Prompt: Balance

When I looked at the September calendar, I noticed the Autumn Equinox is on the 22nd. The first thing I thought of was being told as a kid that an egg can only be balanced on its end during an equinox due to a special alignment of the Sun and Earth during the equinox that creates a unique gravitational pull that stabilizes the egg.  It is a myth. You can balance an egg on its end on any day of the year. The equinox has zero effect on gravity or an egg's physical properties.

My second thought was about poems concerning equinoxes and balance. 

In her poem "Equinox," Elizabeth Alexander uses late-September imagery to reflect on the nature of life and mortality. The energy of the changing season, when "bees are wild and eccentric" as they fly during the last warm days of autumn.

Poems exploring balance often depict it as a delicate, active effort rather than a static state, using physical objects or shifting landscapes to mirror our inner lives.

In our model poem, "Balance" by Alice B. Fogel, from her collection Elemental, she doesn't define balance as calm or symmetry. She defines it as survival.
Balance is everything, is the only way to hold on. 
But not holding on in the way we usually mean it. Not a safe grip, but a hover. 

I've weighed the alternatives, the hold
as harbor: It isn't safe
to let go. But consider the hover,
choices made, the moment
between later and too late.

Balance is that suspended state: choices made, the moment between later and too late.

Consider how these other two balance poems define it: Balance by Adam Zagajewski, and "Balance" by Dorianne Laux.

Balance is not a static achievement but a momentary alignment, something we pass through, notice, and learn from. We don’t “arrive” at balance and stay there; we glimpse it. A period where work and rest feel proportionate, where inner life and outer obligations match pace, where identity feels neither shadowed nor overexposed. These moments are real but fleeting, and that doesn’t make them less meaningful. 

Balance can be physical, like the equinox, an egg, learning to ride a bicycle, or a woman on a tightrope at the circus. In poems, it is more often internal, such as balancing a relationship, life and work, or our emotions. Sometimes, a poem contains both, with one reflecting on the other.

For September, we are seeking poems that focus on some time of balance.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: September 30, 2026 

Alice B. Fogel is a former theatrical costumer and clothing refashioner who earned a BA in art and literature from Antioch College and an MFA in poetry from the University of New Hampshire.
She is the author of Interval: Poems Based on Bach’s “Goldberg Variations," which won the Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature and the 2016 New Hampshire Literary Award in Poetry; and Be That Empty. 
Fogel lives in Walpole, New Hampshire; works as a professor and one-on-one as an academic coach with neurodiverse students at Landmark College in Putney, Vermont; and hikes mountains whenever possible.

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In a Station of the Metro

An article in The New York Times, "These 20 Words Are Worth a Thousand Pictures," suggests that Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is one of the shortest great poems in English.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; 

Petals on a wet, black bough. 

First published in Poetry Magazine in 1913, these 20 words (counting the title, which is central to the poem’s meaning) find "an echo of serene natural beauty in a hectic modern scene."

A Paris Metro station seen from a train, a bustling crowd in the rain at night, become petals on a flowering tree.

I've always liked this poem. I read it in high school. Later, I learned that Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was not only "a shrewd and cantankerous proponent of literary modernism [and Imagism], determined to shake poetry out of its Romantic and Victorian habits," but also an anti-Semite who embraced fascism, broadcasting pro-Mussolini propaganda on Italian state radio during World War II. After the war, he was charged with treason and confined to a mental hospital in Washington, D.C.

But in 1913...

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Prompt: Letters Never Received

I was teaching Melville's story, "Bartleby, the Scrivener," which concludes with the revelation that Bartleby used to be a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington DC. Melville uses this setting as a metaphor for mortal hopelessness, misdirected communication, and loneliness.

I thought I knew of a poem about a dead letter office, but I could not find it. What I stumbled upon was the brief anonymous text here.

I found the letter I never gave you
and wondered if anything
would have changed if I did.
The paper felt lighter than I remember,
like time had taken some of its weight away.
I read it again
and so who I was back then
ready to be honest,
just not brave enough to follow through.

I don't know if it was intended as poetry, but it seemed to be a poem the way it appeared online. And that got me thinking about letters that are never received or never sent.

I thought of Emily Dickinson's letter to the world.

This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,--
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!

There are a variety of epistolary poems in the form of letters but the ones that interest us this month are ones that never were sent or received. The reasons why vary. Here are a few examples

"Letter to N.Y" by Elizabeth Bishop is a letter you couldn't send.

In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you are pursuing:..

Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz by Matthew Olzmann:
You whom I could not save,
Listen to me.

Can we agree Kevlar
backpacks shouldn’t be needed
for children walking to school?

It is about gun violence and school shootings, and the title and opening lines invoke Miłosz’s poem “Dedication”, both poems attempting to bridge historical atrocities with modern, senseless acts. Who is it addressed to? All of us.

A famous letter poem is Sylvia Plath's "Daddy." This confessional work is about a daughter breaking free from the painful, controlling memory of her dead father (and her husband). Plath uses nursery rhyme rhythms alongside Holocaust and vampire metaphors in her rejection of male control.

