Others wrestle with more serious topics like a patient dying of cancer, or marvel at the magic of now-quotidien medical technologies like CT machines. At first, Campo says, he got about 20 or 30 poems ...

Once, in my youth, I took a graduate philosophy seminar I thought would be about law and justice: Instead we discussed the semantic implications of punctuation marks. After class, I found myself ...

We've seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it, Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. And this effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can be ...

Poetry is close to my heart. I would be lost without its very specific magic, its ability to spark wonder and shock and to open up fresh vistas on life in God. But as W. H. Auden famously says in his ...

It’s National Poetry Month this April. Is it worth celebrating? After all, poetry doesn’t seem to be doing much to alleviate the tension in our communities. Ask some of the middle schoolers I’ve ...

It's been a difficult year for many people. NPR's Elissa Nadworny talks with poet Danez Smith about using poetry to understand and process complex emotions like grief. As the year comes to an end, we ...

It wasn’t quite prayer but the more I recited its words the more incantatory power they assumed. What can I say to you, darling, I said to myself, over and over, with hushed focus, When you ask me for ...

April is National Poetry Month—perhaps a good time to review the positive aspects of reading and writing poems. Poetry is a genre of writing in which succinct, vivid, and intense language is given to ...

“In the particular is the universal,” said James Joyce. In Forest of Noise, the particular is the Israel-Hamas war and the suffering of the Gazans, as recorded by the award-winning poet Mosab Abu Toha ...

“Poetry leaves something out,” our columnist Elisa Gabbert says. But that’s hardly the extent of it. By Elisa Gabbert I once heard a student say poetry is language that’s “coherent enough.” I love a ...

Audre Lorde told us this in 1977. Although she spoke specifically to women, I hope she won’t mind me saying that her words can apply to other folks, too. She wrote: “poetry is not a luxury. It is a ...