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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Posts Tagged: The Last Poem I Loved
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.
...moreThe 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 long I had yearned to write blues poetry, to sit down and dialogue about race […]
...moreThe 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 me to make coffee, and I worry about that. I fear my sensitivities for literature […]
...moreThe 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 truth is that a poet learns to fall in love with the words of another. […]
...moreThe 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, or send them to friends, or pull out the ones that really chime with me. […]
...moreThe 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 flowers’ heart) is the way I think women want to be looked at. To me […]
...moreThe Last Poem I Loved: “Hardware Store in a Town Without Men” by Laura Kasischke
It feels strange to claim that “Hardware Store on a Town Without Men” is the last poem I loved, since I have loved it for some time now. A fairer term would be to call it The Last Poem I Loved Continuously. Of the ideas she tackles in the poem, the most obvious and perceptive […]
...moreJeremy Davies: The Last Poem I Loved, Fredy Neptune
I do not love lightly, in poetry or in life. I love Fredy Neptune. This verse novel is probably the most startling reading experience I have had in some time.
...moreJazzy Danziger: The Last Poem I Loved, “Epithalament” by Brenda Shaughnessy
Contrary to popular belief, language is not flat, passionless, clichéd and dying, and if you disagree, it’s imperative that you read Brenda Shaughnessy’s poem “Epithalament” as soon as possible. Language must be “weirded” if it’s going to make the ordinary new again and rejuvenate the old ideas. Someone’s bland “I’m sad and exhausted” is Shaughnessy’s […]
...moreJudy Ossello: The Last Poem I Loved, “Interrogation” by Sophie Cabot Black
“When you have me as I’m standing / Against a wall” ignites memories of intimacy that overcome the who, what, where, and when of relationships. Intense moments have a quality of sameness. You feel alive in that moment, not specific, and this poem offers some words where there are none. A good kiss has a […]
...moreThe Last Poem I Loved: “Clip from Francis Jammes” by Charles North
Charles North works in many modes—conceptual architect, thingy neurographer, witty synthesist, maker of the poetic equivalent of very fine shirts—but I think I like him best when he gets all lucent and dreamy, as in “Clip from Francis Jammes.” To translate is to carry across. The poem translates Jammes’s wordier one, but in North’s hands […]
...moreThe Last Poem I Loved: “Dear Augusta” by Reginald Dwayne Betts
“Dear Augusta” by Reginald Dwayne Betts speaks for itself as a whole art piece, horrifying and beautiful and eye-widening, and I’m finding it pretty difficult to write about it at all but it is definitely the last poem I’ve loved so here goes nothing. The full poem is online in the January 2010 issue of […]
...moreThe Last Poem I Loved: “Prayer Before Birth” by Louis MacNeice
After years of people telling me that I would love Louis MacNeice, last week I stumbled on “Prayer Before Birth”. In the poem, the notion of the undead, the nosferatu as plague-carrier, the underworld and incarnate evil are not supernatural phenomena that threaten to appear to us. For the unborn voice in “Prayer”, hell is […]
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Made Flesh” by Craig Arnold
I met the poet Craig Arnold only once. It was late February or early March of this year.
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