I have said before that poems for me often require a certain amount of effort. Because I spend so much time in prose, perhaps, the linguistic twists and turns that poetry employs to evoke a difference sense, and even sensibility, about the world require me to do more lifting when it comes to...

Robert Leighton’s “Late Spring” seems particularly compelling to me as I look out over our snow-covered yard and desperately try to forget that today is the first full day of spring. I had grown used to a late – sometimes very late! – spring in Minnesota. Our last winter there saw...

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...

There are several things I like about Joyce Sutphen’s poem. I like, for instance, the shared memory of her father, as it calls to mind similar memories of my own. Like how my dad would set us up at a table in the lodge, when we were taking a lunch break from skiing, make sure we were all...

Abraham Lincoln’s birthday was this past Wednesday, February 12, though we celebrate it this coming Monday, Presidents Day. I like the following poem by David Shumate because it gets at one of the core questions of the man: could he be real? We know stories of Washington, like the famous...