Poems for the People

Mischa Willett "Hadriana, My Love"

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 13:11:58 -0700

A poem of my own, from the book WAX, available for the iPhone/iPad through the iBooks app. Thanks for your indulgence.

www.mischawillett.com

Terrific music from "The Fretful Porcupine"

Sierra Nelson "We'll Always Have Carthage"

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 18:49:20 -0700

I'm sending you a postcard from the end of the world.

Brad Davis "Quiet Words"

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:45:53 -0700

A place-poem from the book "Like Those Who Dream" that is deceptively simple. Those who know mythology will be right to detect a note of menace in those ferries going back and forth across the water.

Czeslaw Milosz "Realism"

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:52:20 -0700

A poem from the end of Milosz's considerable life and output. The viewer enters the artwork as a pilgrim to it, and slips gracefully through the ice of his own twilight.

Percy Bysshe Shelley "Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici"

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 14:54:55 -0700

This short lyric is the last finished poem we have of Shelley's. He was in the middle of "The Triumph of Life," when we drowned off the Italian coast in the Bay of Spezia along with Edward Williams, husband to this poem's likely addressee, Jane Williams.

Richard Kenney "Air Sublime"

Fri, 21 May 2010 17:01:28 -0700

Experiences of the sublime are supposed to overwhelm one's intelligence. However tawdry the airline industry has managed to make flying, it's still FLYING.

Mark Halliday "Refusal to Notice Beautiful Women"

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 20:09:39 -0700

Halliday's ingenious productivity suite.

Bruce Beasley "Self-Portrait in Ink"

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 15:15:17 -0700

Why all these poems out poets'-selves? Is the self a suitable topic for poetry? Beasley opens a pretty interesting vein of discussion at the close of the confessional school in this smart, and sonically-motivated piece on the transience of ink.

Alfred Lord Tennyson "Ulysses"

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 12:32:28 -0700

The problem of a leader who doesn't know his people; the problem of men and women passing their lives in front of televisions.

Laura McKee "Strategy for the Decline"

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:46:37 -0700

A meditation on art-making, and cycling, and any striving, from Seattle poet Laura Mckee.

Dylan Thomas "Fern Hill"

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 03:10:06 -0800

In his apartment, they found 40 copies of this poem when Dylan Thomas died, each one slightly different, reflecting the perfectionist craftsman even in this child-like reverie of a farm in summer.

Dean Young "Ode to Hangover"

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 19:56:10 -0800

Dean Young's books are hip and smart, and, thanks to Believer books, beautifully produced. This poem has been useful on more than one occasion; a sort of "morning after" consolation.

W.H. Auden "Musee des Beaux Arts"

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 10:15:09 -0800

A classic piece of ekphrastica, Auden visits a museum in this terrific poem from 1938, and let's the work teach him. Visit the art blog I mentioned at Icarus Also Flew, to read more about the story of Icarus.

Matthew Dickman "Classical Poem"

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 22:36:08 -0800

From the book "All-American Poem," which is sprawling, and surprisingly vulnerable debut from a terrifically gifted, and generous poet from Portland, Or.

Brandon Som "Umbra Penumbra"

Tue, 9 Feb 2010 15:01:58 -0800

McSweeny’s book of Poets Picking Poets is a terrific experiment. A poet picks two favorite poems from someone she admires, who then picks two poems from someone else, and so on. I picked Brandon Som’s, for it’s unique roundedness, and quiet close.

Edna St. Vincent Millay "What Lips..."

Tue, 9 Feb 2010 14:48:33 -0800

Though she died in 1950, I feel as though Edna St. Vincent Millay is just now coming into her own. Her poems are smart and honest, and turns rueful (as this one) and celebratory (as this one also is, in a way of thinking about it).

Mark Strand "Untitled"

Tue, 9 Feb 2010 00:06:41 -0800

The intro poem from Mark Strand's Pulitzer Prize winning volume, "The Blizzard of One." This is the sort of book upon which re-vivified loves of literature are built.

Jack Gilbert "Living Hungry After"

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:55:59 -0800

From Gilbert’s book, The Dance Most of All, which is an homage to gone worlds, poetic, civic, and otherwise.