Just as Emily Dickinson wrote, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” I hope that this poem takes the top of your head off — metaphorically, of course!

How a poet writes poems: To repeat the phrase from Hemingway, it’s always the same and always different. In the fall of 1988, driving home from Vermont, I learned just how different. After 20 years of writing (or learning to write) poems in conventional lyric forms, an unknown voice in my head spoke a line […]

About making love Hemingway said, “It’s always the same but always different.” Poets might say the same about how they write.

Many creatures populate my new book, The Boxer of Quirinal, but today I’m thinking of the singularly impressive albatross.

I’ve been wondering why no one is writing verse drama these days. Writing stage plays in verse is as old as literature itself.

“I had the pleasure and honor of asking John if there is a perfect time to write, what the word poetry means to him, his role as President of the Poetry Foundation, and so much more.”

I’m offering a special gift to my email subscribers: A Reader’s Companion to my new poetry collection, The Boxer of Quirinal, which is complete with commentary on select poems from the book, as well as Rockwell Kent-inspired illustrations created with the assistance of AI!

“The Road Not Taken” is one of the most-read poems by one of America’s most-read poets. It’s easy to see why. All of us have stood where Robert Frost stood to consider our major choices in life. Whom shall I marry? What will my life’s work be? But for me, at this moment, it brings to mind two great poets who chose different paths, and how that turned out.

I’m delighted to share a gift with my newsletter subscribers: a complimentary Reader’s Companion to my latest poetry collection, The Boxer of Quirinal. In it, I do not explicate the poems; instead, I give a taste of the context in which I was writing — the circumstances that influenced each poem’s coming into being.

Poetry and personal responsibility has always been a troubling issue for me — and for anyone, I think, who tries to reconcile the lives of poets with their poems.