Looking at her poem led me to her poet husband, Ted Hughes. His poem about a letter and his correspondence with Sylvia is contained in "The Last Letter." (More about that here)

For our September issue, we are looking for poems that are letters never sent or never received, or poems about letters never sent or received. They might be in the form of a letter, but that is not a requirement.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: AUGUST 31 

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Last Letters: Plath and Hughes

Hughes                                       Plath

In writing our prompt for our September issue about "Letters Never Received," we referenced a very famous letter poem by Sylvia Plath - "Daddy."  This confessional work is about a daughter breaking free from the painful, controlling memory of her dead father (and also her husband). Plath uses nursery rhyme rhythms alongside Holocaust and vampire metaphors. 

That poem might also lead you to look at another poem by her husband, Ted Hughes. His poem, "The Last Letter,' is another poem never sent. 

It is about his correspondence with Sylvia. His poem was withheld from the original 1998 publication of Birthday Letters, but it was discovered in his archive and published posthumously in 2010 by The New Statesman. The poem deals directly with the final physical letter he received from Plath right before her suicide.

It details the final three days of Plath's life and a specific letter.  Sylvia had mailed Hughes a letter that effectively served as a suicide note. However, due to a mailing mishap, the letter arrived early—while she was still alive.

The poem details Hughes rushing to her apartment after reading it. He finds her seemingly fine, and she burns the letter in front of him, leading him to think the danger had passed. He returns to his own flat, only for her to take her life shortly after.

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To Rhyme or Not to Rhyme. That Is a Question.

Billionaire Jeff Bezos was defending major layoffs at his Washington Post, and when asked why, with all his money, he wouldn't just subsidize the paper, he argued payment was a “signal” of relevance. “If people won’t pay for our product, we’re not doing, it’s not a good enough product […] It would be like poetry without rhyming. It’s too easy.”

The analogy was mocked almost immediately, including by a former Washington Post literary critic who imagined Poetry magazine rejecting T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" for insufficient rhyme.

An article at theconversation.com took off from there and reminds us that English loves a rhyme. Because rhyme is so audible, some have decided it must mean the poet is Working Very Hard and Being Serious. Which is funny, because for a very long time nobody could even agree what it was called. In Middle English, "rime" could mean rhyme, but it could also mean meter, or just verse in general. 

And unrhymed poetry?

1. Beowulf. No rhyming couplets about Grendel's bad manners. The Old English poets had a completely different sound system. Heavy stresses, a big dramatic pause in the middle of the line, and lots of alliterative beats like a drummer 
   Rhyme only really moved in after 1066, when the Normans arrived with their Frenchified vowels and their Frenchified taste for everything to match. Rhyme is memorable, teachable, and you can hear it from the back row without really listening. So naturally, it staged a hostile takeover and started pretending it was poetry.
2. John Milton wrote Paradise Lost, containing all of Creation and the Fall of Man entirely without rhyme. He even added a passive-aggressive preface explaining why. Rhyme, he said, was "no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse." What bothered Milton wasn't just the ding-dong-ding, but that rhyme tempts you to sound finished before you've actually finished thinking. He calls it the "jingling sound of like endings" and "the troublesome and modern bondage of riming." 
3. Mr. Shakespeare, when he actually needs to get something done, like, say, invent interior consciousness and run a five-act tragedy, he doesn't rhyme. His plays are built in blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter. The music comes from the push and pull of the rhythm against the sentence, not from two words kissing at the end of a line. Rhyme is saved for when someone is falling in love, being witty, or about to exit with a flourish.

T.S. Eliot wrote in "Reflections on Vers Libre," that there is “no freedom in art.” No rhyme does not mean no structure. Rhythm, word order, line, repetition, and other devices become more exposed.

I think that writing poetry without concern for rhyme does feel easier at first. Rhyme is a very visible kind of difficulty. Some poets wrestle with it and if you get something that doesn't sound like a greeting card or children's song, you get a dopamine shot of accomplishment. Rhyme tells you when a line is over. It tells you where the next line has to go. It even gives you a cheap way to sound musical when the rest of the line is prose. 

Writing unrhymed (blank verse, or free verse) is hard because you have to build the music out of other things. Poets learn to use the weight of stressed syllables, the length of the sentence against the length of the line, alliteration, vowel echo, the caesura. Many readers can't point to why-this-is-a-poem. It may read to some like broken-up prose that is quietly asking to be put back together. 

Most of the poets who last — O'Hara, Milton, Williams, Bishop — can do both, and they choose the tools for the job.  

 

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Poems at Lunch with Frank

I read an article in The Times a few weeks ago that suggested Frank O'Hara as the perfect poet for my lunchtime reading.

"It's my lunch hour, so I go / for a walk..." wrote O'Hara in his Lunch Poems. It's a small book from 1964. Frank would have turned 100 this year, but the poems don't read like an old man. They are un-intimidating, and feel a bit like he was writing them at the table across from me outside on this July afternoon as the world passes by my cafe table.

