last poem i loved
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The Last Poem I Loved: “The Bells” by Adam Zagajewski
My maternal grandparents emigrated from Poland in 1924 after experiencing the horrors of World War I. They arrived here with pockets full of hopes and dreams and little else. I never met them; they died before I was born. I…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Reaching Around For You” by D.A. Powell
April is over. We can’t stop these things from happening, no. We’re slipping out of spring into summer, out of busy semesters and National Poetry Month. We’re slipping outside our houses, and offices, and coffeeshops after the seemingly innumerable gray…
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The Last Poem I Loved: Zachary Schomburg’s Poem-Film “Your Limbs Will Be Torn Off In a Farm Accident”
When I saw this poem, I took it personally. I cried. I sent it to friends and family. “Look at this, look at this!” My emails were demanding. “This is what happened to me.”
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Modotti” by Adrienne Rich
I didn’t have time to be devastated on the day Adrienne Rich died, but I still couldn’t keep back the tears. Like so many others, Rich was The One to me, America’s greatest living everything I ever wanted to be:…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Poem at the New Year” by John Ashbery
To truly commit a poem to memory is to commit your life to that poem. Out of all the many verses I’ve memorized over the last year, no other has so fully enveloped my days than John Ashbery’s “Poem at…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Nothing Twice” by Wislawa Szymborska
The last poem I loved was “Nothing Twice” by the well-known Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. I loved all of her poems that followed, but “Nothing Twice” was the first Szymborska poem I ever read. Last week, I was on my…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Minor Poem” by Bill Knott
Lately, I’ve been feeling full-circlish. As a result, I am choosing to publicly acknowledge the-last-poem-I-loved’s similarity to the first poem that made me want to be a poet. They were both written by Bill Knott, they are both terribly short,…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “The Crowds Cheered as Gloom Galloped Away” by Matthea Harvey
Matthea Harvey’s “The Crowds Cheered As Gloom Galloped Away” resides in her second full-length collection, the wonderfully-titled Sad Little Breathing Machine. It is a poem about ponies, sadness, and the inversion of cognitive behavioral therapy. It is a poem about…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Revolutionary Letter #1” by Diane di Prima
The summer I turned 19, after my first year of college, I took off, leaving behind my small midwestern campus, to work in a gift shop in Yosemite National Park. That’s a whole other story, and maybe someday I’ll tell…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “South America” by Tom Raworth
Can words become a part of you? I found Tom Raworth’s “South America” published in Keith Tuma’s Anthology of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry (Oxford, 2001) and have always looked back. Listen to Raworth read it. It asks us to…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Nice” by Marianne Boruch
I love a poem that understands me. Most of the time, when I’m not reading poetry to inspire my own work, I read it as a reminder to appreciate the world, or some small space within it. Some days, I…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Dream Song 29” by John Berryman
The Dream Songs are, at their best, incantations, syllables given to the unspeakable. And yet, here’s the really unsettling thing: They’re fun. “Dream Song 29,” and the others in 77 Dream Songs, read quickly and lightly. Their rhythms catch in…