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American Life in Poetry: Column 240
Reading Room Blog, American Life in Poetry, Ann Haley, Poetry
11/03/2009 - 1:52pm

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

We haven’t shown you many poems in which the poet enters another person and speaks through him or her, but it is, of course, an effective and respected way of writing. Here Philip Memmer of Deansboro, N.Y., enters the persona of a young woman having an unpleasant experience with a blind date.

The Paleontologist’s Blind Date

American Life in Poetry: Column 241
Reading Room Blog, American Life in Poetry, Ann Haley, Poetry
11/03/2009 - 1:47pm

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

I love poems in which the central metaphors are fresh and original, and here’s a marvelous, coiny description of autumn by Elizabeth Klise von Zerneck, who lives in Illinois.

Like Coins, November

We drove past late fall fields as flat and cold
as sheets of tin and, in the distance, trees

were tossed like coins against the sky. Stunned gold
and bronze, oaks, maples stood in twos and threes:

American Life in Poetry: Column 240
Reading Room Blog, Ann Haley, Poetry
10/26/2009 - 10:57am

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

We haven’t shown you many poems in which the poet enters another person and speaks through him or her, but it is, of course, an effective and respected way of writing. Here Philip Memmer of Deansboro, N.Y., enters the persona of a young woman having an unpleasant experience with a blind date.

The Paleontologist’s Blind Date

Books With Bite
LibraryPoint Blog, Reading Room Blog, Horror, Meg Raymond, Monsters, Vampires, Werewolves
10/22/2009 - 2:43pm

Check out "Books With Bite," featuring vampires, werewolves and other fictional creatures that go bump in the night.

American Life in Poetry: Column 239
Reading Room Blog, American Life in Poetry, Ann Haley, Poetry
10/21/2009 - 6:50pm

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

It’s likely that if you found the original handwritten manuscript of T. S. Eliot’s groundbreaking poem, “The Waste Land,” you wouldn’t be able to trade it for a candy bar at the Quick Shop on your corner. Here’s a poem by David Lee Garrison of Ohio about how unsuccessfully classical music fits into a subway.

Bach in the DC Subway

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