 

The small book was published by City Lights Books as number nineteen in the Pocket Poets series with their unassuming covers (as with Ginsberg's Howl) and was edited by the poet in collaboration with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Donald Allen, who had published O'Hara's poems in his The New American Poetry. 

O'Hara studied at the New England Conservatory when he was a teen. Concert piano. But he traded that for words. He moved to New York in 1951 at 24. He took a no-pay "job" at MoMA so he could see the Matisse and eventually became a curator there. He championed Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, and the rest of the Abstract Expressionists, and he was writing art criticism.

He was a lunchtime walker, and that was where many of the Lunch Poems came into being. They are formally inventive and casually composed. He wrote in his office at The Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunchtime, and on the Staten Island Ferry en route to a poetry reading.

He belonged to the New York School quite literally. He hung out with painters and poets in the Fifties and Sixties. Pollock, his old college friend John Ashbery, Larry Rivers, Jane Freer and they traded studio space, gossip, and line breaks. 

"How funny you are today New York / like Ginger Rogers in Swing Time..." he says to the city in begins "Steps." The poetry lesson here includes his idea of the importance of place. And specific places - Bergdorf's, Christmas trees being hauled down Park Avenue, "cool graced light" hitting the enormous glass towers of midtown. You probably haven't lived in NYC. Either have I, but I get it. 

In the final scene of the opening episode of the second season of Mad Men - the TV series set in the world of NYC advertising in the early 1960s - we see the show's protagonist, Don Draper, picking up a slim volume of O'Hara's poems (Meditations in an Emergency from 1957). Don recites the final lines from "Mayakovsky." It fit in quite well. 

I know so many poets who bemoan the lack of time they have to write. O'Hara says you don't have to wait for some weekend retreat or a residency in a mountaintop cabin. It happens while eating lunch, on a walk, between errands.

Reading poems on your lunch hour is a particular kind of pleasure. You've eaten, you're sated, and if the poet has done their work, you're sated in a second way too — that small, lit-up feeling that says: go write something, go read something, go look harder at the street for the rest of the afternoon.

Lunch Poems is, in the best sense, pure Americana. Lunch, for one thing, is literal. O'Hara really does eat his lunch in these poems. There are chocolate malted milkshakes and cheeseburgers and sweating bottles of Coca-Cola, all recorded with a kind of sensual delight in abundance that feels utterly American. And then there are the movies. He has a great appetite for them.

"Mothers of America / let your kids go to the movies! /It's true that fresh air is good for the body / but what about the soul / that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images..." ("Ave Maria")

I wish the end of O'Hara's own story was more like these poems. In July 1966, on a dark beach on Fire Island, he was struck by a jeep. He was 40. His funeral on Long Island was a who's who of the New York art world. They gathered for their friend whose poems never really believed in tragedy.

Rather, let us end with walking with Frank at lunch.

It’s my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look 
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust...
           from "A Step Away from Them" 

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Emily Dickinson, Children's Poet

Illustration from St. Nicholas magazine for children
that accompanied one of Emily's poems

I learned this week that after Emily Dickinson died, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd were left to handle Dickinson's work. Todd was deeply involved in a love affair with Austin Dickinson, Emily’s brother, who was married to Susan, who was a very close friend of Emily.

Emily had been famously hesitant to publish while she was alive.

In an effort to promote the posthumously published volumes of Dickinson's poetry, her editors sometimes positioned the work as children's literature. These edits ranged from changing punctuation to amending the rhyme schemes to be more elementary and even changing entire lines. Todd said she altered some of Dickinson's poems to be more lullaby-like, changing them “in order to have the rhyme perfect."

I still have a tough time as an adult interpreting many of Dickinson's poems, and could not imagine reading them as a child.

One famous example of an edit is in  "I taste a liquor never brewed." Dickinson originally wrote:

Not all the Frankfort Berries

Yield such an Alcohol!

Todd and Higginson published it as:

Not Frankfort Berries yield the sense

Such a delirious whirl!

which substantially changes Dickinson's imagery and rhythm.

Some Dickinson poems appeared in children's magazines in the 1890s. Here is one poem from a children's magazine.

Here is Emily's original version:

Will there really be a "Morning"?

Is there such a thing as "Day"?

Could I see it from the mountains

If I were as tall as they?

Has it feet like Water lilies?

Has it feathers like a Bird?

Is it brought from famous countries

Of which I have never heard?

Oh some Scholar! Oh some Sailor!

Oh some Wise Men from the skies!

Please to tell a little Pilgrim

Where the place called "Morning" lies!

You can see that the only changes here are Emily's distinctive capitalizations.

St. Nicholas was the premier magazine for children's literature and it serialized some of the most famous classics in children’s literature, including: The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain, Little Men by Louisa May Alcott, and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

The purist in me objects to changes made to her poems after her death, but the example above does read fine as a poem for children. 

What are your feelings about what the editors did with her work?

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Prompt: At The End Of

For our July prompt, we look at Jane Kenyon’s poem “Three Songs at the End of Summer,” which features three portraits of late summer.

