It's National Poetry Month, and so many poets I know are churning out a poem-a-day. They are emailing and asking for prompts, for any ideas to trigger inspiration. I don't have anything to offer them. I feel old, dried up. But every time I am asked, I think of this poem by the brilliant Dante di Stefano.    Prompts (for High School Teachers Who Write Poetry) Write about walking into the building as a new teacher. Write yourself hopeful. Write a row of empty desks. Write the face of a student you’ve almost forgotten; he’s worn a Derek Jeter jersey all year. Do not conjecture about t ..read more

I love this Sappho poem of pure jealousy. I love the “kindled the flesh along my arms/ and smothered me in its smoke-blind rush.” I’m just realizing that many of my favorite poems celebrate the worst parts of our beings: jealousy, lust, rage. I am thinking about this because I have been reading this book, Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection, a book recommended by my meditation instructor. The basic premise of the book is that love is not something you simply emanate like a yogi from a cave. Rather, you have to practice it in both small and big ways. The book ..read more

Tayi Tibble’s second book of poems Rangikura was just reprinted with Knopf. (The volume was first published in 2021 in New Zealand.)  Tibble, from Wellington, New Zealand, writes a poetry that blends her Māori culture with the attitude and wisdom of a young Millennial or the elder stateswoman of Gen Z. (Tibble was born in 1995.) Her poems are wildly bold, not shying away from colonialism, climate change, and the banality of pop culture. They are defiant and tender, as illustrated in these lines from “Tohunga”: good on you babe. / You got what you wanted. / The juicy earth / the fact ..read more

Les Keiter recreated West Coast baseball games for heartsick New Yorkers bereft of the Dodger and Giants after they moved to LA and SF at the end of the 1957 season. It's the same job Ronald Reagan performed in the 1940s. How well I remember lying in bed listening to my black Zenith radio with the lights out as the clock moved toward midnight on a September night in 1959. The Giants and Dodgers were battling for first place. In the opening inning, Don Drysdale walked the first three Giants to face him. Then he proceeded to strike out the next three. The Dodgers won, ended the season tied for ..read more

                                      _________________________________________________ She Said in Bed   When I die let my body fly. Book me a trip on a rocket ship and launch me at dawn.  Play some Hendrix and a Nina Simone song.  Give me a eulogy through a static headset.  Let the booster jets be my pallbearers and give me a smoke plume in lieu of a tomb.  And everyone awake who tries to fake some caffeinated joy can take their eyes out of their latte chai and turn their ..read more

Feeling a Snack Coming On Maybe the best thing to compare it to Would be the old cowboy-and-Indian movies We used to endure on Friday night TV Or Saturday matinees, before Psycho hit. Indians whooping and chasing stagecoaches; A strong-but-vulnerable woman holding a rifle, Her face streaked with dirt, a white sleeve torn; Or a lone half-naked buck sneaking up Behind a blue-clad soldier to slit his throat— Until the soldier proves the better athlete, Wrestling the knife away and giving the Injun What-for, before bayonetting the poor bastard And rolling his painted body into the canyon. A 16-o ..read more

Sometimes, when I'm reading a new collection of poetry, I think: For this poem alone, everyone should own this book. But this week, while reading January Gil O'Neil's collection, Glitter Road, Kathleen McGookey's Cloud Reports, and Philip Metres' Fugitive/Refuge, I couldn't find a favorite. Instead, I found many favorites.  What I loved about all of these books, as different as they are, were the mystical moments they offer their readers.  Woman Swallowed by a Python in Her Cornfield by January Gil O'Neil Inside every woman is a snake. Some think I’m a hoax or an oddity, rarer than ..read more

If Blade Runner and The Terminator depict a dystopian future as imagined in 1982 and 1984, respectively, The Creator (2023) is a perfect projection of the present – a time when the public is passionately debating the very pressing issue of the role that Artificial Intelligence plays in basic living duties, in the stock market, and in filmmaking. For several months in 2023, the Screen Actors Guild made the A.I. the central factor in its strike in Hollywood. And right now stocks like Nvidia that specialize in A.I. are soaring. Technology is the hottest sector of the stock m ..read more

Sara Daniele Rivera’s debut collection The Blue Mimes was just published by Graywolf Press as the winner of the Academy of American Poets’ 2023 First Book Award. Rivera is a Cuban Peruvian American poet whose landscapes include Havana and Lima, the sea and the mountains. Her gestures include code-switching and rompecabezas/ puzzles to get at the terrifying heart of her subjects. In these lush and powerful poems, she faces the geopolitical realities of migration , the 2016 election, and mourns the loss of those taken by Covid-19. The Blue Mimes is a tour-de-force. You can read (and hear R ..read more

  FOR A DOLLAR I'LL TELL YOU WHAT YOU ARE DYING TO HEAR, WHICH IS ALL OF IT The social impulse and the roaches and the throb no one brings me what I heard. The window's great -- along with your four walls, you are more gorgeous than an afternoon I don't watch that kind of fucked up. The presidents walk across the broken windows. Stop thinking like I need a thing. How much worse than being talked about is it the war or the collision of galaxies. ‘He flew into the bonfire to celebrate being on the roof of my heart,’ Sunset light on my phone.               ..read more