Lawrence Raab’s 2005 poem entitled “The Great Poem” proposes that “the great poem” is something that is “always possible” for the poet to achieve, even though the speaker of Raab’s poem admits “[w]hat he is writing now is not / the great poem.” The entire poem raises some useful questions for those of us who find ourselves…

Here we are again, on the verge of the 15th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, a series of events that, to me, seems to have happened only yesterday, yet somehow—inconceivably—they burned themselves into my memory back before my current seniors were in preschool, back on a normal Tuesday school morning. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, one…