I’m still pondering the importance of paying attention, especially to joy. I think the reason Mary Oliver and Billy Collins are my two favorite living poets is probably their knack for paying close attention to things many of us miss so that we might see something we hadn’t seen...

On Thursday I shared a few of the poems of Billy Collins, one of my favorite poets. Today a poem from another favorite poet, Mary Oliver. Oliver is the writer of the luminous and inspiring “Summer Day,” and what I like about her poetry is that it always feels honest, like she is sharing...

Billy Colllins’ poem puts me in mind, not of the countless rather worthless crafts or gifts I made my mother over the years – though I suspect she did not count them as worthless – but rather of the labor and delivery room in which our first child was born. I remember as vividly as if it...

This took me, quite frankly, by surprise. Whenever you go to the “Dashboard” of the WordPress template I use to operate this blog, it displays the number of posts, comments, and all the rest. I rarely look at the numbers, as I’m usually in a hurry to set up a new post, find...