1384: I do not mention the war in my birthpla...

Today’s poem is The Good Life by Tracy K. Smith. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Diannely Antigua writes… “When my grandmother took us kids to the pharmacy, she’d let us pick one snack to share. We always picked raspberry and creme cookies. W ...  Show more

Today’s poem is Blue by Laura Villareal. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Diannely Antigua writes… “I believe color carries energy. It carries memory. I remember when I was young, coming home from the hospital after being sick. The teal paint ...  Show more

Today we pay tribute, with poems by Andrea Cohen and Elizabeth Alexander, to the indispensable golden wonder.

Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)C.K. Williams' Collected Poems covers a lifetime's concern with ethics and personal morality. As his work proceeds, he develops a quality of consciousness and empathy that some would describe as a soul. In this conversation, this accessibl ...  Show more

About twenty years ago, I heard William Stafford read his poetry for about twenty minutes. For a young aspiring writer like I was then, he was mesmerizing, a mix of poetic energy and grandfatherly wisdom, with a high-spirited charm. I think it was the first poetry reading that I ...  Show more

In his poem “You Who Never Arrived,” Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that we can mourn love as an unrealized possibility, and see this loss signified everywhere in the ordinary objects of the external world. In “Be Ahead of All Parting” (II.13 from his “Sonnets to Orpheus”), he seems ...  Show more