. It may have even invented modern poetry...
- Poem GuideBy Tyler MaloneOur knowledge that a flower is fleeting increases its value. So too does dawn’s desirability increase due to our knowledge of its transitory nature. With knowledge comes the pain of loss, but through...
- Poem GuideBy Sarah ArvioFederico García Lorca had a great ability to tell ravishing and ravaging tales of love between men and women, and as a gay man he disguised his own passion for men in poems that include few personal...
- Poem GuideBy Heather Green“Speaking Alone” is a reckoning with the trauma of war. Although it carries some of the wild energies of Tzara’s younger work, it moves at a reflective pace, paying lucid attention to the reality...
- Poem GuideBy Eric Weiskott“A Bird in Bishopswood” is an immersive springtime lyric scribbled on the back of a rental account for St. Paul’s Cathedral dated to circa 1395. For an alliterative poem of only forty-one lines, “A Bird in...
- Poem GuideBy Shanta Lee
If we pay close attention, we discover a cautionary tale that ends with self-devouring.
- Poem GuideBy CM BurroughsWalker constructs a tapestry from and for her people: “For My People” is an embrace of Blacks of the “gone years and the now years and the maybe years.” To guide the reader out of the repetition ...
- Poem GuideBy Annie FinchGwendolyn Brooks’s “the mother” is not an anti-abortion poem, despite being used repeatedly as an argument against abortion. In fact, “the mother” must be one of the most misunderstood poems in the...
- Poem GuideBy Julie IrigarayOn October 11, 1962, the English poet Ted Hughes abandoned his American wife, Sylvia Plath, and their children. On the same day, Plath wrote “The Applicant,” a hymn to female independence in the ...
- Poem GuideBy Tyler Malone
Who are all these people? Where is this waste land they inhabit? What is this chaos of impressions we are privy to? Wherefore such madness?
- Poem GuideBy Kristi MaxwellThe rare, the raw, the uncooked, a slab of flesh, the objectified, the carnal, the demands and nourishment of conventional masculinity, the slaughter, the substantial—see “the meat of it”; see also “the heart...
- Poem GuideBy Jeffrey CareyvaWhen you’re a kid, it’s not hard to be cute. And what’s cuter than the inarticulate, lisping voice of a young child? Even 200 years ago, Samuel Taylor Coleridge could exclaim in “The Nightingale,...
- Poem GuideBy Austin AllenYou open a book and start reading a prose poem. The poem’s voice sounds insistent, but it keeps trailing off. It calls itself “we” and repeatedly passes judgment on “they,” but it never specifies...
- Poem GuideBy Christopher SpaideOne of English’s great, scornful, scorching political poems was premiered in an unassuming place: the postscript of a letter: “What a state England is in! But you will never write politics.” It was...
- Poem GuideBy Austin AllenHow closely is language tied to identity? To our sense of reality? Born in the Dominican Republic and schooled in the United States, Rhina P. Espaillat confronted these questions early, writing poetry...
- Poem GuideBy Scott ChallenerIn “Harlem,” Langston Hughes asks one of American poetry’s most famous questions: what happens to a dream deferred? This question echoes throughout American culture, from Broadway to Dr. Martin Luther...
- Poem GuideBy Austin AllenAre borders necessary or regressive? Are humans naturally driven toward greater connection and cooperation, or does some old, mistrustful instinct always hold us back? These are among the questions...
- Poem GuideBy Austin AllenMarilyn Nelson’s “Daughters 1900” is both a witty villanelle and a nuanced vignette. The villanelle, an old French poetic form containing 19 lines and two refrains, is musical, intricate, and strict...
- Poem GuideBy Christopher SpaideHere’s a situation that’s hypothetical for some yet all too familiar for the clumsier among us. You spill something especially sugary or goopy all over your computer and a few keys gunk up; now, ...
