Frank Hecker

This is the final post in my “Sunday night poetry” series, which also coincidentally marks the end of National Poetry Month. Rather than post one last poem, I point to some resources for those who enjoyed some of these poems and want to read more, and learn more, about poems, poets, and poetry.

For an art that today has a relatively small audience and relatively little cultural impact, there’s a surprisingly large number of people happy to explain poetry to you. For example, searching the Internet Archive for the title How to Read a Poem turned up books from (in alphabetical order) Terry Eagleton, Edward Hirsch, Nancy C. Millet and Helen J. Throckmorton, Molly Peacock, Burton Raffel, and Tania Runyan. There are other books with slight variations on that title, and others on the same general theme.

Rather than overwhelm you with my opinions on these and other books (most of which I haven’t read), I would point you to two people whose thoughts on poems are worth consideration and may be helpful to you, Stephanie Burt and Helen Hennessy Vendler.

The poets I’ve featured in this series are mainly those whom I encountered in the 1980s and 1990s, so even those who were alive at the time I first read them are now either dead or in their dotage. (Elizabeth Alexander is the youngest, at 61.)

I thought that for this next-to-last Sunday night poetry post I should feature some younger poets, ones new to me. After doing some Internet queries and sampling a selection of poems, I found the two poets I’m featuring tonight, Natalie Diaz and Danez Smith.

The poems of Diaz I found most compelling were those written about her brother; I chose this one, “My Brother My Wound,” for its surrealistic imagery (CW: violence):

We’re now past Easter and well into spring. For this third Sunday night poetry night selection riffing on “love, death, and the changing of the seasons,” here’s a poem about the changing of the seasons, which (in the Christianity-influenced Western tradition) is also a poem about death and resurrection. It’s by Louise Glück, who wrote the second poem I posted in this series, “The Triumph of Achilles”; this one is titled “The Wild Iris,” and is written in the voice of the flower:

“Love, death, and the changing of the seasons” is the theme of this group of Sunday night poems, and tonight’s poem is about the second item in that list. It’s what used to be called a memento mori, and these days it hits a lot harder with me than it used to. “Otherwise,” by Jane Kenyon: