“Poetry is life distilled,” said longtime Illinois Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks. This is concise; but what does it mean? It means, as I understand it, that poetry is a place where the rich ...

I'm going to think I'm being clever here and ask you a question similar to one you asked poet W.D. Snodgrass when you interviewed him for The American Poetry review in 1986, when you said you looked ...

The author grew up in Jabalpur in central India, a place still largely absent from the dominant imagination of Anglophone poetry. The poems in his collection carry that world in them in specific ...

Lotus L. Kang is a channeler of memories—both collective and personal. In her latest exhibition, “Already“ (on view at 52 Walker through June 7, 2025), the Brooklyn-based Canadian artist layers the ...

Memory is strange. Maggie Smith has struck on one of its amazing qualities — that each occurrence, each memory, adds to the previous ones as if we had put them in folders. And we revise as we go, ...

Schoolchildren, including this columnist decades ago, were taught a twelve-line lyric poem of rhyming couplets of iambic tetrameter verse, entitled, Trees, that many centenarians and nonagenarians ...

Content warning: The following piece includes mentions of suicide and sexual violence. Poetry, like the other arts, takes many forms that lead to many different ends. Some say that poems are good for ...

Journal Editorial Report: The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Kyle Peterson, Jillian Melchior and Dan Henninger. Image: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images About 18 months ago, at age 79, I gave ...

When senior Lucy Chuang learned of the March 16 shootings in Atlanta, she opened her poetry journal. In the days that followed, she wrote several poems dedicated to the Asian women who were killed.

My guest this week on Poetry from Daily Life is Angela Jackson, who lives in Chicago, Illinois in the historic Bronzeville neighborhood. She fell in love with poetry in first grade and was writing her ...