1530: At the End of a Good Week, the Van Brok...

Today’s poem is Cheap Magic by Arielle Hebert.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “When we wear a costume, or even an uncharacteristic outfit, it’s possible to let go of the expectations other people set for us. Sometimes disappearing into an ...  Show more

Today’s poem is Prayer for My Unborn Niece or Nephew by Ross Gay. The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Hope — earnest hope — is something we all need more to combat the cruelty and cynicism of these times we’re enduring. Today’s poem is fille ...  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