If you are going out
Beware of mangoes
And all such beautiful
sweet things.
—Victor Hernandez Cruz

Mango on Tree (USDA)
Click here to read an EXCELLENT interview with Victor Hernandeze Cruz on The Poetry Foundation site. Here are some excerpts of questions to whet your appetite:
You don’t write what many would call autobiographical lyric poems. Was this a conscious decision?
Well, […]

Earlier this year Nigerian poet Obi Nwakanma filled my Gathering Room with talk that made the world right for the hours he shared himself and conversation. We exchanged poetry books at the end of our time together. I sent some of Daniel’s hardworking roses home for Obi’s wife.

In the days that followed our encounter, I […]

When I lived in Northern California, one of my great treats was to hear Gary Snyder perform his poetry with musicians in a cozy old-fashioned theatre…and another time….to hear him read and speak at the University of California at Davis. What remains of his presence for me is a sense of dignity…integrity…and a man of […]

Late Self-Portrait by Rembrandt
by Jane Hirschfield
from After
The dog, dead for years, keeps coming back in the dream.
We look at each other there with the old joy.
It was always her gift to bring me into the present—
Which sleeps, changes, awakens, dresses, leaves.
Happiness and unhappiness
differ as a bucket hammered from gold differs from one of pressed tin,
this […]

The Kindness of the Blind
by Wislawa Szymborska (Nobel Prize in Literature 1996)
Translated from the Polish by J. Kostkowska
A poet is reading to the blind.
He did not suspect it was so hard.
His voice is breaking.
His hands are shaking.
He feels that here each sentence
is put to the test of the dark.
It will have to fend for itself
without […]

What are actors thinking in a scene and how do they prepare? More often than we know, the answer is poetry.

That’s what we learn in Jason Shinder’s newest newest anthology and its accompanying CD: “The Poem I Turn to: Actors & Directors Present Poetry that Inspires Them” (Sourcebooks Media Fusion, 2008) with a preface by […]

Read Michiko Kakutani’s review of William Styron’s “HAVANAS IN CAMELOT:Personal Essays,” in today’s N. Y. Times by clicking here. [You may be asked to log in.] Kakutani’s review essay is titled, “Styron’s Essays Give Glimpses Into a Life Spent in Good Company”
Here’s a quoted excerpt I particularly liked, because it articulates how I feel inside […]

Digges was born in Jefferson, Missouri and went on to write poetry that would win awards and attract passionate readers such as Sharon Olds. Learn more about Deborah Digges by clicking here. “Darwin’s Finches is from Vesper Sparrows (1986), her first book. —JGR

Vesper Sparrow photo by Chan Robbins
Darwin’s Finches
by Deborah Digges
1
My mother always called it […]

wishes for sons
by Lucille Clifton
from “Quilting”
i wish them cramps
i wish them a strange town
and the last tampon.
i wish them no 7 – 11.
i wish them one week early
and wearing a white skirt.
i wish them one week late.
later i wish them hot flashes
and clots like you
wouldn’t believe. let the
flashes come when they
meet […]

A friend put W. T. Pfefferle’s Poets on Place in my hands as I worked on preparing a talk on the influence of place in my own poetry. I found “Poets on Place” so invaluable that I typed many pages of detailed notes to ruminate on.
It’s an attractive work replete with compementary elements to […]