Check back here every day of National Poetry Month (April 2026) to fall in love with a new poem!
April 29
DETOUR by Roméo Desmarais III
I have to start this second-to-last poem with an apology to the poet. I know Roméo personally-ish and I actually contacted him about his work being one of the eponymous 30 Poems. He sent us some of his favorites from among his own work… but then I just kind of found myself reading around and fell in love with this one. So, Roméo, I apologize for wasting your time asking you to send me a few samples. Now on to the poem.
I could say how it compares in my mind to other visual poets (Octavio Paz, Gertrude Stein…) but I want to look at this work for what it is; not what it isn’t. For instance, visually, I don’t know what it depicts. Maybe it’s obvious to you but I have some issues that make me a bad chess player and make it essentially impossible for me to decode a Magic Eye… and also make this image opaque to me. If you think you know what it is let me know. To me it looks like a flower from Super Mario Bros half-out-of-frame. But the hazy visual to me is a plus not a minus. It draws the eye and settles the mind into a contemplative space. Too often when I read poetry I speed-read rather than read.
I also like the visual rhyming of pairing “futile” and “fruiteles…s” and the fact that the second ‘stanza’ makes it unclear which way to read. I finally settled on counterclockwise, or widdershins, as I never tire of saying.
But if the poem were purely contemplative it wouldn’t also be telling me to “Steal a big bus.” I love that. The paradox of a shaped poem–a format that traditionally urges or enables contemplation–urging violence; urging the achievement of the contemplative through the rigors of grand theft auto. Bravo, Roméo.
-Adam
April 27
bone by Yrsa Daley-Ward
CONTENT WARNING: SEXUAL ASSAULT AND INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE
Don't cry.
You'll like it after a while
Erika is ever-mindful of months that mark awareness. And in addition to being National Poetry Month, April is also Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Erika has been public on her experience with sexual assault. Nevertheless I like being the one to write this piece:a mashup, if you will, of our poem-a-day offering for National Poetry Month and our ongoing battle to be more open and honest about the pandemic of sexual assault that women face the world over. I like to be the one to write this because Erika and people like Erika shouldn’t have to. But there is another dimension which is that Erika has been really sick lately and even this much writing, editing, etc. would be too much right now.
Nevertheless it was Erika who picked the poem.
What strikes me about this poem is its use of numbers to de-humanize the men. And how appropriate that is. By their own admission they are letting their animal need take over. So in a real sense they are not human in this moment; nor in the moments thereafter when they self-justify and rationalize and, often as not, strike again. We are not human when we are pawing at a woman who wants us to leave her alone.
Then there is the way this poem uses the assaulters’ words. What are words in such instances but ways of justifying the unjustifiable; ways of putting a patina of civilization over the most uncivilized, the most warlike, of acts? As Erika said in an essay a few years ago: “Nice guys don’t rape you; but even if they do, they’re nice enough to walk you home afterwards.” It’s been exactly four years since that essay was published in April of 2022. That line; that essay as a whole, hits so hard even after so many readings.
What is going through that nice guy’s head when he says those words: “don’t worry,” or “it’ll start to feel good” or “let me walk you home.” That last one. “Let me walk you home” implies: Let me make a show of protecting you from people like me so that I can pretend that I’m not people like me. Let me use your fear and discomfort, your situational awareness and understanding that you must accept my offer of an escort because you cannot safely say “no” to my offer, let me use that implied force to further imply that you are okay with this and that this is all therefore consensual.
Having already used your body for my pleasure let me use your fear and silence as a balm for whatever conscience I have left so that my pleasure isn’t burdened with inconvenient feelings of guilt and remorse. Sure things got a bit heated and now there are bits of me under your fingernails and other bits of me up inside your… well never mind that. But if I’m doing a classic good-guy gesture by walking you home and you’re allowing me to then it can’t have been that bad and by tomorrow I’ll have convinced myself that it was all fine and above-board.
I know that the survivors will keep shouting because they can’t not. Because it hurts too much to be silent. It hurts to be silent more than the loss of supposed respectability from speaking up; more than the loss of anonymity and privacy. It is a choice to speak up and a brave one. But what of the men who fancy themselves “one of the good ones”? Who not only paw at a woman but who press and press? Some of them might read this poem; or poems like it. What happens then? What happens in that head to turn off the switch where the conscience should be? To stop them from saying: I did it and I was wrong and I’m sorry and what can I do to make amends? It’s not the fear of jail time. Don’t make me laugh. So what is it?
If I’ve learned one thing it’s that Erika doesn’t talk and write about this to appeal to men’s consciences. We men either have a conscience or we don’t. It’s a waste of time to press further than that. She does it because part of her identity has been shaped around surviving this tragic moment. And because talking to people who have been in a similar situation gives her a sense of kinship. I hope this poem, and works like it, do the same for you.
