What is it about life’s big and little moments that calls for a poem? At weddings. At funerals. On greeting cards. In church. On the radio. At moments of great happiness or deep sadness. At beginnings ...

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 ...

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 ...

There was a time, not too long ago, when many people could only name one, maybe two, poets – often a long-dead White man named William Shakespeare, Robert Frost or Walt Whitman. Meanwhile, the Lincoln ...

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 ...

The form of a poem is how we describe the overarching structure or pattern of the poem. Some forms of poetry must stick to very specific rules about length, rhythm and rhyme. Poets enjoy playing with ...

With just days to go until National Poetry Day – when iambic pentameters, Shakespearean sonnets and haikus will be dusted down across the land – that’s the assessment of the shape poetry is in in ...