For our August issue, we ask for poems that use her title as a starting place. Not poems about summer, but about endings. Your title should be "Three ______ at the End of ________."  For example, you could write "Three Scenes at the End of an Affair," or "Three Haiku at the End of Life." You might write three stanzas, or three short poems, three sections, or even "Three Lines at the End of Day."

I do like how Jane's poem's three parts are connected through nature and also distinct in their sounds, moods, and atmosphere. Her second section consists of two three-line stanzas. The poem ends with lines that lead us gently into autumn. The poem views the end of August as the end of summer, the way young people often mark the end of summer with the start of another school year.

I had the new books—words, numbers,
and operations with numbers I did not
comprehend—and crayons, unspoiled
by use, in a blue canvas satchel
with red leather straps.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: July 31

Jane Kenyon (1947–1995) was an acclaimed American poet and translator known for her luminous, spare, and emotionally resonant verse. Her life and work deeply chronicled her lifelong struggle with clinical depression, her spiritual faith, and the quiet beauty of rural New England. 

She was married to poet Donald Hall. Following their marriage in 1972, the couple relocated to Hall's family home Eagle Pond Farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire. That location provided the natural imagery for much of her writing.

Her poetry includes From Room to Room (1978), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), Let Evening Come (1990) and Constance (1993). Her Collected Poems contain all four collections.

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Walking with Dante

Dante Alighieri is certainly one of the most influential poets in our history. Though The Divine Comedy is considered an essential work of Western civilization, Dante is also one of the least read poets, especially in this time. Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso are the story of a journey, and reading them is a journey for a modern reader.

In an episode    "Dante: The Most Famous, Least Read Poet," one person talks about how this 700-year-old poem helped a widower rebuild his life. I'm sure he is not the only reader who has journeyed through Hell and emerged along with the poet.

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Frost and Auden on Artificial Intelligence

Before you start typing a comment here about how Robert Frost and W.H. Auden had no knowledge of artificial intelligence, let me explain where I'm going here.

I often use AI to create images to illustrate my (too) many blog posts. I was creating an image of myself surrounded by poetry based on what a chatbot already knew about me from prior queries. (You can see the result here.)

I can imagine many classic and modern poets sitting at a computer. The computer, the Internet, and certainly AI would be something from science fiction or fantasy, but being inquisitive people, I have to imagine they would want to experiment. They would certainly have opinions about all of it. So I proposed a kind of thought experiment to several chatbots about poets and AI, and specifically these two poets.

Robert Frost and W. H. Auden likely would have responded to AI very differently in tone, but with overlapping concerns about language, humanity, and authenticity.

Frost would be suspicious of abstraction and more interested in the human voice. I think he distrusted systems that moved people away from lived experience and direct human encounter. He valued some ambiguity and the “sound of sense” in language.

Though he might have admired AI’s technical cleverness, he would reject poetry produced without genuine experience behind it. Frost often emphasized that poetry comes from:

AI suggests to me that Frost might have asked, "Can language still be poetry if nobody has lived it?"

Auden might be intellectually fascinated by AI but morally cautious. He was interested in psychology, science, systems of thought, and modernity’s strange transformations and how language shapes society and consciousness.

But Auden worried about propaganda, impersonality, bureaucratic thinking, and probably would not be a supporter of any misuse of technology. Perhaps, he would see AI as an extraordinary linguistic tool, and also a dangerous amplifier of mass conformity or emotional detachment.

Auden wrote, “Poetry makes nothing happen,” but he did not mean that poetry is powerless. He meant poetry changes inner life indirectly, through consciousness and moral perception. He likely would have questioned whether AI can truly participate in moral experience or only imitate its language.

If the two sat down for a conversation and played with AI together, they might have some common ground. They would probably resist the idea that intelligence is merely information processing. Human meaning comes from mortality and embodiment, and art emerges from uncertainty and lived contradiction. The language of poetry matters because people risk themselves in it.

Like many people today, they might warn that AI could encourage people to substitute fluent expression for genuine thought.

They just might concede that much human language is already formulaic, imitative, and patterned. But poetry, for them, was valuable precisely because it resisted that drift into automatic speech.

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Reading the 'Iliad' in the Afterlife

Archaeologists have found a papyrus copy of Homer’s Iliad on an ancient Egyptian mummy. This was the first time that a Greek literary text had been found used in the preservation process.

The discovery has implications for our knowledge of funerary practices and religious life in ancient Egypt. The papyrus was placed on the abdomen as part of the embalming ritual. That's not unusual. Egyptian mummies from this period have previously been found to carry papyri written in Greek. Those earlier papyri discoveries had text of magical or ritualistic content. This fragment was discovered in the abdomen of a mummy buried in a Roman-era tomb in Oxyrhynchus around 1,600 years ago. 

This is the second major discovery involving an ancient poetic text in recent weeks. I wrote earlier about the discovery of the oldest English copy of a poem. 

