Riehlife Poem of the Day: e. e. cummings’ “i carry your heart with me (i carry it in”

When I was a young married woman computing to graduate school at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville in the 1970s before I went into Peace Corps in 1972, my husband and my best friend of that time got together to buy me the complete works of e.e. cummings. I was never so thrilled, and spent almost…

Riehlife Poem of the Day: Sandra Kohler’s “Why a Woman Can’t Be a Pope”

Nina’s Night 22″ x 17″ by Eden Maxwell The Country of Women (1995): CALYX Books “Sandra Kohler’s poems find art in the mundane, the sacred, and the profane. Examining woman’s experience as sexual being, as mother, and as artist, Kohler reveals what it means to live in a woman’s body.” -from the cover Why a…

Riehlife Poem of the Day: Nabokov’s Butterflies

Painting by Joseph Lamarque (see profile under Art Matters) Vladimir Nabokov’s poem was suggested by my friend Leigh Davidson as our poem of the day.–JGR Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings No, life is no quivering quandary! No, life is no quivering quandary! Here under the moon things are bright and dewy. We are the…

Riehlife Poem of the Day: Langston Hughes’ “A Negro Speaks of River” with links to audio and scholarly article

I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. This is the first stanza of one of my favorite poems “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” by Langston Hughes (from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes,…