April 25
Bird on a Wire by Leonard Cohen
“Like a bird on the wire,
Like a drunk in a midnight choir,
I have tried in my way to be free.”
What did it mean when Leonard Cohen said, as he did in one of his interviews, that he went inside the world of Garcia Lorca and never came out? To me it means that his works are surreal in the very best way. Listening to a Cohen song feels like entering a world with its own rules. Words mean different things. Ideas come and go like lost children. And a fellow with not much of a voice can mesmerize you with his lyrics and melodies.
I’m going with the Joe Cocker version because I think a unique strength of Cohen’s songs is that they sound better when others take them up; they are like seeds. I don’t know what else to say. I could go on for hours or I could just say: I really like him and was sad when he died; though I know that he had been studying for that moment in synagogue and Buddhist temple alike for a great many years.
-Adam
April 23
Sociable Letter CXI by Margaret Cavendish Duchess of Newcastle
and ’tis Harder, and Requires more Wit to Express a Jester, than a Grave Statesman; yet Shakespear did not want Wit, to Express to the Life all Sorts of Persons, of what Quality,° Profession, Degree, Breeding, or Birth soever; nor did he want Wit to Express the Divers, and Different Humours, or Natures, or Several Passions° in Mankind; and so Well he hath Express’d in his Playes all Sorts of Persons, as one would think he had been Transformed into every one of those Persons he hath Described; and as sometimes one would think he was Really himself the Clown or Jester he Feigns, so one would think, he was also the King, and Privy Counsellor; also as one would think he were Really the Coward he Feigns, so one would think he were the most Valiant, and Experienced Souldier; Who would not think he had been such a man as his Sir Iohn Falstaff? and who would not think he had been Harry the Fifth? & certainly Iulius Cæsar, Augustus Cæsar, and Antonius, did never Really Act their parts Better, if so Well, as he hath Described them, and I believe that Antonius and Brutus did not Speak Better to the People, than he hath Feign’d them; nay, one would think that he had been Metamorphosed from a Man to a Woman...
Usually you spend the 23rd of April, which is the day of Shakespeare’s death certificate and putative day of his birth except it’s neither because Pope Gregory added 17 days to the calendar in like 1589 and so really we should be celebrating all of this on May 10 but never mind and if it seems like I’m writing all of this in a rush it’s because both Shakespeare and the woman who, in my opinion, is Shakespeare’s first critic of note put me in that kind of mood.
Margaret Cavendish lived a life for the storybooks, many of which she wrote herself. She wrote closet dramas where she plays with the idea of gender reversal in a way that would have made Shakespeare proud. Following King Charles I into exile on the continent in the early 1650s, she married the principal general of the Royalist forces when she was 23 and he was 53 and against all odds it was a love match–she had no children by him and he supported her in her career as a writer of poetry, drama, philosophy, and one Utopia-style satirical novel. She also predeceased him which is a bit of a dick move when you’re THAT much younger than your partner.
But let’s take a look at the above-quoted rush of language. It comes from the Sociable Letters which is something between a novel and a collection of essays. It’s a lovely read and I wholeheartedly recommend it as long as you’re not looking for linear drama of the sort you’d find in Dangerous Liaisons or something similar.
Anyway back to the text. What stands out for me about Cavendish is that she gets it. A lot of paeans were written to Shakespeare by the usual suspects (rival Ben Jonson, colleagues Hemings and Condell, even Milton who writes a poem to his memory despite the fact that Shakespeare had started to fall out of fashion by the time Milton took up his pen. What all these poetic ass-lickers have in common is… their words are generic. They praise Shakespeare’s “easy numbers” (“numbers” back then meant verses or rhythms) and called him “untutor’d,” “sweet” etc. It all feels a bit condescending. It’s not coincidence that two of the major poems we have–those by Jonson and Milton–carry the weight of two of the most learned Latinists and Hellenists to grace English letters not just in the 16th century but in all of history. Shakespeare was not unlearned; he was unlearned compared to these two teacher’s pets. And so part of their difficulty is that they don’t just have to praise his greatness; they have to reckon with the paradox of his greatness. Well. Trust Margaret Cavendish, who was monolingual despite living on the continent in exile for like 10 years, to get it right.
Cavendish is one of the first published authors of my acquaintance to reckon with WHY Shakespeare was great and she correctly pinpoints that it is his handling of characters as people. Whoever enters the stage will have their moment and their motive and their sense of unique personhood as if Shakespeare had lived that person’s life for them and come to tell you about it.
