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Few poets, few people, deserve popularity as much as Pablo Neruda. He’s back again with more brilliant imagery, dozens of lines that I wish that I had written. As you read these lines, & dammit, you’d better, just relax your reason & see the images that he’s drawn for us. I can think of no… Continue reading “Melancholy Inside Families” by Pablo Neruda

Here’s a good one from Major Jackson, whom some of you will remember from the flame-lit days of the Black Arts Movement. He, like many of us, is a much better poet now, writing free, unconstrained  by the imperative of those years to make every poem about Blackness. I’m a big fan of free association.… Continue reading “You, Reader” by Major Jackson

Note that the publication year for this poem is 1965. You’re hip to the brew of politics, art & culture that was boiling over then & that your humble correspondent was cooking in it. Feminism was setting in along with all of the “isms” that keep us motivated today, but there was still a lot… Continue reading “The Mutes” by Denise Levertov

I’m back with another poem by the immortal Chilean, Pablo Neruda. Probably, if you surveyed everyone who reads poetry (all both of them) on the question of their favorite poet not named Shakespeare, Neruda would lap the field. I think that this is in great part because he writes to us from inside the heart… Continue reading “Emerging,” by Pablo Neruda

Here’s a poem by one of my favorite poets, Patricia Smith. Her suite of poems on hurricane Kartrina & its rape of New Orleans is, to me, a masterpiece, the kind of work that I never have been able to make in the way that it takes a single subject through so many registrations that… Continue reading “You’re Gonna Write This” by Patricia Smith

Hello,This prose poem, unlike the others that I’ve sent to (not shared with) you, is not so very dense & florid, but rather relaxed & calmly cynical / smile inducing. It is constructed atop the obvious oxymoron that “now” could possibly be “more than” “ever”. Opinion might vary on that, but I say, emphatically, never.We… Continue reading “Now More Than Ever” by Morgan Parker