The identified Iliad text found is from the catalogue of ships in Book II of the epic poem, which contains a famous passage listing the Greek forces massing before Troy.

Why was this text chosen to be included with the mummification? Researchers say they are unsure why this particular Greek text was chosen for the mummification process.

Roman-era mummification in Oxyrhynchus combined traditional Egyptian, Greek, and Roman customs. Ancient Egyptian priests preserved bodies using natron salt to dehydrate them and wrapping them up in linen for about 40 days. Instead of using traditional canopic jars to preserve organs, they preferred to pack the body with preserved materials along with papyri containing Greek literature sealed with clay inside the chest or pelvic cavity.

Was it something to read in the afterlife?

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Prompt: Mirrors

Venus at the Mirror

Mirrors often show up in poetry in symbolic roles, as self-knowledge, distortion, doubles, and thresholds. Let's look at some varied approaches to the mirror in poetry.

"Mirror" by Sylvia Plath is probably the most famous “mirror poem.” The mirror speaks here in a cold, objective voice: “I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.” It becomes a symbol of unyielding truth, especially as a woman ages and confronts her changing identity. The mirror is not comforting; it is brutally honest, almost inhuman. 

In "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" by Anne Sexton, she rewrites the fairy tale, focusing on the mirror as an instrument of patriarchal judgment and female self-surveillance.

An early example is "The Lady of Shalott" by Alfred Lord Tennyson. The lady of the poem lives under a curse and can only see the world through a mirror, never directly.  Today, we might call this mediated reality. When she turns away from it to look directly, her world collapses. This poem explores the danger of moving from **illusion into reality**, and the cost of authentic experience. 

I have always loved the mirror as a portal or threshold in Alice Through the Looking-Glass. Okay, it is prose, but Lewis Carroll embedded poems in the book. He treats the mirror as a passage into an inverted world. That is a classic metaphor for crossing into the unconscious or the surreal. 

What we see when we look in a mirror might be an uncanny double. "Facing It" by Yusef Komunyakaa is set at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which is a reflective black surface. The speaker sees his own face merge with the names of the dead. That mix - “I’m stone. I’m flesh” mixes past and present, self and ghost.  

Send us a poem that uses mirrors in some symbolic way. 

Submission Deadline: June 30, 2026

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Oldest English Poem Discovered

Memorial to Caedmon at St. Mary's Churchyard. The inscription reads,
"To the glory of God and in memory of Caedmon, 

the father of English Sacred Song. 

Fell asleep hard by, 680" 

Photo: Rich Tea, CC BY-SA 2.0

Researchers leafing through a ninth-century manuscript have discovered a copy of the earliest surviving English poem, according to a recently published study. Known as “Caedmon’s Hymn,” the short verse is considered to be a foundational text in English literature. 

Purportedly composed by an illiterate cowherd after experiencing a religious vision, the nine-line verse references heaven and praises God for creation. The poem is known for its inclusion in some versions of the medieval “Ecclesiastical History of the English People,” written by the monk Bede the Venerable, which was reproduced about 200 times. 

Now let us praise Heaven-Kingdom's guardian,

the Maker's might and his mind's thoughts,

the work of the glory-father—of every wonder,

eternal Lord. He established a beginning.

He first shaped for men's sons

Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator;

then middle-earth mankind's guardian,

eternal Lord, afterwards prepared

the earth for men, the Lord almighty.

The Old English version reads:

Nu scilun herga hefenricæs uard

metudæs mehti and his modgithanc

uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuæs

eci dryctin or astelidæ.

he ærist scop ældu barnum

hefen to hrofæ halig sceppend

tha middingard moncynnæs uard

eci dryctin æfter tiadæ

firum foldu frea allmehtig

Cædmon (657–684) is the earliest English poet whose name is known. This Northumbrian cowherd cared for the animals at the double monastery of Streonæshalch (now known as Whitby Abbey) during the abbacy of Hilda. He was originally ignorant of "the art of song" but, according to the 8th-century Christian historian and saint Bede, learned to compose one night in a dream. He later became a zealous monk and an accomplished and inspirational Christian poet.

While two older copies of the poem have surfaced, they were both written in Latin. The recent discovery was written in Old English and embedded in the main Latin text, suggesting English poetry was valued by Latin readers much earlier than previously thought.

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That Poetic Voice We Sometimes Use

The premise of a New York Times piece titled "What's With That Voice People Use When Reciting Poetry?" is that there’s a distinctive, stylized way many poets read their work aloud.

This is often called “Poet Voice,” and the article digs into what it is and why it’s so common. If you attend poetry readings and if you yourself read poetry aloud, you probably have encountered this Poet Voice.

It can be a slow cadence, with dramatic pauses, a lilting or monotone delivery, or a sing-songy inflection. It is not that person's natural speaking voice. Poet Voice is not meant as a compliment.  

On the page, poetry is quiet, private, and intimate. There is some "voice" in our head when we read silently. Is that the voice we use when we read aloud?

Do you hear this different way of reading as comforting and familiar, or as awkward?

We know there are poets who turn reading into a performance rather than language meant to connect.

