Poet Laureate Archives

Clearing the Bar with Care and Complexity: Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind

The Hurting Kind’s epigraph, a quote from Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik [implores] us to “Sing as if nothing were wrong. / Nothing is wrong.” When we read Limón, we can almost believe that.

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Catalyst Events and a Time for Poetry: An Interview with Charles Flowers

Consider: My coming out story has been told, but coming out is constantly changing and shifting and needs retelling, and each telling has value for a particular audience.

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Literature as Expression, Exchange, and Peace

Everything make sense if you’re an artist. At the Dallas Observer, Caroline North exchanged a few words with current US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, who is kicking off his second…

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Poetry of the Moment

Juan Felipe Herrera is at the top of his game…He served as California’s Poet Laureate from 2012-2014, the first Latino poet to hold that post. He’s also the first Latino…

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Poet Laureate Grew Up a Migrant Worker, Seeing Poetry All Around Him

Those are some deep landscapes of mountains and grape fields and barns and tractors; families gathering at night to have little celebrations in the mountains and aquamarine lakes way down…

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Learning from Yeats

There is music in those words, yes, but music, when things go right, is always wed to sense, as though he were speaking to you directly, trying to work things…

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Do We Need a Poet Laureate?

For Literary Hub, Nick Ripatrazone breaks down—and defends—the poet laureate.

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Official Bards for the Bay State

All but six US states have official Poet Laureates; the Massachusetts House of Representatives is poised to cut that number down to five. Although many individual cities appoint poets to…

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Hell on Earth

Former Poet Laureate Charles Simic grapples with the current global situation in the New York Review of Books. The world is going to hell in a hurry. At my age,…

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Who are the Poet Laureates?

After the recent dust-up over North Carolina’s poet laureate, the New York Times takes a look at 45 state poet laureates to see who they are and just what exactly…

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