I also like the idea that Shakespeare was a better Caesar or Brutus than they ever were. One historian (I think it was Aubrey) said that Shakespeare tended towards kingly parts, so it’s not out of the question that the greater actor (Burbage) would have played Brutus or Antony while Shakespeare would have played the smaller but grander part of Caesar. It’s a fun part. Just strut about stage for three acts loving the smell of your own farts and then get popped like a balloon by 10+ senators. But take a look. Because Cavendish is exactly right. The reason why the play works is the same reason why all of his plays work. When Cassius speaks, you feel his rage and indignation; when Brutus speaks, you feel his ambivalence; when Calphurnia speaks you feel her fear for her husband. The whole play just teems with people–real people with real lives of which we, the audience, chance to glimps a few minutes or hours as through a chink in a darkened window. And, as Cavendish correctly points out, there is more. Caesar’s tragedy oscillates between the depths of seriousness and the heights of comedy. The speeches are as gorgeous as the jests are clever; and Cavendish, unlike the Oscar judges, understand that it can be more difficult to write kings than clowns. Shakespeare’s skill as an illusionist is unsurpassed to this day.
And yet all of this would not be especially interesting; it is after all what we now know about Shakespeare–about the variety and depth of his characters, about his equal skill in comedy and tragedy–if not for the fact that Cavendish was writing shortly after the event itself. Shakespeare died in 1616; his popularity received a new lease in 1623 with the publication of the First Folio containing nearly all of his plays. And then he slowly dropped out of popularity while younger wits took center stage. So Cavendish wasn’t rising to the occasion and saying: everyone knows he’s the best and here’s why (which everyone also already knows). She was saying: here’s this charming playwright from 40-50 years ago (the equivalent of someone today taking an interest in the works of Alfred Hitchcock or Stanley Kubrick) and here’s why he’s the best. And then over a hundred years later hers has become the dominant opinion with the romantic-era revival of interest in the Bard and the coining of the term “bardolatry” and the whole nine yards.
-Adam
April 22
Remember by Christina Rosetti
Remember me when I have gone away
Gone far away into the silent land
Where you can no more hold me by the hand
Nor I half turn to go, yet, turning, stay
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of the future that you planned
Only remember me. You understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while,
And afterwards remember, do not grieve
For if the darkness and corruption leave
Some vestige of the thoughts that once I had
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
Why is this the perfect sonnet? First, it follows the original Italian model giving a sense of a wave coming up for eight lines and receding for six rather than the impression of 12 lines of clever musings followed by an even cleverer couplet.
Second, it is simultaneously particular and universal. We can feel the speaker’s rage: “YOU tell ME of the future that YOU planned.” But we don’t know the specifics. Also the poem feels both young and old. It discusses the future as something that hasn’t happened yet but still the poem feels like it’s looking back.
And even in the midst of rage and sorrow there is gentleness. There is room for understanding and thus for healing. I am not saying that everyone who incurs your rage deserves your forgiveness. Forgiveness is earned; not given. See how the poet wrestles with the idea. The first few lines are end-stopped. But as the grief starts to flow, we get thoughts that begin in the middle of one line and end in the middle of another line, nearly (but not quite) breaking the integrity of of the sonnet.
Maybe I just like it because it’s beautiful. Who TF knows?
-Adam
April 20
To Joy by Johann Cristoph Friedrich von Schiller
Thine enchantments bind together,
What did custom stern divide,
Every man becomes a brother,
Where thy gentle wings abide.
Yesterday’s bout with Tchaikovsky left a bitter taste in my mouth. Tchaikovsky lived a sad life; but his use of an antisemitic poem in one of his most popular song-settings is hard to forgive. Consider: he wrote the piece in question in 1878 or so. According to a shipping manifest my father showed me, my great grandparents left Russia in 1902 rather than live their lives wondering if they would die in the next pogrom. That’s a space of twenty-odd years. Tchaikovsky directly contributed to the antisemitic atmosphere that lay so heavily on my own ancestors they chose to cross the ocean in a creaking leaking ship and start a new life in New York rather than make the best of what they had. What a dick.
So let’s shift to Beethoven whose last symphony is based on a drinking song by Friedrich Schiller about how drinking brings the whole world together. Joy melts the divisions of custom.
Beethoven has a sense of humor; it’s just so dark that it’s indistinguishable from sorrow, for the most part. And I think this is a prime example. Taking a song that’s about getting to see up a woman’s skirts when her morals loosen and choosing to take it more seriously than an oncologist takes the act of delivering a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Look at the way Beethoven sets us up: the Ninth consists of four movements, and each of the first three is a snapshot of the progress of classical music up to that point; what classical music has been capable of.
