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Peggy Rosenthal

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November 2016

November 25, 2016

Poetry Friday: “Poetry Is the Spirit of the Dead, Watching,” Part I, By Margaret Gibson

Where do our words come from? And our lives: how do they connect with those...

November 04, 2016

Poetry Friday: “Winter Song” by Amy McCann

What do we understand? What do we even mean by “understanding”? A poem can pose...

November 03, 2016

Twitter #Micropoetry

Tootling around on Twitter, I’ve come upon a delightful community of poets. Their hashtag is...

October 2016

October 28, 2016

Poetry Friday: “Poverty of Spirit” by Fleda Brown

“Blessed are the poor in spirit.” This beatitude has always puzzled me: what, I’ve wondered,...

October 19, 2016

Reading (in) Walden

What are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only...

October 14, 2016

Poetry Friday: “Nothing More” by Todd Davis

Whenever I first meet a long skinny poem, I ask myself: Why has the poet...

October 07, 2016

Poetry Friday: “Intercession: For My Daughter” by Brett Foster

We pass into this world at birth. We pass out of it at death. And...

September 2016

September 26, 2016

Looking for a Good Laugh

In his collection of delightfully reflective and paradoxical mini-stories, Espejos (Mirrors), Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano...

September 23, 2016

Poetry Friday: “Visitation Rights” by Jeffrey Harrison

I sometimes talk to friends who have died. Especially to friends who acted as spiritual...

September 09, 2016

Poetry Friday: “The News”

What do I do with the daily news of disasters? Do I mumble a quick...

August 2016

August 30, 2016

Margo Jefferson’s Negroland

In her photo on the jacket flap of Negroland: A Memoir, Margo Jefferson looks to...

August 26, 2016

Poetry Friday: “The Embrace”

Poetry can recall us to the sensuousness of ordinary experience. Elizabeth Smither does this in...

August 19, 2016

Poetry Friday: “Recovery”

What I like about this poem is how it slides almost unnoticeably from a simple,...

August 09, 2016

Fit for Immortality?

“How’s your health?” my long-time friend asked me with concern. “The leukemia is creeping toward...

July 2016

July 21, 2016

Poetry Friday: “Sometimes I Am Permitted”

On my first reading of this poem, I felt disoriented by all the non sequiturs,...

July 20, 2016

Why We Write

What is it about words that so moves those of us who are writers? We...

July 15, 2016

Poetry Friday: “I Am Poured Out Like Water”

What attracts me to this poem is something deliberately absent yet evocatively present: baptism in...

July 05, 2016

Adam Zagajewski’s Trench Warfare

“Writing poems is a duel / that no one wins…” As I’m reading the poem...

July 01, 2016

Poetry Friday: “For Whom the Resurrection Is the Full Moon Rising” by Mark Wagenaar

This is a poem to stretch the mind. It begins by stretching our imagination to...

June 2016

June 17, 2016

Poetry Friday: “Tenebrae” by Anya Krugovoy Silver

This is a dark poem, raising a profound question about suffering. Its title, “Tenebrae,” is...

June 03, 2016

“Translation Back into Native Tongues” by Nicholas Samaras

There’s a sub-genre of poetry in which the speaker’s persona is a long-ago figure or...

May 2016

May 31, 2016

Richard Wilbur’s Poetry Captures Our Days

Last night I read a poem that showed me in a flash why I save...

May 20, 2016

Poetry Friday: “In the Beginning Was the Word” by Jeanne Murray Walker

I can't begin to count the number of poems which offer their language to re-imagining...

May 13, 2016

Poetry Friday: “Middle Distance, Morning” by Margaret Gibson

I read this poem as a meditation on how one can relate to the outside...

May 06, 2016

Poetry Friday: “The Moss Method” by Pattiann Rogers

I've long loved Pattiann Rogers' poems: how they caress nature's most minute details with acutely...

May 05, 2016

The Lone Ranger’s Easter Narrative

His back to us and to the camera, the hero walks silently away. His work...

April 2016

April 29, 2016

Poetry Friday: “When God Dreamed Eve through Adam” by Richard Chess

The Genesis story of the creation of Adam and Eve: poets for centuries have been...

April 15, 2016

Poetry Friday: “The Grackles” by Betsy Sholl

Here is a poem that silently enacts a conversion. The poem starts off with a...

April 13, 2016

Finding Another World in Winterkill

"There is another world, but it is in this one." —William Butler Yeats Reading Yeats's...

April 08, 2016

Poetry Friday: “Smokers, Sunday Morning, 1975” by Bobby C. Rogers

This poem seems at first to be a straight-forward narrative: a childhood recollection of the...