last poem i loved
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The Last Poem I Loved: Richard Siken’s “Scheherazade”
Tell me, Richard, that I, too, will never get used to this.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Satan Says” by Sharon Olds
Therein lies the brilliance of “Satan Says”: Olds’s Satan is not villainous because he urges the speaker to denounce her parents … but because he is too obtuse to comprehend the uselessness of such denunciations to a curious intellect.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “So the Pilot Says Over the Intercom” by David Hernandez
July fifth. My girlfriend and I are waiting on Chinese food to be delivered while the neighborhood kids work their way through buckets of excess firecrackers and I come across a book I thought I’d lost—Always Danger by David Hernandez,…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Ganymede,” by Michael D. Snediker
Sometimes, it’s easy to think of the poem as a conversation one might have in a bar. And sometimes, to follow the metaphor through, the poem is a surprising conversation, at once sweet and sexy and utterly—thank god—smart. So when…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Seele im Raum” by Randall Jarrell
Well, hello there, Randall Jarrell. Where you been all my life? And how did you get a real live eland up into a poem? An eland! It came out of the poem and stared at me. I stroked its hot…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Insomnia” by Elizabeth Bishop
It is near the time of my college graduation. I’m graduating early, barely 20 years old. Among my friends, the stuff of my romantic self-sabotage is legendary.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Untitled” by Tina Brown Celona
This poem begins with an epigraph: In poetry at least the imagination must not detach itself from reality… -Wallace Stevens I want to be in love forever and not like anyone else
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The Last Poem I Loved: She Had Some Horses by Joy Harjo
Reading my own poetry feels like looking into a blurred old mirror at an antique shop. I can’t tell if I look good or pale and pasty. I can’t figure out if it’s my writing or my self-criticism that is…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver
After I finished reading “Wild Geese,” all I could think of was: So what! So what that I am an undocumented person living in hiding, so what that I was turned into a “criminal” when I was a child, so…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Oh Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie” by Philip Appleman
Of all of the people I know who own a smartphone (a majority, anymore), most of them get up in the morning and immediately reach for said smartphone from their cozy nest in bed. The first thing they do is…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Sleeping Lioness” by Larry Levis
As a fiction writer, and as a reader, I gravitate toward stories from the perspective of a specific, imperfect and alert, outward-and-inward-looking consciousness, a transparent eyeball with legs and, at least occasionally, uncomfortable shoes. The danger of a story centered…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Under the Maud Moon” by Galway Kinnell
A round- cheeked girlchild comes awake in her crib. The green swaddlings tear open I first encountered the last poem I loved, Galway Kinnell’s “Under the Maud Moon,” eleven summers ago, after a short trip to a novel writing workshop…