The first movement represents “sturm und drang” or “storm and stress.” This is a mood we closely associate with Beethoven; but it was sufficiently popular in the previous century that the always-courtly always-correct Haydn tried his hand at it numerous times. The second movement is light and bouncy, evoking something halfway between a dance and a march. The third movement is timeless and motionless: one of the most beautiful melodies I think i’ve ever heard. One of the ones I catch myself humming from time to time. But it’s not unique. I’m not even sure it’s the most beautiful, the most timeless Beethoven melody. The middle movement of the fifth piano concerto comes to mind (which Leonard Bernstein low-key ripped off for “There’s a Place for Us” from Westside Story) and so does the slow movement of the Pathetique Sonata. And so does the second movement of the 27th sonata and…
Look. There’s a lot of lovely melodies out there even just in the works of Beethoven.
One gets the sense that, much as Bach did toward the end of his life, Beethoven is using the long and complex Ninth Symphony as a catalogue of his previous achievements. And the last movement, which , after an explosive beginning starts sounding like a wandering recitative… like a pensive person moving the plot of the opera along but slowly and thoughtfully… even quotes excerpts from the previous three movements. As if the last movement were the concluding paragraphs of an essay. What happens in the concluding paragraphs of an essay? A cautious writer will often sum up the arguments. But a more experienced writer learns to use the process of summing-up to suggest new directions and deeper insights. And that’s what Beethoven is doing. Summing up what Classical music has had to offer to date and then suggesting the way forward is through folk music; through the common man’s music; and perhaps through the hazy glasses of a few too many beers.
And in fairness to Beethoven this drinking song he’s chosen seemingly as a joke to take way too seriously is… pretty serious. One of the choruses runs:
Suffer on courageous millions!
Suffer for a better world!
O'er the tent of stars unfurl'd
God rewards you from the heavens.
WTF kind of drinking song lyric is that? Schiller seems himself to be making a joke: playing with the form of a drinking song but using the way in which the freedom of a good night's drunk often steers or veers our thoughts towards serious or mock-serious or maudlin topics. This is the mood those who quit drinking do not particularly miss. I myself am not a fun drunk and limit my use of the fermented grape accordingly.
I could go on and on... but Schiller is right about one thing: If our differences melt away when we take mind-altering substances (and they do) then that means that those differences are only in our minds. And Beethoven is right about one thing: if you can't laugh at yourself then your seriousness cannot be all that interesting. And I'm right about one thing: if there is a song world famous for a little over 200 years... maybe take a look at the lyrics and see what all the fuss is about.
-Adam
April 19
Roses and Thorns by Richard Henry Stoddard
The young child Jesus had a garden
Full of roses, rare and red;
And thrice a day he watered them,
To make a garland for his head!
When they were full-blown in the garden,
He led the Jewish children there,
And each did pluck himself a rose,
Until they stripped the garden bare!
"And now how will you make your garland?
For not a rose your path adorns:"
"But you forget," he answered them,
"That you have left me still the thorns.
They took the thorns, and made a garland,
And placed it on his shining head;
And where the roses should have shone,
Were little drops of blood instead!
___
When Jesus Christ was yet a child
He had a garden small and wild,
Wherein he cherished roses fair,
And wove them into garlands there.
Now once, as summer-time drew nigh,
There came a troop of children by,
And seeing roses on the tree,
With shouts they plucked them merrily.
"Do you bind roses in your hair?"
They cried, in scorn, to Jesus there.
The Boy said humbly: "Take, I pray,
All but the naked thorns away."
Then of the thorns they made a crown,
And with rough fingers pressed it down.
Till on his forehead fair and young
Red drops of blood like roses sprung.
This one will be a long row to hoe. I sang this poem as a text-setting by Tchaikovsky just yesterday in concert. It’s quite beautiful. See what happened: the original poem was translated into Russian and set to music; but Russian is notoriously difficult for many western-Europeans and English speakers to do justice; lots of unfamiliar consonants and consonant-clusters. So a series of re-translations came out. You cannot just set the original text of the poem to the music; the Russian meter would be different. You need English words that preserve the Russian rhythms. But notice how the translation of the translation (which is what we sang) does not mention that they are Jewish children.
I’m not going to use this space to talk about antisemitism; not right now. Too much to discuss and the issue has been too deeply confused by countries claiming to act for the benefit of Jews. But the change must be noted. The supposed culpability of the Jews as outlined in the Gospel According to Matthew has been preserved and emphasized in the Stoddard poem and in the Russian translation–the latter calls the children “Evreskiy” or “Hebrew.” It’s only in a later translation that, like the title of the Agatha Christie novel And then there were None the glaring racism of the original is at least partially laid to rest.
The new poems also fails to mention that Jesus was indeed binding roses about his brow in the original poem. And the parallel between the garlands of red roses and the garlands of thorns decorated with drops of blood in place of roses is lost in the newer translation. The loss of this image is the loss of the structural integrity of the poem. The two parallel images–the garland of roses and the crown of thorns–give unity to the poem that, in the newest translation, disappears.
