Tag Archives: poetry

“For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.”

Posted on January 19, 2019 by Kate Stover

The poet Mary Oliver died this week, and I’m convinced that if we all would take a break to read her poetry, we would be strengthened by it. The level of anger – about the shut-down, the bickering, the brutal … Continue reading →

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“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

Posted on October 20, 2016 by Kate Stover

Much like Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, this collection of elegant essays by the poet Mary Oliver is for those who “are not trying to help the world go around, but … Continue reading →

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“The light tastes like laughter.”

Posted on August 6, 2015 by Kate Stover

This metaphor is simple, and yet it packs a punch. It’s from the poem “The Town Where I Belong” in Faith Shearin‘s new collection Telling the Bees. Part of its power comes from the way three of the five senses … Continue reading →

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“What do these extraordinary lines summon in you?”

Posted on March 19, 2015 by Kate Stover

The premise of Ten Poems to Change Your Life by Roger Housden is this: great poems can be dangerous. They can make you question your assumptions, change your direction, and find the courage to start over. I believe that reading … Continue reading →

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“August is huge and blue, a glittering gemstone curving dangerously at either end into what precedes and follows it.

Posted on December 11, 2014 by Tony Herman

One afternoon about twenty years ago, someone on NPR read the poem “On the Island” by Elizabeth Spires.  I was driving my car, and I was so moved that I almost went into the ditch. This poem is infused with … Continue reading →

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“If trees could speak they wouldn’t. . .

Posted on September 18, 2014 by Kate Stover

The poem continues: “. . . only hum some low green note, roll their pinecones down the empty streets and blame it, with a shrug, on the cold wind. During the day they sleep inside their furry bark, clouds shredding … Continue reading →

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