Mr. Speiser and I were among those in attendance at the PEN organized “Writers Resist: #LouderTogether” event, held on the steps of the NYC Public Library on January 15, 2017. Here we are, momentarily turning our backs from both the poets and from our kids, who patiently took in the event. My oldest, Nikolai, wearing…
Published in the May 2003 edition of Poetry magazine, Kay Ryan’s “Home to Roost” has evolved into a poem that has quite a bit of personal meaning for me. Ryan, the 2008 U.S. Poet Laureate and the winner of the 2011 Pulitzer prize for poetry, is known for her spare, compressed verses, and “Home to…
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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…
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