Either way, what comes forward in both poems is the persecution of a creative, likely queer child. I am writing this reaction in the heat. The song is such a paradoxical joy to sing. The beautiful, heartbreaking depiction of childhood bullying–of a group of boys pushing around a quiet, reserved sensitive, artistic boy–feels too real. The fact that the poem, by identifying the bullies as “Jewish” children preserves a different type of bullying… well. That’s just how that works. The poet who sees so clearly in one direction often can’t see in another direction; often can’t see how, in highlighting one problem, they are contributing to another. Not all examples are as stark and foolish as this one, of course. And that’s why we need sensitivity readers.
Note: this is a rare case where I link directly to a poem’s Wikipedia article so you can see the translations side by side.
-Adam
April 18
Déjeuner du Matin by Jacques Prévert
Déjeuner du Matin
by Jacques Prévert
Il a mis le café
Dans la tasse
Il a mis le lait
Dans la tasse de café
Il a mis le sucre
Dans le café au lait
Avec la petite cuillere
Il a tourné
Il a bu le café au lait
Et il a reposé la tasse
Sans me parler
Il a allumé
Une cigarette
Il a fait des ronds
Avec la fumée
Il a mis les cendres
Dans le cendrier
Sans me parler
Sans me regarder
Il s’est levé
Il a mis
Son chapeau sur sa tête
Il a mis
Son manteau de pluie
Parce qu’il pleuvait
Et il est parti
Sous la pluie
Sans une parole
Sans me regarder
Et moi j’ai pris
Ma tête dans ma main
Et j’ai pleuré
Breakfast
by Jacques Prévert
He poured the coffee
Into the cup
He put the milk
Into the cup of coffee
He put the sugar
Into the coffee with milk
With a small spoon
He stirred
He drank the coffee
And he put down the cup
Without talking to me
He lit
A cigarette
He made rings
With the smoke
He put the ashes
Into the ashtray
Without speaking to me
Without looking at me
He got up
He put on
His hat
He put on
His raincoat
Because it was raining
And he left
Into the rain
Without a word
Without looking at me
And I put
My head in my hands
And I cried.
Last night, a friend I respect dearly and I were speaking about my fragmented novel, Tore All to Pieces, a work that centers characters from rural Appalachia facing, among other things, socio-economic difficulties. He asked me if I “really think I could have written such a novel had [I] lacked the tools to see both sides of the fence?” In this case, one side of the aforementioned fence was poor and working-class Appalachian folks, and the other was white-collar academia.
I am left wondering just how real the fence is: who constructed it, why it matters, and who it keeps where.
Central to the friend’s question is one of identity: must the working-class human shift their identity to become something else in order to write a novel about the working-class person? Is a novel the byproduct of a type of thinking that a person from a working-class background can only arrive at by some act of transcendence into something else?
I would say no. A thousand times.
I would also argue that saying no puts me in many ways in a left-of-center argumentative space from a sociolinguistic lens: one that believes that class is largely determined by forces external to capacity or intelligence, one that understands grammar to be a hegemonic tool used to draw lines of demarcation that largely harm people of color and folks living in poverty.
Of course, by suggesting that the fence is entirely socially constructed, I raise another question that is less likely to gain approval from the left: can a person from a white-collar, academic background arrive at writing a book that focuses on working-class Appalachians?
Now, my spidey-senses are up. Because of Hillbilly Elegy. Because of The Kentucky Cycle. Because of over a century of images created outside of Appalachia used to demean us.
Still—the question isn’t whether or not others have written us poorly. The question is whether they can write us well. Fairly. As humans and not symbols.
Rarely, I would say. Often due to structural barriers—among which, if we’re honest, is the fear of writing.
But there is beauty in the trying. There is functionality in the trying. There is an act of empathy—and in 2026, an act of bravery—in the trying. Call me crazy, but I want to live in a world in which straight men write gay romances. I want them to fail at it. I want them to sometimes get it right. I want us all to move towards each other, to feel safe enough to talk about what happens when others see us
Call me a hopeless optimist, but I think we can become better people this way—if we love, listen to, and then love some more the people we write about.
This is all a very long introduction to a very short poem—”Déjeuner du Matin” by Jacques Prévert. From his 1946 collection Paroles, named by Le Monde as one of the top 10 books of the century, the premise is straightforward: a man eats breakfast, a woman watches him, and a tender narrator brings the reader inside her consciousness and holds us there.
It’s an old fence, but it’s a real one. Ask anyone who has seen the painful Facebook posts at Men Writing Women.
Men definitely get it wrong; but this isn’t the same as saying they can’t get it right.
Whether Prévert “got it right” isn’t mine to say; but the swift movement, the delicate observation, the simple diction, and the obvious love for the woman in the poem as a full human being deserving more than she gets—that is at least mine to admire.
