“I never got poetry,” someone says to me again. And I sigh. Because I never got it either — at least, not until I learned to stop worrying about “getting it.” In fact, “get” — with its connotation of ...

When I am driving in the country at night the same words will always pop into my head. I look at the white line disappearing past my headlights and I think, "The road was a ribbon of moonlight." This ...

A former editor introduced me to the Poetry Foundation‘s Poem of the Day. His parents were poets—not amateurs who scribbled doggerel on birthday cards, but professionals who published books and taught ...

LET’S BEGIN by talking about meaning in poetry. It’s always the dragon at the gate whenever you approach the subject. Every poet, I suppose, tries to define for himself what poetry is all about. It’s ...

In 1968, Margaret Ackerman of the University of Arizona authored a paper for The English Journal in which she included a summary of what poetry meant to most of her students: “sentimentality, ...

At first, Walter Grigo was stumped. His class assignment was to prepare a 10-minute presentation on a poem by colonial author Phillis Wheatley. Grigo, who at the time was taking graduate courses at ...

Poet and professor of divinity Christian Wiman says that there are all kinds of poems he’s turned to during this pandemic. He especially enjoys poems that are joyful and have helped him perceive the ...

“Mimi’s Trapeze,” a new book by J. Allyn Rosser, starts with a quote by Balzac in the original French. The poet translates it roughly as, “Being human — what an appalling condition! in which every ...