Poems

I've got mixed feelings about National Poetry Month - not because I don't love poetry but because I do. If you ask me, every month should be poetry month, and the idea of setting one apart feels a bit like cultural condescension, as if we were paying lip service to an art that we all know ought to be important, even though, deep down, we fear it's not. And yet, poetry is important, as a form of expression that does (or can) stand outside narrative, that makes meaning through language, that connects us through the music of words.

A tiny poem written by a teenage Charlotte Bronte has sold for more than $140,000 , the Guardian reports. Called "I've Been Wandering in the Greenwoods," the poem, composed when Bronte was 13 years old, is handwritten on a piece of paper just three inches square. It is difficult to read without a magnifying glass. The manuscript is dated Dec. 14, 1829, and signed " C. Bronte . " Written in a minuscule hand on the scrap of paper (easy to hide, one imagines, from one's siblings or clergyman father)

In 2006, musician Michael Zapruder boarded the Wave Books Poetry Bus in North Carolina and spent a week riding through the South. Among the poets with whom he traveled were his brother, Matthew, an editor at Wave (a leading poetry publisher, based in Seattle), as well as D.A. Powell, Bob Hicok, Dorothea Lasky and Mary Ruefle. The idea behind the bus tour was to bring poetry to its readers by making it accessible in the most public way. Poetry, after all, remains on a fundamental level aural, a form in which meaning is as much a matter of sound, of music and rhythm, as it is of the content of the words.

I've got mixed feelings about National Poetry Month - not because I don't love poetry but because I do. If you ask me, every month should be poetry month, and the idea of setting one apart feels a bit like cultural condescension, as if we were paying lip service to an art that we all know ought to be important, even though, deep down, we fear it's not. And yet, poetry is important, as a form of expression that does (or can) stand outside narrative, that makes meaning through language, that connects us through the music of words.

In recent years, poet Stanley Plumly gave readers "Posthumous Keats," a gorgeous, award-winning prose meditation on the great English Romantic poet's life and death. With "Orphan Hours: Poems" (W.W. Norton: $25.95), the Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, ruminates again on the topic of mortality, though this time the subject is much closer to home. Surely there's a struggle ahead for anyone with a serious illness, but in the poem "Cancer," he offers a respite from the horror by addressing the disease from a startling, cosmic perspective.

Activist, poet and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti, co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers in San Francisco, has written a new book of poems, his first since 2007's “Poetry as Insurgent Art.” Titled “Time of Useful Consciousness,” an aeronautical term for the period between the moment you run out of oxygen and the time you cease to be able to function, the new book has been described by the author  as "a fragmented recording of...

Leave it to Wislawa Szymborska, the 1996 Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet who died this month at 88, to write a poem celebrating tragedy's nonexistent sixth act. This is when, as she described it in "Theatre Impressions," the offstage dead return for their bows, actors straighten their wigs and fancy gowns and, as the curtain falls, it's possible to see a hand as it "quickly reaches for a flower" or "picks up a fallen sword. " Only after the stage has gone dark does the poet feel the hand of tragedy grabbing her by the throat.

I was one of many who wrote to you to protest the change in the Book Review's policy on poetry reviews. But I owe you this letter of appreciation. I think that the new format and policy serve poetry well, albeit differently. I have enjoyed the poems and the vignettes about the poets immensely, and look forward to them each week. I want dialogue about poetry, but I think that in this poetry-starved media universe we inhabit the presentation of poetry itself is more important.

In "My Nephew Tony" (May 17, in some editions), Jessica Reynolds Shaver quotes some letters she said Anthony Reynolds had sent her from prison, adding, "I didn't know he wrote poetry." In reality, Tony does not write poetry. He copies poetry, and it appears that he has conned his aunt into believing that she sees "a Tony in them that I have never seen before, the Tony I knew must be there." The poems in the article were written by James Kavanaugh, published in a book titled "There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves" (Dutton, 1970)

For the reader boiling in triple-digit SoCal heat at the end of the summer, Donald Hall's "The Back Chamber: Poems" arrives like a sudden cloudburst and shower of cooling rain. Again Hall takes readers into his New Hampshire, a realm of "fiddleheaded ferns, lilacs purpling / trilliums, apparition of daffodils" and soft breezes where "my grandfather and I," he recalls in "Maples," "with Riley the horse, / took four days to clear the acres of hay / from the fields on both sides of the house.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a sweet poem for actress Helen Hayes' daughter, Mary McArthur. Then, six years later, he penned her another one on the reverse of the same page that's, well, a little unsettling. Would you write to a 7-year-old about the "thumb-print of lust"? The poems can be seen at the website of Nate D. Sanders Fine Autographs and Memorabilia . They are part of a lot that is set to go up for auction on April 2. The first poem was written to Mary when she was just a year old. It's a singsong verse: "Is Papa / Your Papa / My Papa?