-Willie Edward Taylor Carver
April 16
The Yoke by Frank Bidart
don't worry I know you're dead
but tonight
turn your face again
toward me
Some poems clearly feel worked on. Others feel like they flowed out of the author’s pen almost faster than the ink itself. This one… I know is one of the former. I know because the poetry professor I learned it from was personally acquainted with Frank Bidart and his process is unusually fastidious–review after review, correction after correction. But the poem; considering how many revisions it’s gone through, shouldn’t the finished feel tough like overworked dough? It doesn’t. It feels delicate and improvisational. It captures in a handful of words how hard it is to lose someone. How all the old neural pathways are still active. You expect to see their face, hear their voice. You think “maybe I’ll call them” you wish you could go for a visit.
I learned this poem from my late beloved professor Saskia Hamilton. She died of cancer a few years ago. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. Every time I read or write something I like I want to run it by her; talk it over with her. Every time. Yes really. Every time. It’s like a… thing around my neck that I can’t take off that’s attached to something I am constantly dragging behind me.
-Adam
April 14
Song for the Luddites by Lord Byron
As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!
I don’t especially like Byron. But he’s here as a representative of his era. You cannot dispute that Byron was the Taylor Swift of his era; someone whose art and social life were equally the stuff of pop legend. You may want to dispute it given that Byron was a serial sex criminal. But those are the levels of fame and influence we’re talking about.
Byron was a romantic first and foremost. He loved to get involved in causes. His taking up the cause of the Luddites reminds me of some of the celebrity activists of our own day (particularly the ones who turn out to be sex-pests).
I am not posting this because it’s deep poetry; or because Byron’s take is unique. But in the current age the stories of the men and women who took up arms against being mechanized out of a job has again taken center-stage. So I thought it would be interesting to see their precursors.
-Adam
April 13
The Unforeseeable Fate of Mr Jones by Foster the People
I've got the wild inside to conquer
And then I'll be free. If I was free, if I was free
I would fly between the moons of consciousness
And ride on the back of a shooting star
And float into your arms
Blossom Akpojisheri recommended this song by Foster the People. There is something so beautiful about the combination of the mundane and the sublime in this song. Look at this lyric. “Conquer” the “wild inside” and then “be free” but being “free” looks, from the outside, wilder than anything. This is honestly what ADHD feels like–if we could just conquer the wild inside then we could do much wilder things but on the days we can’t then we end up staying home and rocking back and forth
-Adam
April 12
Untitled by John Compton
the vulture eats the deer;
the head is already gone.
the red beak & black wings
flash by my peripheral.
John Compton is one of the few people on this list I know personally. This poem has a rhythm to it caused by the alternating bits of visceral and sophisticated language. Does the word “peripheral” belong in a poem about vultures eating dead flesh? Why not, given that it’s a poem about, among other things, how ideas are born; how hope gets worn down but then recycled; how time can both hurt and heal. A lot of those complex, cyclical processes are “peripheral” to human observation. A lot of how they happen is “singular.” And a lot of the worry and strain and anxiety makes me want to kick back and “wear intestines like a medallion.”
-Adam
April 9
Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we—
Of many far wiser than we—
It’s my favorite for a few reasons.
One, I love the way Poe used verse to express an all consuming grief. It’s hard to express grief, and he did so in a healthy way. I commend that as a former social worker and as someone who has experienced profound grief.
Two, the way he spoke of a cloud coming and chilling her, taking her away, is a beautiful and haunting way to talk about illness killing a beloved.
Three, if I’m not mistaken, it was his final poem. I first read this poem in middle school, and it really spoke to me. The atmosphere created by his words is just a chef’s kiss.
-AJ Weeks
Note: It was indeed his last poem and you can see in an image from the Library of Congress that the poem was first printed as part of Poe’s obituary. -Ed.
April 8
The Applicant by Sylvia Plath
First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,
Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Sylvia wrote this after her husband, Ted Hughes, abandoned her and their children. And the poem perfectly illustrates the wound that he left behind. But it’s not just him the poem is critiquing, but also society as a whole. In a world where women are treated as objects, the poem is horrifying in its message as Sylvia pokes holes in the belief that women are things; empty vessels to be acquired and thrown away when they’re no longer useful. And that men are incomplete without a wife whose job it is to complete him.
-Jayce
April 7
There Will Come Soft Rains by Sarah Teasdale
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
If it feels a bit on the nose to post a poem about the human race being sundered by endless war, written by a woman who took her own life in the interregnum between the two world wars… it is. I’m not feeling like much for subtlety today.
