*featuring some prose from authors who mostly wrote poetry; favorites are bolded

Featured Poets

Featured Themes

Words About Not Having Words

• "if i have made, my lady, intricate" by e. e. cummings

• "I found the words to every thought" (Poem 581) by Emily Dickinson

• "V" from "East Coker" by T. S. Eliot

• "A Letter" by Anthony Hecht

• "A Letter" by Ted Kooser

• "Drinking Wine" by Tao Qian

• "When in the chronicle of wasted time" (Sonnet 106) by William Shakespeare

• "There can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of obscure allusions that lurks in these things" from If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italio Calvino, trans. William Weaver

• "between the lips and the voice something goes dying/Something with the wings of a bird, something of anguish and oblivion./The way nets cannot hold water" from "I Have Gone Marking" by Pablo Neruda, trans. W. S. Merwin

• "I could say: those mountains have a meaning/but further than that I could not say." from "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" by Adrienne Rich

All Poetry:

• "The night is darkening round me" by Emily Brontë

• "What He Said" by Cempulappeyanirar, trans. A. K. Ramanujan

• "Carving" by Imtiaz Dharker

• "November" by Alex Dimitrov

• "I think of you here,/where you haven't been in years" from "Living on Earth" by Alex Dimitrov

• John Donne

  • "Death, Be Not Proud"

  • "Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God"

  • "The Good-Morrow"

  • "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"

  • "The Flea"

  • "The Funeral"

• "what I like about/you, she throws in, even/as the last atari/sun grinds in still/the sky, you're all/just lined up, in/ridiculous clothes,/waiting to have/feelings that/change you again" from forget thee by Ian Dreiblatt

• T. S. Eliot

  • "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

  • "The Hollow Men"

  • "The Waste Land"

  • "V" from "East Coker"

• "Acquainted with the Night" by Robert Frost

• "A Bronze God, or a Letter on Demand" by Clifton Gachagua

• "Casida of the Reclining Woman" by Federico García Lorca, trans. W. S. Merwin

• "But tear out of me the memory/and the color of old hours" from "Desire of a Statue" by Federico García Lorca, trans. W. S. Merwin

• Jack Gilbert

  • "Rain"

  • "Failing and Falling"

  • "Infidelity"

  • "I Imagine the Gods"

  • "Burma"

• Tony Hoagland

  • "Sunday at the Mall"

  • "Better Than Expected"

  • "Turn Up the Ocean"

  • "I Don't Ask What You're Thinking"

  • "The Classics"

  • "In this kind of stillness, you should be able to find out/exactly what you feel,/if you feel anything." from "Autumn"

  • "I've lost one of the places I tell things to." from "Landscape Without Jason"

• "To an Athlete Dying Young" by A. E. Housman

• "Winter Without You" by Sarah Kay

• "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" by John Keats

• "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats

• "Little Sleep's Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight" by Galway Kinnel (especially Part V)

• Ted Kooser

  • "A Letter"

  • "For You, Friend"

  • "After Years"

  • "Mother"

  • "Walking by Fog Beside a Lake"

  • "Étud"

• Philip Larkin

  • "An Arundel Tomb"

  • "Kick up the fire, and let the flames break loose"

  • "Climbing the hill within the deafening wind"

  • "Poetry of Departures"

  • "Talking in Bed"

  • "a huge and birdless silence" from "Next, Please"

  • "The difficult part of love/is being selfish enough,/is having the blind persistence/to upset an existence/just for your own sake." from "Love"

• "There is Nothing" by Dorothea Lasky

• Ada Limón

  • "Open Water"

  • "The End of Poetry"

  • "Blowing on the Wheel"

  • "Maybe this letter is to say, if it is red where you are,/know there is also green" from "Sway"

• "Coda" by Lewis MacNeice

• "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell

• "Rain Travel" by W. S. Merwin

• "Separation" by W. S. Merwin

• "River Road" by Sean O'Brien

• Frank O'Hara

  • "Morning" 

  • "Animals"

  • "Instant coffee with slightly sour cream"

  • "Un Chant Contre Paroles"

  • "A Pathetic Note"

  • "Prose for the Times"

  • "somehow I shall escape into history" from "My country, leafy and blue with infinite breaths,"