Just a few months ago, Eloise Klein Healy was chosen as L.A.'s first poet laureate. Now a new anthology of Healy's work offers ample proof, if any were needed, what an inspired choice she was. "A Wild Surmise" is a vivid record of one woman's artistic and emotional quest, a journey that unfolds, for the most part, in the streets, gardens and homes of Los Angeles. The City of Angels appears again and again in the work of Healy, a native of El Paso who grew up in Iowa but who has made Los Angeles her home since the 1970s.

Poet Simon Armitage has announced a plan to walk 260 miles along the English coast this summer. During this sojourn, Armitage will offer readings at pubs, schools and other venues in exchange for food and shelter, carrying no money and relying on his pen to sustain him.  "The whole idea is that of the barter. All I've got to offer is my work, and the reading of it," he told the Guardian. "Will that be enough for people to say I can stay at their home, or that they'll give me some sandwiches?

An unpublished manuscript by the 19th century Scottish poet William Topaz McGonagall is up for auction at Bonham's this spring, and is expected to fetch something in the neighborhood of $4,600, according to the Guardian. This price is not despite its notable badness, but exactly because of it:  McGonagall, born in 1825 in Edinburgh, is widely considered to be the world's worst poet. The achievement, if one can call it that, has kept McGonagall's work in print over a century after his death, even as his more talented (not to mention mediocre)

Fifty years ago Monday, Sylvia Plath, a 30-year-old American living in England, put her head in her oven and committed suicide. Her two children were upstairs; her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, had left her after a tempestuous relationship. Her poetry and the semi-autobiographical novel "The Bell Jar" have become lasting parts of our literary culture.  Today, Plath is much remembered -- and specifically, she's being remembered online. Poet Craig Morgan Teicher looks at the poems in Plath's debut collection, "The Colossus," at NPR: "The strange psyche at the core of these poems is made powerful by its seemingly limitless ability to endure self-destruction ... . As tragic and dark as her end would be, it's nonetheless thrilling to watch this great artist becoming herself.

The following poem was delivered by inauguration poet Richard Blanco during ceremonies for  President Obama's second inaugural Monday. The text of the poem was provided by the Presidential Inaugural Committee. "One Today" One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores, peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies. One light, waking up rooftops, under each one, a story told by our silent gestures moving behind windows.

"Am I glad to be a woman?" begins a poem written by Gailellen Conyers. "Am I glad to be a black woman in the 20th Century?" Several times a month, Conyers reads this and other poetry at small Orange County coffee shops and community theaters. The poems express the joy and anger that span her 40 years. "Poetry is my heart, my soul," said Conyers, sitting in her elegant, contemporary house in Orange, a place far removed from the foster homes and abuse of her childhood.

As one dedicated to poetry composition, and recently inducted into the International Society of Poets at their convention and symposium, I found a faulty assumption in the Book Review section most repugnant and misleading ("Anne Sexton: A Biography," Aug. 25). Reviewer Nancy Mairs noted "the roster of modern poets dead by their own hands--among them Delmore Schwartz, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman--who communicated to the following generation the belief that, in writing poetry, they courted death."

In about 550 words, Richard Blanco's inaugural poem created a metaphorical country and took it through the journey of a metaphorical day. “One Today” was an intimate and sweeping celebration of our shared, single identity as a people, and Blanco recited it in a voice that was both confident and tenderly soft-spoken. Blanco built his poem on a foundation of the concrete and the everyday. He began with people going to work and school in “silver trucks heavy with oil or paper - bricks or milk, teeming over highways alongside us, on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives…” And then he placed these ordinary people in a recognizably American landscape of “one ground.

There's a handmade quality to Maged Zaher's third volume of poetry, “Thank You for the Window Office” (Ugly Duckling: 74 pp., $15 paper), and not just because of the rough-hewn beauty of the book itself. No, the work here - one long, impressionistic poem about … well, really, about everything   - seems piped directly from the inside of the poet's head as he lives and thinks his way through the moment, a moment defined by alienation, humor, politics and the indignities of a corporate culture that cares nothing for the soul.