What I find particularly impressive about the poem is when it was published: 1920. After the “Great War,” before it was unceremoniously renamed to “World War I” and, more importantly, before J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller and the circulation of Richard Feynman’s autobiography to put a human face on a thing that could end humanity. This woman in her thirties from New York who favored the blouses and skirts of the upper crust. It’s a beautiful poem–restrained yet emotional. I think the reason we keep coming back to it; or the reason I do anyway is that it captures the feeling of helplessness. And in doing so points to a way forward. Seek nature. Do what you can. Make what stand you can against the darkness. And use your voice.
-Adam
April 6
Vibranium by Jamie Legaspi
The Agusan image weighs four-point-four pounds, the Internet corrects.
But I shrug off the decimal.
How much more is that not-quite-half-pound,
To someone who makes minimum wage?
With her powerful verse, Jamie laments the continued losses due to colonial violence. For all the Filipino diaspora is one of the largest in the world, our stories are relatively unknown, including the damage colonialism wrought in the past and present as well.
The piece isn’t lighthearted because it’s not a lighthearted subject. Yet it partakes of literary devices that often appear lighthearted–humor, imagined conversations with Gods, scenes borrowed from super hero movies. Jamie’s writing, about being torn between fantastical conversations with Gods and the practicalities faced by a person too poor to afford what passes for justice in a corrupt system, speaks to an ache that many of us feel.
-Jayce
April 5
The Lamb by William Blake
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o'er the mead...
“The Lamb” is a short, but whimsical, poem from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. It captures the feeling of child’s flights of fancy, especially regarding how Christianity is taught to children. The child in the poem is reciting the first line of the catechism to a local farm animal, and trying in a small way to connect its abstract teaching to something the child knows about.
As today happens to be Easter, I chose it because it captures the delicate side of the holiday, the part that draws people in and paints a picture of love and light. The holidays are a difficult time for many people; but sometimes we are allowed to have nice things.
-Jayce
April 4
I Shall Forget you Presently My Dear by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.
It seems like everyone loves the joyful fun poems of ESVM: “We were very tired and we were very merry…” “My candle burns at both ends…” So many of her poems are about that burst of joy during or right after a moment of passion, of creative inspiration. But she also has this other type of poem: what I would call the “sunday morning coming down” after the passion of her better-known work.
-Adam
April 3
All the Aphrodisiacs by Cathy Park Hong
strips of white cotton I use to bind your wrist to post, tight
enough to swell vein, allow sweat—
sweat to sully the white of your sibilant body,
the shrug of my tongue, the shrug of command
My mom is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst; I once described my English PhD to her as “psychoanalyzing dead people.” I do mostly read the works of dead people: Homer, Shakespeare, Rabindranath Tagore… but there is a real pleasure to checking in with a poet every so often; growing up with them; growing old with them. I first encountered Cathy Park Hong in college. I actually introduced her when she won the Ruth Lilly prize. I remember she thanked me for my introduction, though, frankly, the whole event is a bit of a blur. I still have the signed advanced proof. I’m willing to entertain offers of a million USD or more.
Cathy Park Hong is, fundamentally, a person who loves to play with language. You can imagine her as a child in a bath surrounded by floating alphabet blocks, endlessly rearranging. Consider these lines:
you say it turns you on when I speak Korean.
The gold paste of afterbirth, no red—
Household phrases —pae-go-p’a (I am hungry)
—ch’i-wa (Clean up)
—kae sekki (Son of a dog)
I breathe those words in your ear, which make you climax;
afterwards you ask me for their translations. I tell you it’s a secret.
Yes it’s funny. Yes it’s charming. Yes it’s the sort of thing we all joke about in multilingual relationships. But I believe that it’s not just about being funny or charming. If it were, what’s that extra line doing in there: “The gold paste of afterbirth, no red–”
If it were just funny that line wouldn’t be there. The mystery of language is not reducible to a joke or a bit. Nor is the mystery of lovemaking. I expect I will continue to check in with CPH’s poetry. She is one of the few truly funny poets whose poetry elevates the humor and whose humor elevates the poetry.
-Adam
April 2
La aurora de Nueva York by Federico Garcia Lorca
Dawn over New York brings
Four columns of ash
And a hurricane of black pigeons
That churn the gutter water
I don’t know what to say except I’ve always loved this poem. In an era overridden by GenAI nonsense, it is refreshing in a way to be able to look at a poem that has such respect for the reader’s imagination; for the reader’s willingness to imagine a complex, impossible image and hold it in their mind and engage with it on an emotional level. It’s a workout for the mind and the heart and the emotions to read Lorca. Leonard Cohen thought so, and so did Flamenco legend Enrique Morente. And so do I. And so will you.
Lorca’s poetry is tied to his politics. He was a queer man living in a repressive society, allying himself with the communist revolution. A lot of his main characters–Adela from the House of Bernarda Alba most famously–are stuck. They indulge in forbidden love and society judges and destroys them. It would be really nice to say the times we live in are more free and more wise; that Lorca no longer speaks to us directly but rather as a relic of an older era. I would like to be able to say that.
