A controversial study just released by a group of historical linguists proposes that twenty-three words still in use today have survived mostly unchanged from the end of the last ice age. Using statistics, the researchers have tried to prove that these 15,000-year old “ultraconserved” words come from one mother tongue. That language, which they […]
MoreSo We’ll Go No More a Roving By Lord Byron (George Gordon) So, we’ll go no more a roving So late into the night, Though the heart be still as loving, And the moon be still as bright. For the sword outwears its sheath, And the soul wears out the breast, And […]
MoreI was stepping out the door into a thunderstorm with a shoebox of poems when my husband asked where I was going. “An errand for my blog,” I said. He looked at the weather and looked at the poems bundled in a protective garbage bag and said, “Sometimes I think you’re a […]
MoreThis morning I was taking a break from news of the Boston Marathon manhunt and was thumbing through the strangest bathroom book I own (because the bathroom is an excellent place to get away from the radio), and I happened to open to this page. It was as if poet Kenneth Patchen’s book was […]
MoreNational Poem in Your Pocket Day is a good day to be a poem elf. So many pockets to fill, so many poems to share. Last year I set up my very first take-a-poem box at the post office. I saved the box to use again, but when I pulled it out of […]
MoreThis Morning by Javier Galvez This morning The sun broke my window and came in laughing Along the same path: Gift by Czeslaw Milosz A day so happy. Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden. Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers. There was no thing on earth […]
MoreYeah, yeah, yeah, it’s the first day of National Poetry Month, a celebration most people observe by deleting Poem-a-Day emails. Today is also the most important secular holiday of the year: April Fool’s Day. And I am Marie of Romania, as Dorothy Parker would say. Actually I’m as serious as a person […]
MoreA break from poetry today to showcase a few lines from a brilliant novel. Decades before English writer Hilary Mantel won the Booker Prize twice in four years (becoming the only woman to win the prize twice and the only writer to win it for a sequel), she wrote another historical novel, A Place […]
MoreYes, this is long. But you won’t regret taking a minute to read it. katherine with the lazy eye. short. and not a good poet. by Francine J. Harris this morning, i heard you were found in your mcdonald’s uniform. i heard it while i was visiting a lake town, where […]
MoreCongratulations to poet Marie Ponsot, who was just announced as the 2013 winner of the prestigious Ruth Lilly Prize. The prize, established by the heir to the Lilly pharmaceutical fortune, honors a living American poet for lifetime achievement. At $100,000, the prize is about the heftiest a writer can receive. I’m delighted. 91-year old Ponsot […]
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