  • "I'm so damned literary/and at the same time the waters rushing past remind me of nothing" from "Poem En Forme De Saw"

• "Dulce et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen

• "The Raft" by Carl Phillips

• "Star Map With Action Figures" by Carl Phillips

• Sylvia Plath

  • "The Rival"

  • "Child"

  • "Elm"

  • "The balled/pulp of your heart/confronts its small/mill of silence" from "Cut"

  • "I eat men like air" from "Lady Lazarus"

• "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allan Poe

• "...I kissed a girl/through the tin smog and chemical plant perfume/and carried that kiss through the year, touching newspaper,/edges of blankets, the backs of hamburger buns/to my lips to remember the dimming summer/sheepishly backing out of a door it hurriedly burst through./Only in America will the sons and daughters of slaves/kiss the sons and daughters of their masters/and remember it as an opportunity to be human" from "American Landscaping, Philadelphia to Mount Vernon" by Roger Reeves

• "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" by Adrienne Rich

• "You Who Never Arrived" by Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell

• "Weren't you always distracted by an expectation, as if every event announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you going and coming and often staying all night.)" from "The First Elegy" by Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell

• Sappho

  • From If Not, Winter, trans. Anne Carson

    • Fragment 34

    • Fragment 31

    • Fragment 94

• William Shakespeare

  • "When in the chronicle of wasted time" (Sonnet 106)

  • "Let me not to the marriage of true minds" (Sonnet 116)

  • "That time of year thou mayest in me behold" (Sonnet 73)

  • "Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck" (Sonnet 14)

  • "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" (Sonnet 18)

  • "Against that time, if ever that time come" (Sonnet 49)

  • "My love is as a fever, longing still" (Sonnet 147)

  • "For all that beauty that doth cover thee/is but the seemly raiment of my heart," from "My glass shall not persuade me I am old" (Sonnet 22)

  • "Blessed are you, whose worthiness gives scope,/being had, to triumph, being lacked to hope" from "So am I as the rich whose blessed key" (Sonnet 52)

• "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley

• "Scheherazade" by Richard Siken

• "I Had a Dream About You" by Richard Siken

• "I want to tell you this story without having to confess anything,/without having to say that I ran out into the street to prove something... I want to tell you this story without having to be in it" from "The Torn-up Road" by Richard Siken

• "The only heat of your kind for miles." from "The Speed of Belief" by Tracy K. Smith

• "One Day I Wrote Her Name in the Strand" by Edmund Spenser

• Alfred Lord Tennyson

  • "'I am half sick of shadows'" from "The Lady of Shallot"

  • "Am I mad, that I should cherish that which bears but bitter fruit?" from "Locksley Hall"

  • "O Let the Solid Ground"

  • "The Charge of the Light Brigade"

• "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas

• "From March '79" by Tomas Tranströmer, trans. John F. Deane

• "There's a fist/trying to be made/in my chest -/quivering,/which is,/the heart insists/to the disagreeable head,/at least/a gesture." from "The Evening" by John Emil Vincent

• "Lonely,/I read and read/the last thing you read./Afternoon tugs,/evening plies./Morning/has its leash in its mouth." from "Book of Jonah" by John Emil Vincent

• "Seventh Circle of Earth" by Ocean Vuong

• "Say autumn despite the green/in your eyes" from "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" by Ocean Vuong

• "Helen" by C. K. Williams

• "'A man's life cannot be silent; living is speaking, dying, too, is speaking,'" Part 16 of "Le Petit Salvié" by C. K. Williams

• "The Old Astronomer to His Pupil" by Sarah Williams

• William Carlos Williams

  • "This Is Just to Say"

  • "The Ivy Crown"

  • "The Descent"

• W. B. Yeats

  • "He Wishes For the Clothes of Heaven"

  • "The Second Coming"

• "Today's Heavy Rain Poured Down Last Night" by Wang Yin, trans. Andrea Lingenfelter

• "So it's not only on rainy days/that you turn this black cup/slowly in your hands" from "I've Had Enough of Paris" by Wang Yin, trans. Andrea Lingenfelter

• "I want you to see what I see -/I'm talking with your fingers caught in my mouth." from "Fugue: Pilgrim Valley" by Cynthia Zarin