The Last Poem I Loved
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The Last Book
The poet goes to the supermarket for peanut butter. The poet cleans the toilet. The poet responds to emails.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “In Defense of Our Overgrown Garden” by Matthea Harvey
I read poetry for enjoyment now, to feel seen, and to see the world differently.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “The Hell Poem” by Shane McCrae
I’m fascinated that the speaker’s harm disappearing is a function of being in Hell.
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The Last Poem I Loved : “The Planned Child” by Sharon Olds
The poem is no longer a part of the book I own. I ripped it out, had it framed, and nailed it to the wall right next to the door in our master bedroom.
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The Last Poem I Loved: The Waste Land
It is March, almost April, and the year feels like a spool of days spliced out of order, leaping treacherously from sun to ice to sun to rain to snow.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “The Cinnamon Peeler” by Michael Ondaatje
How different the world of the poem was from Saudi culture, which draped me in black and insisted, it often seemed, on One Truth.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson
Dickinson realizes that hope shifts and flutters and changes within you.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Snow for Wallace Stevens” by Terrance Hayes
The only time I had the privilege to meet Jake Adam York was after a panel he participated in at the 2012 AWP Conference. The panel was called “In White: White Poets and Race,” and I was hooked. For so…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “The Devil and Billy Markham” by Shel Silverstein
Having been an English teacher with an undergrad degree in Journalism, one might think I read a lot of quality work, but I don’t. I read news and posts that probably take less time to write than it does for…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Rick” by Jericho Brown
Poets fall in love with poems all the time, so much so that the question “what poem did you love last” isn’t really a question, but an invitation to wax poetic about the current darling in your eye. Because the…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Bolt from the Blue” by Gregory Orr
After taking a certain number of poetry classes, one may end up with a giant box of photocopied poems. If one is a packrat (and I am), these poems are impossible to discard. Sometimes I cut them up for collages,…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond” by E. E. Cummings
“Somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond” is not only the Last Poem I Loved, it also is actually the first. The way its writer (of whom I shall elaborate later on) likens one fine woman to flowers (and to a…