If there are any poems I can remember studying in school, they are “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, ” “The Road Not Taken”and “Mending Wall, ” all by Robert Frost (1874-1963). While Walt Whitman has been called “American’s Poet, ” Frost has been called America’s most beloved poet. So much has been said […]
National Poetry Month: Maureen Doallas
Maureen Doallas is one of our regular contributors to the Tweetspeak Poetry-sponsored poetry jams on Twitter. She writes beautiful words, and not just poetry. She blogs at Writing Without Paper, where she covers poetry, art and culture in general – and covers them comprehensively and with great depth and insight. Below are two of Maureen’s poems. […]
National Poetry Month: Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) has been called “America’s Poet.” When he published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 (and he kept revising and republishing it for a long time), he changed the direction of American poetry and letters. For decades, some of his poems were memorized in schoolrooms across the United States. Time […]
National Poetry Month: Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), one of the “greats” of American poetry, was friends with William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and E.E. Cummings, among many others – and his day job was being a vice president at the Hartford Insurance Company. His achievements went largely unrecognized, however, until the year before his death, when he published his […]
National Poetry Month: Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott published his first poem at age 14 in 1944 (entitled, appropriately enough, “1944, ”); had self-published two volumes of poetry by age 19; and received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992.
National Poetry Month: “Ballistics” by Billy Collins
Billy Collins served as U.S. poet laureate for two terms (2001-2003), and New York state poet from 2004-2006. He’s published 12 books of poetry and edited three others. The New York Times has called him “the most popular poet in America, ” and he’s something rather odd in publishing circles – several of his books […]
National Poetry Month: Mona Van Duyn
Mona Van Duyn (1921-2004) received numerous prizes, accolades and recognitions, including becoming the first woman to be named U.S. poet laureate (1992-1993). Her book of poems Near Changes (1990) received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Van Duyn once said, “I believe that good poetry can be as ornate as a cathedral or as bare as […]
National Poetry Month: Edgar Lee Masters
Edgar Lee Masters (1868 – 1950) is best known for his famous book of poetry, Spoon River Anthology (1916), in which 244 voices speak of all the passion and tedium of life, and often death. Visiting Spoon River is to visit a poetic graveyard to read the headstones. Masters produced far more than this work. […]
National Poetry Month: Sara Teasdale and Vachel Lindsay
Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) was born and raised in St. Louis, and won numerous recognitions for her poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize. She was in love with poet Vachel Lindsay, but married someone else, a local St. Louis businessman. She later divorced her husband but never married Lindsay. Lindsay (1879-1931) was born in Springfield, Illinois, and became […]
National Poetry Month: Nancy Rosback
Nancy Rosback is one of our regular contributions to the (approximately) twice-a-month poetry jams on Twitter. She lives in Oregon, where she and her husband Peter operate Sineann Wines. Her blog is Poems and Prayers, where she posts some of the simplest, and most profound, poems around, about faith and hope and even everyday things like […]
National Poetry Month: Rupert Brooke
We hop back across the Atlantic to England for one of the Great War poets who died during that conflict in Europe. Rupert Brooke (1887 – 1915) died in World War I, not from a war wound but from sepsis as the result of an infected mosquito bite. Brooke was connected to the Bloomsbury Group […]
National Poetry Month: Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson was a prolific poet, yet fewer than a dozen of her almost 1, 800 poems were published during her lifetime.
National Poetry Month: One from Keats
April is National Poetry Month in the United States and Canada, and what better way to start the celebration with a poem from the Mother Country. Our goal is to post at least once a day during April with poems, articles, reviews and a couple of giveaways. (Note that I said goal; I didn’t say […]
We’re Celebrating National Poetry Month!
April is National Poetry Month (it’s also National Stress Awareness Month, but someone else can blog that), and we decided to do something special to recognize and help promote it. National Poetry Month was started in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets (Canada joined in the fun in 1999). With the help of friends, […]
Poems from the Cupboard – 4
These eight poems are the last from Tuesday’s poetry jam on Twitter. I’m not sure if the last one, “The Poets Recite, ” is a poem or not; our jamming poets didn’t know that their causal concluding remarks and comments were being recorded for posterity. This will bring the total number of poems created to […]
Poems from the Cupboard – 3
Here are another group of eight poems from our poetry jam on Twitter last Tuesday. The contributions started getting playful – you could tell it was getting late in the hour. Poems from the Cupboard – 3 By @llbarkat, @doallas, @mxings, @PoemsPrayers, @TchrEric, @togetherforgood, @monicasharman, @mmerubies, @KathleenOverby, @lauraboggess and @gyoung9751; cameo appearance by @Lorrie58; edited […]
Poems from the Cupboard – 2
Some strange things can happen when you start reading labels in on packages in the kitchen, which were our prompts for the poetry jam last Tuesday on Twitter. Here are eight poems that resulted, and more are coming. Poems from the Cupboard – 2 By @llbarkat, @doallas, @mxings, @PoemsPrayers, @TchrEric, @togetherforgood, @monicasharman, @mmerubies, @KathleenOverby, @lauraboggess and […]
Poems from the Cupboard
For our poetry jam on Twitter this past Tuesday, @tspoetry provided a series of prompts taken from packaging found in the cabinet. Our instructions were to pick up words from the prompts and each other, and make poems. Below is the first of several posts, this one containing six poems. Poems from the Cupboard By […]
Pencil Drawn and Paper Grown
Heather Truett, aka Madame Rubies, aka @mmerubies, has become one of our regular contributors to the TweetSpeak poetry jam on Twitter. I checked out her blog site, Madame Rubies, and I discovered that she has collected and published some of her poetry. So I ordered Pencil Drawn and Paper Grown, to earn more about her […]
Walter Bargen: Days Like This Are Necessary
Last summer, I drove to a high school in a central St. Louis suburb for a writing and publishing fair. Seminars were held inside the school; the parking lot had been cordoned off for booths, demonstration areas and even a children’s playground. I wandered around the large number of booths, and then came to one […]