It's world poetry day so here are some of my favorite poems:

Failing and Flying by Jack Gilbert

What the Living Do by Marie Howe

Night Walk by Franz Wright

Crossword by Lloyd Schwartz

The Great Fires by Jack Gilbert

Love Train by Tomás Q. Morín

Divorced Fathers and Pizza Crusts by Mark Halliday

Perhaps the World Ends Here by Joy Harjo

in another string of the multiverse, perhaps by Michaella Batten

acknowledgments by Danez Smith

Death Wish by Josh Alex Baker

San Francisco by Richard Brautigan

How to Watch Your Brother Die by Michael Lassell

You Are the Penultimate Love of My Life by Rebecca Hazelton

On Political(ized) Life by Kanika Lawton

All the Dead Boys Look Like Me by Christopher Soto

It Was the Animals by Natalie Diaz

In Time by W.S. Merwin

It Is Maybe Time to Admit That Michael Jordan Definitely Pushed Off by Hanif Abdurraqib

Dear Life by Maya C. Popa

I Could Touch It by Ellen Bass

To The Young Who Want To Die by Gwendolyn Brooks

Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds by Ada Limón

YOU ARE THE PENULTIMATE LOVE OF MY LIFE by Rebecca Hazelton

I want to spend a lot but not all of my years with you.

We’ll talk about kids

                              but make plans to travel.

I will remember your eyes

                              as green when they were gray.

Our dogs will be named For Now and Mostly.

               Sex will be good but next door’s will sound better.

There will be small things.

I will pick up your damp towel from the bed,

                                                            and then I won’t.

I won’t be as hot as I was

                              when I wasn’t yours

and your hairline now so

               untrustworthy.

When we pull up alongside a cattle car

                              and hear the frightened lows,

                              I will silently judge you

                              for not immediately renouncing meat.

You will bring me wine

                              and notice how much I drink.

                                              The garden you plant and I plant

                              is tunneled through by voles,

                                                             the vowels

                                                             we speak aren’t vows,

               but there’s something

                              holding me here, for now,

               like your eyes, which I suppose

                                                             are brown, after all.

Questions About the Wife

I’m having trouble understanding the wife. The wife seems like she is only there as a foil to your actions. I want to know how the wife feels when you drag her and your son down into the basement to start a new religion. The religion has something to do with cowering before a force greater than yourself and then being buried alive. I want to know how the wife behaves in small, enclosed spaces: if she is trying to comfort your son by telling him Daddy likes to play funny games, or if she is already visualizing herself walking into a women’s shelter, your son on her back and maybe, because this is a fantasy, she carries a burning torch, like an angry villager, or a goddess. Does the wife merit any revenge after you weed whack the coffee table? Does she agree with you that the coffee table is yours to destroy because you built it? What has she built in the house that is hers to destroy? What kind of childhood has the wife endured that allows her to understand you? In her past life or lives, was the wife ever a shepherdess? Does she see you as a sort of Pan, goatish, and pricked by ticks, but also very well-endowed? When the wife transforms into a tree can she still think or is she just a green haze inside, an idea of growing? I would like to see the wife peel off that bark, leaving only enough for modesty’s sake, although as this is your poem, we can take a bit more off. I want to see her uproot herself, pick up the house and shake it. How many people fall out? The wife has something about her the Germans would call unheimlich. I sometimes catch a glimpse of the wife out of the corner of my eye but then I look away. I cannot look directly at the wife. The wife is a conflagration of everything dear. I wonder sometimes if she is faking; There is a certain note she holds too long so the orgasm is more operatic, less genuine. When she cries, Oh my God, really, she should stutter. Let’s say the wife wakes up in the morning. You have already made breakfast. Does your kindness feel oppressive? Does she want to take your weed whacker through the house? Has she ever, in a fit of anger, destroyed your pornography? When you found a picture of the wife online with a foreign handprint smacked red on her ass, how quickly did your shock turn to arousal? Are you aware the wife is breaking down in public places, and sometimes cannot move for thirty minutes? Sometimes her arm goes entirely numb from the shoulder down. I think the wife might need some fine-tuning, some elbow grease, some wrenching apart, and then reassembling.

-- Rebecca Hazelton

hi! I hope it's okay to ask this but I was wondering if you have any poems about quiet, simple love or the kind of love that is soft and gentle and transcends time, not because it's out of this world or needs big gestures or is about star crossed lovers, but because it's safe, and it's about two people who find happiness and pleasure in the small things, dancing in the kitchen, shopping together, cooking together? Im not sure how to explain it, i tried to paint an imagine, maybe it helps. Thank you so much ♥️

Having a Coke with You by Frank O'Hara

For Keeps by Joy Harjo

Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem by Matthew Olzmann

The Orange by Wendy Cope

Our Beautiful Life When It’s Filled with Shrieks by Christopher Citro

On Loving by Forough Farrokhzad

Yours by Daniel Hoffman

Atlas by U.A. Fanthorpe

Camomile Tea by Katherine Mansfield

Always For The First Time by Andre Breton

You Are the Penultimate Love of My Life. by Rebecca Hazelton

To Be In Love Poem by Gwendolyn Brooks

hello! this might be too specific but could you make something about finally admitting to yourself that the person you love is indifferent to you after being in denial for avery ling time? i'm going through a bit of heartache rn if you couldn't tell 😞

natalie diaz postcolonial love poem: "isn't the air also a body, moving?" (via @liriostigre) \\ marge piercy the moon is always female: "intimacy" (via @liriostigre) \\ marylin hacker love, death and the changing of the seasons: "didn't sappho say her guts clutched up like this?" \\ rebecca hazelton vow: "you are the penultimate love of my life" \\ deborah pendell shattered heart blue bullet \\ deborah pendell shattered bleeding heart

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generic husband - rebecca hazelton

Poem of the Day!

Rebecca Hazelton (American), from “Late Youth,”

claudia poems

we don't know exactly when she died (or even for absolutely sure if! at this point! technically! here's how 47 years after the publication of the book alive claudia can still win–) but i'm dividing this into "before 1950" and "after 1950" as a guesstimate

poems from before 1950

gwendolyn bennett, "hatred"

countee cullen,"thoughts in a zoo"

emily dickinson, "it was not death, for i stood up," "after great pain, a formal feeling comes–" "i never hear the word 'escape'" "they shut me up in prose"

alice moore dunbar-nelson, "if i had known"

john keats, "lamia [left to herself]"

georgia douglas johnson, "the heart of a woman" "foredoom" "your world" "smothered fires"

d.h. lawrence, "ressurection"

marie luhrs, "cry"

claude mckay, "adolescence" (thank you this post)

edna st. vincent millay, "departure" "rendezvous"

esther popel, "theft"

robert roe, "a light song"

marjorie allen seiffert, "the man-made woman"

poems from after 1950

lucille clifton, "my dream about time"

angela jackston, "angelhair"

rebecca hazelton, "book of memory"

lisel mueller, "happy and unhappy familes i & ii" "imaginary paintings" "the late news" "letter from the end of the world"

alice notley, "the descent of alette ['a car' 'awash with blood']"

sharon olds, "satan says" (thank you this post) "after 37 years my mother apologizes for my childhood"

sue owen, "written in blood"

justin phillip reed, "pushing up onto its elbows, the fable lifts itself into fact"

sonia sanchez, "poem at thirty" "blues" "sequences" "under a soprano sky" "fragment 2"

prageeta sharma, "the imperishable and perishable family"

keith s. wilson, "impression of a rib"

jamila woods, "on naming yourself (a cento)"

charles wright, "nightletter"

kevin young, "i am trying to break your heart"

"Love Poem for What It Is" by Rebecca Hazelton, read by James Marsters.

Here is an article on form that you may find interesting ;)

Love Poem For What It is

after Rebecca Hazelton I collect things now: photos on a portable hard drive, one email, two empty hands, six-tenths of a heart. There is both an excess and emptiness of your ghost withdrawing and overflowing which is to say, there’s nothing unusual in that and maybe it is why I have these regrets or don’t have more. Virginia summer was one-sided. This thing-that-once-was is now two generations deep, is black-ice cement on the bridge tunnel, a broken guard rail where the jeep used to be, diving in Black Bay. A fire burns up the California Coast. Bodies turn into bones along river streets down south and once, I threw my arms around the swell of the Atlantic to save you the trouble.

— Jessica Sabo, featured in 45th Parallel issue 7 (source)

rebecca hazelton

Learning the Poetic Line by Rebecca Hazelton

Learning the Poetic Line by Rebecca Hazelton

There are so many quality articles out there on the subject of poetry that I have decided that I am going to begin to post excerpts and links when ever I might happen to run across something worth while. This first poetry link is an essay written by Rebecca Hazelton of poetry lineation and provided by Poetry Foundation. I found it a good read. I think you will too. If you want to understand…

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I no longer love the way you block the light. I am not attached to your feet. Every night while you slept I picked the stitches free, but then I had to learn to walk again. I took this picture of the empty bed so you’d remember the shape of my body, so I could imagine my return.

— Rebecca Hazelton, from “Self-Portrait as Unsent Lines, Unsent Letter,” Gloss