The above translation is mine.
-Adam
April 1
Aristotle’s Poetics
“The plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy; character holds the second place.”
(Ed Note: It is our tradition to begin our National Poetry Celebration with a poem about poetry. Granted this is a work of Philosophy. Please check back every day this month for more favorite poems. Sometimes our reflection will be short; sometimes long. We especially encourage you to submit your own! What is your favorite poem, and why? Submit your ideas to us through our facebook page)
I know better than to start with Aristotle. He is arcane and difficult to understand and so frequently incorrect about basic points of physics and biology that you have to wonder if he ever set foot outside his own door. People in my friend group often roll their eyes when I start talking about works of literature published more than two thousand years ago. But. One thing Aristotle said came back to me while I was recounting the story of the Iliad for a friend who was raised rather in the tradition of the Mahabharat and Ramayan than in the Greek myths. This is not a contrived example and is in fact a normal thing to have happen to me.
It started innocently enough: he asked what my favorite book was. I said… It’s probably the Iliad. He was unfamiliar and asked for the story. I told him about how the Trojan war started with a member of one royal house kidnapping a woman who was part of another royal house; and the Iliad starts the same way: With the overlord of the Greeks, Agamemnon, stealing Briseis, whom Achilles of Phthia won as a prize of war. That part has aged worse than Agatha Christie.
Achilles is half god and half human. He tries to respond to the situation as a good would: by withdrawing his help from the humans he has been allied to so that they perish en masse. But he’s not a god; not quite. So as they humans die around him he develops a conscience. That’s what leads him to let his hetero life mate Patroklos to enter the combat in the glorious armor of Achilles… armor that doesn’t save him from the Trojan heroes Hektor and Sarpedon.
This book was written 28 centuries ago and yet the narrator takes the time to emphasize that Hektor commits a cowardly act–not a brave one–by agreeing to face Achilles in single combat. Hektor knows he is going to die. He remains outside the walls of the city because he cannot bear to face his people’s scorn if he should retreat. Imagine if that’s the moment people remembered instead of the Achilles’ heel nonsense that’s not even in the text. Imagine if a soldier deciding to offer his life for his country were met with that response: what a coward. He didn’t have the courage to flee like a sensible person and take his well-deserved lumps for getting himself into an unwinnable situation in the first place. It would be a different world.
Achilles is still caught in his mental trap though. He still responds like a god. After he fights and kills Hektor, he tries to do what a god would do: to judge the dead. So he mutilates Hektor’s body and refuses Hektor’s parents the simple solace of a funeral.
But again Achilles is not a god. So the depredations he visits on Hektor’s corpse do not fill the emptiness in his heart. What finally does is an act of mercy: Hektor’s aged father sneaks into the Greek camp on a mule-cart laden high with treasure to ransom the body. Something in the courage of this gesture–and its link to Achilles’ own aged father waiting in vain for a young soldier to come home from the perils of war–causes Achilles’ failed attempts at godlike behavior to crack. And Achilles finally does the sensible thing: he performs an act of kindness to his enemy and lets the body go. The book ends with Hektor’s funeral pyre. The prophecies are being fulfilled one by one. Next to go is that Achilles will die. After that, Troy itself will die. But all of that lays outside the scope of the book.
My listeners listened with rapt attention as I told them a version of this story and I was reminded of something Aristotle said: that plot is so important to the success of a poem that a plain reading of the plot should elicit the same type of emotion as a full performance of a tragic drama. And here it was. Here I was sitting with Indian people in a room far from where these stories were first told and farther still from the classrooms where I first read of them, and we were joyfully sharing the sorrows of Achilles who, if a version of him lived at all, is at least 3000 years dead as of this writing.
Aristotle wasn’t wrong: a great plot lasts. Yes it’s the characters we’ll remember… but the plot is what reveals the character of the character. You can’t just tell the reader about the character. You have to reveal the character through the development of the plot. That much has not changed since Gilgamesh, let alone since Achilles.
I am not great with plot. It’s been a struggle to overcome this difficulty in my own writing. But I have found that, as long as I have my characters DO things, there does end up being a plot by the end of the story. I would love to have my characters just sit and think things; talk matters over; discuss their competing philosophies. And maybe if I did that I’d end up with a book as compelling as Plato’s Symposium or Herbert’s God Emperor of Dune or any of a number of other successful books in that style. But I maintain a naive hope that I can publish something worth reading in the old style. A plot that captures the imagination; that feels true; a story whose characters feel true. And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into Aristotle.
I can’t force you to read Aristotle. Nor do I want to. I can just tell you that, if you’re interested or curious, there is something there. And I wish you luck in finding it.
-Adam
To view a list of all poems that have been part of the 30 Days, 30 Poems project, click here.
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