“I never got poetry,” someone says to me again. And I sigh. Because I never got it either — at least, not until I learned to stop worrying about “getting it.” In fact, “get” — with its connotation of ...

A former editor introduced me to the Poetry Foundation‘s Poem of the Day. His parents were poets—not amateurs who scribbled doggerel on birthday cards, but professionals who published books and taught ...

Close reading is more than just reading carefully—it’s a deliberate, methodical way to uncover a poem’s layers of meaning. By focusing on details like diction, imagery, and structure, you can build a ...

This is the third in a monthly series by Dave Lucas, the Poet Laureate of the State of Ohio. You can read the September Installment, (No. 1), here; and the October ...

LET’S BEGIN by talking about meaning in poetry. It’s always the dragon at the gate whenever you approach the subject. Every poet, I suppose, tries to define for himself what poetry is all about. It’s ...

In 1968, Margaret Ackerman of the University of Arizona authored a paper for The English Journal in which she included a summary of what poetry meant to most of her students: “sentimentality, ...

We may receive an affiliate commission from anything you buy from this article. In his memoir, "Story of a Poem" (Unnamed Press), the celebrated writer Michael Zapruder (author of "Father's Day" and ...

At first, Walter Grigo was stumped. His class assignment was to prepare a 10-minute presentation on a poem by colonial author Phillis Wheatley. Grigo, who at the time was taking graduate courses at ...