“The times now seem to be evolving with voices of color,” the 66-year-old son of migrant farmworkers said.
Teaching science and engineering kids, and why toughness might be the most important quality in a writer
Silence by Billy Collins There is the sudden silence of the crowd above a player not moving on the field, and the silence of the o...
In college, Garrison Keillor, the host of American Public media’s “A Prairie Home Companion” and “The Writer’s Almanac,” majored in poetry. After he wrote his papers and received his degree, he didn’t look at it again until decades later, when was he finally re-acquainted with verse and realized that his relationship to it had changed.
Everyone should learn poems by rote at school, Seamus Heaney has argued, as it gives children a cultural "ear" which will set them up for life.
Peony and Ant by Mary Lee Hahn Today by Billy Collins If ever there were a spring day so perfect, so uplifted by a warm intermitten...
The classic poem tells—and shows—how Christ's resurrection lifts us into flight.
Nicholas Lezard's paperback of the week: John Drury has written an exemplary biography of the influential religious poet
Flannery O’Connor’s notes on faith and prayer and her hopes for her fiction, written while she was studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, in 1946.
While Afghan women risk their lives for verse, we ignore it.
They read their poems to raise cash for flood victims. Many of the works touched not just on the flooding — which destroyed more than 2,000 homes — but also on the cyclicality of disaster here: fire, drought, downpour, flood.
Malcolm Guite's "Sonnet for St. Thomas the Apostle" celebrates the urge to touch God.
Sometimes when you venture out, just past your own backyard, you discover that Walden really is nearby, closer than you even realized. ...
Alfred Corn, "Verseforms," The Poem's Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody.
Elie Wiesel was an Auschwitz and Buchenwald survivor who, through his more than fifty books, countless speeches and op-eds, and tireless activism, became a voice for the voiceless. When he won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, they called him “one of the most important spiritual leaders and guides in an age when violence, repression and racism continue to characterise the world.” His death, on July 2, marks the passing of an important writer and humanitarian. His most widely read book, Night, is the account of his time at Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a young man.
Pete Seeger once said, “If there’s one thing worse than banning a song, that’s making it official.” One could say something similar about good books: the one thing worse than banning the book is ...
Navy tradition holds that the first entry in a ship's deck log each year must be in verse.
Poets are not the world's most visible celebrities. But an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., puts faces to verse, and explores poets' shifting — and sometimes conflicting — public images.
Flora MacQueen: A vivid and poignant portrait of a vanished age
Few of the previous writers inducted into the American Poets Corner at St. John the Divine were as suited to the religious setting as O’Connor.
CHICORY by John Updike Show me a piece of land that God forgot— a strip between an unused sidewalk, say, and a bulldozed lot, rich in br...
Neruda's "Heights of Macchu Picchu" describes how the lost city of the Incas revitalized his faith in humankind.
James Franco and Chris O’Dowd discuss their roles in “Of Mice and Men” with a team of Steinbeck experts.
Literature's universalism functions as an antidote to the exclusionary politics of figures like Donald Trump and Marine LePen.
A non-native-Midwesterner wonders out loud about the fields.
Poets are not the world's most visible celebrities. But an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., puts faces to verse, and explores poets' shifting — and sometimes conflicting — public images.
Wendell Berry laments his "lack of simple things" in 'The Want of Peace,' asking about our collective trade--"selling the world to buy fire."
It probably happens now and then, though perhaps you don’t give it much thought. You read a poem backward.