Poets aren’t generally "performers," but still can fall into this same vocal pattern.

That article isn’t arguing for or against Poet Voice. It’s asking: what is this “weird poetic monotone rhythmic thing,” why does it persist, and how does voice change what a poem means when it moves from page to performance. The general takeaway from the article is that Poet Voice isn’t tied to one generation or school of poetry. It shows up at “the open mic and the Pulitzer podium alike,” and many poets admit they dislike it even while using it.

Here are a few poets who get mentioned as examples of “Poet Voice,” either in the *NYT* piece’s broader conversation or in the related analysis it draws on:

Louise Glück reads her poem "The Wild Iris." The Nobel laureate’s readings are frequently described as having that “precious, lilting cadence” with down-slurring line endings

Robert Bly is a poet who certainly reads his poem in an interesting way. I've heard him at reading read the same poem several times in a row, as if he thought we missed something the first time. Bly’s readings are faster, more emphatic, and less singsong. It's unusual but probably not what is meant as Poet Voice.

Robert Pinsky also has a distinctive way of reading. Is it Poet Voice? Here he reads "The Forgetting."

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Only Rhyme with Nicholson Baker

I just finished listening to Nicholson Baker’s 2009 novel, The Anthologist. It is a meta-fictional exploration of the creative process and really gets into the technicalities of poetry, particularly rhyme. 

The protagonist, Paul Chowder, is a poet. Baker has said in interviews that while he isn't a poet himself, he shares Chowder’s obsession with rhyme and meter. Through Chowder, Baker delivers highly technical "lectures" on the 4-beat line, the history of iambic pentameter, and how these things are used by certain poets. Paul is a middle-aged, moderately successful poet tasked with writing the introduction to a new poetry anthology titled Only Rhyme. But he is stalled by procrastination. He has selected the poems, but he cannot seem to write a single word of the introduction.

His struggle is mixed with his personal life. His long-term girlfriend, Roz, has recently moved out because she is tired of his inability to move forward with his work and his life.

Poets should enjoy his deep dives into the lives and techniques of poets like John Dryden, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Louise Bogan, and Elizabeth Bishop. He treats these historical figures like personal friends or neighbors. 

I'm not a big fan of rhyme in modern poetry, but I liked the lessons and anecdotes about poets. His introduction becomes a meditation on how we use art to make sense of our failures and our loves.

After I finished the book, I stumbled on "Endymion" by John Keats and took a closer look than usual at the rhyme.

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases, it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
Its loveliness increases,
it will never pass into nothingness
but still will keep a bower quiet for us

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth

Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made of our searching; yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.

The rhyme still doesn't work for me the way it does for Paul Chowder or Keats.

I have read almost all of Baker's books. Here are 4 that I enjoyed. 

The Fermata (1994) is my favorite of his novels. A provocative and controversial story that blends magical realism with erotica. It follows a man who can stop time by snapping his fingers (a move he calls "The Fold"). While time is frozen, he moves through the world unobserved, and spends part of his stopped time (Can you spend stopped time?) doing what any adolescent male would do with that power - though the protagonist is an adult - and that's why the book is frequently debated for its "ethical implications" and its "voyeuristic" premise. One reviewer called it a "X-rated sci-fi fantasy," which will either intrigue you or turn you off.

U and I is non-fiction about Baker's obsession with John Updike, though he hasn't met him. I am a big fan of Updike's writing, so I could identify.

The Mezzanine (1988) was Baker’s debut and is known for its hyper-focus on the mundane details of daily life. The entire novel takes place during a single lunch hour as the narrator, Howie, buys a pair of shoelaces and returns to his office via an escalator. It has Baker’s signature style of minute observations (here, footnotes) —such as the mechanics of a straw, the design of a paper-towel dispenser, or the philosophy of office etiquette. I know it doesn't sound like a page-turner but it will surprise you.

Vox (1992) was a commercial success. That might be surprising as it consists entirely of a single phone conversation between two strangers on a pay-per-minute erotic chat line. It was a New York Times bestseller and gained some notoriety when it was revealed that Monica Lewinsky had given a copy to President Bill Clinton. But more importantly, it shows mastery of dialogue and human connection through technology decades before AI was all the buzz.

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Prompt: Travel

Odysseus on the road

Our June issue will be about travel. It seems appropriate for that time when school ends, and travel and vacations usually increase.

Travel is a very old theme for poets. Ancient writers like Homer didn’t treat travel as leisure or self-improvement in the modern sense. In works like The Odyssey, travel is fate-driven, dangerous, and morally revealing. It is something that happens to you as much as something you choose. Travel was not leisure but an ordeal. Odysseus journeys and longs to return home, facing storms, monsters, and the wrath of Poseidon. It is a test of survival rather than comfort.

Each stop becomes a moral trial because Homer's travel reveals character under pressure. Central to his journey is nostos — the drive to return home. Travel also means entering the unknown. Travel shapes identity, and Odysseus defines himself by recounting his adventures and turning experience into reputation.

In modern poetry, the best travel poems don’t just describe travel but interrogate it from different angles. "Ithaka" by C. P. Cavafy interrogates Odysseus' travels.

"As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery...."

The poem makes me think of a well-worn adage about travel of all kinds: "The journey matters more than the destination."

Perhaps your personal journeys are not as mythic. Perhaps your travel doesn't ead to wisdom. In "Questions of Travel by Elizabeth Bishop, she seems to be asking, "Why do we travel at all?" It is a poem that debates itself.

"...Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there... No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"

"The Journey of the Magi" by T. S. Eliot takes a very famous journey and is somewhere between Cavafy and Bishop. Travel transforms you, but at a cost. It is more about the aftermath than the actual experience of traveling.

"...We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death."

I chose as the main model for this call for submissions "Traveling Through the Dark" by William Stafford, from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems, because our poetic travel does not require going very far from home or for very long. Here, travel forces moral confrontation. In this concrete situation, there is ethical weight. His focus is on a single moment rather than the whole trip. This travel is grounded in a specific, dramatic action, not abstraction.

You might begin by selecting one trip and asking: Why did I go? What did it do to me? What did I face there? Was it worth it?

Your travel poem can contain the breadth of an Odyssey or be as specific as a stop on a drive not far from home.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: May 31, 2026

William Stafford (1914–1993) was an American poet known for his quiet, contemplative voice and his belief that writing should be a daily, attentive practice.

Born in Hutchinson, Kansas, he grew up during the Great Depression, an experience that shaped his sensitivity to ordinary lives and moral choices. A committed pacifist, he declared himself a conscientious objector during World War II, working in civilian public service camps. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and spent most of his career teaching at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon.

He published his first major collection, Traveling Through the Dark (1962), at age 48. The book won the National Book Award and established his reputation for spare, plainspoken poems that carry ethical weight. The title poem, one of his most anthologized, reflects his characteristic blend of narrative clarity and moral tension. His essays on writing are collected in Writing the Australian Crawl (1978). He was appointed U.S. Poet Laureate (then titled Consultant in Poetry) in 1970.

Stafford continued publishing until his death in 1993, famously writing a poem the morning he passed away.

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Senryu and Haiku Compared

Senryū (pronounced, sen-ryoo)  are 3-line, 17-syllable (5-7-5) Japanese poems. I know that sounds like haiku, but, unlike haiku, these poems focus on human nature, irony, and humor rather than nature. They often highlight life's daily foibles with wit. 

Senryū comment on aspects of everyday life, often in a humorous or ribald fashion. These were usually composed by townsfolk and submitted to poetry competitions run by professional judges or tenja. The best would be awarded prizes and compiled in anthologies. The most famous tenja was Karai Senryū (1718-1790), and it is from him that the poems take their name.

Two senryu by Karai Senyru

I grab the robber
and find I’ve caught
my own son.

As a man fond of both
loose women and senryu —
please remember me.

Some masters of haiku also wrote senryū.

A woman showing
a charcoal-seller his face,
in a mirror
  -  Buson

In those three lines, you should expect the occassional surprise.

The stone saint
is kissed on the mouth
by a slug.

Haiku is described as “17 syllables” in English because English speakers substituted syllables for the Japanese unit on (also called mora), which is the actual building block of Japanese. A haiku is traditionally 17 morae, not 17 syllables. 

In comparison, senryu uses the same 3-line 5/7/5 pattern, but it does not include a seasonal word (kigo) and uses a more colloquial language. The last line holds the meaning of the poem and is funny or surprising, a bit like the punchline of a joke. 

A butterfly
that goes straight
has free time.

No matter how
sorry you are,
the teacup is broken.

Ecstatic at being
set free,
the bird collides with a tree.

Watching a plane
the kid playing third base
misses the ball
     — Sandy J. Anderson

combing my hair—
the face in the mirror
is my mother's
  - Sharon Peeples

I’m told I look young
That’s how I know
I’m not young anymore

It is difficult for an English speaker to "see" the morae. Take the Japanese word for book: “hon.” This word has one syllable for us but two morae, the “ho” and the “n.”

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Absinthe and the Muse

Absinthe is an alcoholic drink that gained a reputation for being a drink for poets and artists. Absinthe rose to popularity in late‑19th‑century France, especially in the cafés of Montmartre and the Latin Quarter — the same places where poets, painters, and musicians gathered. 

Some of the most famous absinthe‑drinking poets were Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and later Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce. Absinthe became associated with poets because it was cheap, strong, ritualistic, and mythologized as a way to summon "the Muse." 

That Muse was la fée verte, the Green Fairy, a muse who whispered inspiration to drinkers. Absinthe was high-proof and relatively cheap, and it became the drink of choice for the "Green Hour" (L'Heure Verte), a daily ritual in cafes.  

