Once, in my youth, I took a graduate philosophy seminar I thought would be about law and justice: Instead we discussed the semantic implications of punctuation marks. After class, I found myself ...

One night sometime in the early 1930s a New Jersey doctor left a note for his wife on the door of their fridge. He looked at it again and saw something he hadn't noticed when first writing it down, ...

Fledgling poets usually yearn for their words of wisdom to appear in artsy books or literary journals. For the past decade, ...

CHRISTIAN WIMAN is a poet and editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago. His most recent book of poems, Every Riven Thing, was published last fall by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Some existential glitch in ...

CARBONDALE — As Thunder River Theatre Company’s Valerie Haugen launched a poetry festival in memory of a close friend in 2011, the notion of encouragement kept coming to mind. “When my friend Karen ...

In this lesson, high school students write ‘I am’ poems in their home language and then translate them into English, building ...

Every poem has structural features that have a bearing on the way the poem sounds or what it means. To comment on the structure of a poem is just the same as commenting on its language – you notice ...

Ten years ago this fall, an executive who had managed the Jell-O account at General Foods published a collection of essays about American poetry. Its contents included a debunking of Robert Bly, a ...