Poem Guides

The poet navigates the unknown world.

“somethin’ wasn’t right:” How Finney captures an American nightmare.

A letter, a list, a sonnet, and the state of a nation.

A poem to outlast empires.

Does a notoriously grumpy poet believe in everlasting love?

A Springtime train ride with brides and grooms.

An Elizabethan plays a Modernist language game.

How did you become who you are?

Bridging two languages and generations in one intricate poem.

In the realm of the world-class talkers.

A poet uses a punctuation mark to plot a crime.

On Robert Duncan’s incantatory summons.

How a poem about a rural stone wall quickly became part of debates on nationalism, international borders, and immigration.

Our choices are made clear in hindsight.

Robert Hass, Baudelaire, Marx, and a bomb-building anarchist.

A lost father warms a house.

Witness the making of a new American poetics.

A queer childhood and the demand to “sound straight.”

The poet shows how reality and imagination can become one.

In this “Troubles” elegy, the poet revisits a fisherman and pub-goer he once knew.