There was a ritual connected to absinthe that seemed almost alchemical and added to the mystery and myth. You would drip iced water over a sugar cube perched on a slotted spoon over the absinthe-filled glass. This turned the green drink a cloudy white. This also lowered the alcholic hit and bitterness but brought forward floral notes. This theatricality made it feel more like a potion than a beverage. Artists embraced the idea that it opened the mind to visions, even though its supposed hallucinogenic effects were much exaggerated. 

Charles Baudelaire is one of the earliest literary figures linked to absinthe. Although he didn’t write poems about absinthe directly, his fascination with altered states, decadence, and artificial paradises made the drink a natural part of his mythos. His prose work Les Paradis Artificiels explores intoxication and creativity.

In "Le Poison" (The Poison) by Baudelaire from his Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), he compares the mind-altering effects of wine and opium before introducing a third intoxicating power. While he does not say the word "absinthe" explicitly, it is widely accepted by literary scholars that the third verse is an ode to it, playing on its signature color and its nickname as a liquid lake of dreams.

All this is nothing to the poison that spills
From your eyes, from your green eyes
Lakes where my soul trembles and is turned upside down...

Paul Verlaine was a heavy absinthe drinker whose turbulent life — including his relationship with Rimbaud — became part of the Green Fairy legend. Absinthe appears in his letters and memoirs, and its haze fits the languor and melancholy of his Symbolist style.

Arthur Rimbaud drank absinthe with Verlaine during their infamous Paris and London years. His visionary, hallucinatory poetic style helped cement the idea that absinthe unlocked new modes of perception.

In the prose poem "Absinthia Taetra" by Ernest Dowson, a central figure in the English Decadent movement, he captures the aesthetic, sensory experience of preparing the drink.

Green changed to white, emerald to opal; nothing was changed. The man let the water trickle gently into his glass, and as the green clouded, a mist fell from his mind.

Ernest Hemingway is one of the 20th‑century devotees who helped revive absinthe’s mystique. He wrote about it in For Whom the Bell Tolls and drank it in Paris and Spain. His “Death in the Afternoon” cocktail was absinthe mixed with champagne.

James Joyce also drank absinthe in Paris during his early years. While not central to his writing or the mythology, it was part of the bohemian café culture that shaped Modernism.  

Read further about the science and mythology of absinthe

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Petrarch Meets Laura

It was on this day, April 6, in 1327, that Italian poet Petrarch first set eyes on “Laura,” the ethereal woman he would use as his muse for more than 300 sonnets. 

He met Laura on a Good Friday at St. Clare Church in Avignon. Some historians think she was a woman named Laura de Noves, a married mother, and most agree that she never responded to Petrarch’s overtures. 

The first 263 poems Petrarch wrote for her are known as the Rime in Vita Laura. She died during the Black Death of 1348. After she died, the remaining poems were known as Rime in Morte Laura.

Petrarch’s works for Laura laid the groundwork for the sonnets of the Elizabethan era. Shakespeare would not be Shakespeare without Petrarch.

About his unconsummated love for Laura, Petrarch wrote:

“In my younger days, I struggled constantly with an overwhelming but pure love affair — my only one, and I would have struggled with it longer had not premature death, bitter but salutary for me, extinguished the cooling flames. I certainly wish I could say that I have always been entirely free from desires of the flesh, but I would be lying if I did.”

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Prompt: Uncertainty

Our theme this month is uncertainty. You could say we live in a time of uncertainty, but hasn't that always been true?

In 1927, physicist Werner Heisenberg first described his Uncertainty Principle, saying that the more precisely we can determine a particle's momentum, the less information we have about its position, and vice versa. The principle represents one of the most fundamental differences between quantum mechanics and classical physics. Albert Einstein, a classical physicist, disagreed with quantum mechanics in general and the Uncertainty Principle in particular. 

Einstein said, "I like to believe that the moon is still there even if we don't look at it," and that "God does not play dice with the universe." He wanted certainty. He wanted to believe that there was some certainty in the universe.

In his 1919 poem "The Second Coming," William Butler Yeats describes the atmosphere of post-WWI Europe and a vision of the future. I saw that future as uncertain.

The first stanza introduces Yeats' concept of the gyre, a world which is "turning and turning" in a gyre that widens to the point of apocalypse.

THE SECOND COMING 
by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The second stanza is a prophetic vision that uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and Second Coming. Yeats is reaching for some certainty, but there is uncertainty in the lines "Surely some revelation is at hand / Surely the Second Coming is at hand."

There are many poems on the theme of uncertainty. In "The Road Not Taken" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost, we see that the former is about choice and the uncertainty of paths offered. The latter poem is about the uncertainty of yielding to temptation versus continuing on. Einstein might have liked Frost's "Design," which is a darker meditation on whether events in nature and life have meaning or are governed by randomness.

In "Ode to a Nightingale," John Keats expresses uncertainty about what is real, what is fleeting, and whether transcendence is possible.

"Because I could not stop for Death" shows Emily Dickinson exploring the uncertainty of death and eternity in a calm but mysterious tone, leaving readers unsure what lies beyond.

Our call for submissions for our May issue is for poems that clearly focus on the theme of uncertainty.

Submission deadline: April 30, 2026.

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