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So, perhaps you are new to writing poetry, and are a little confused. Or maybe you have been writing poetry for a while, and want to improve. Hopefully this column will grant you insight into the world of poetry.
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Mothers and fathers grow accustomed to being asked by young children, “What's that?
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Li-Young Lee, who lives in Chicago, evokes by the use of carefully chosen images a culture, a time of day, and the understanding of love through the quiet observation of gesture.
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I'd guess we've all had dreams like the one portrayed in this wistful poem by Tennessee poet Jeff Daniel Marion.
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In many American poems, the poet makes a personal appearance and offers us a revealing monologue from center stage, but there are lots of fine poems in which the poet, a stranger in a strange place, observes the lives of others from a distance and imagines her way into them.
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Of taking long walks it has been said that a person can walk off anything.
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The conkers (horse chestnuts to the uninitiated) are falling off the trees and will soon be joined by the leaves. The dark mornings and even darker nights have arrived to make the daily commute to and from work even more depressing. The churches are proclaiming Harvest Festival services and the Christmas advertisements have started to appear. This is October.
A wonderful month of rich bright colours, full store houses and, just to stop us getting carried away with euphoria, thoroughly miserable weather
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Those of us who have planted trees and shrubs know well that moment when the last spade full of earth is packed around the root ball and patted or stamped into place and we stand back and wish the young plant good fortune.
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Those who survived the Great Depression of the 1930s have a tough, no-nonsense take on what work is.
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William Carlos Williams, one of our country's most influential poets and a New Jersey physician, taught us to celebrate daily life.
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As a man I'll never gain the wisdom Sharon Olds expresses in this poem about motherhood, but one of the reasons poetry is essential is that it can take us so far into someone else's experience that we feel it's our own.
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This marvelous poem by the California poet Marsha Truman Cooper perfectly captures the world of ironing, complete with its intimacy.
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Here is a marvelous little poem about a long marriage by the Kentucky poet, Wendell Berry.
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One in a series of elegies by New York City poet Catherine Barnett, this poem describes the first gathering after death has shaken a family to its core.
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Some of the most telling poetry being written in our country today has to do with the smallest and briefest of pleasures.
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Visiting a familiar and once dear place after a long absence can knock the words right out of us, and in this poem, Keith Althaus of Massachusetts observes this happening to someone else.
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Literary and Poetic devices. A series I will be working on presenting.
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Storytelling binds the past and present together, and is as essential to community life as are food and shelter.
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A special memorial to our poets who are gone but not forgotten
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Rome wasn't built in a day. Give your idea time to germinate. Write more verses than you intend to use. Print your poem and read it out loud. Editing can turn a mediocre poem into a gem...
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Remember those Degas paintings of the ballet dancers?
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Gardeners who've fought Creeping Charlie and other unwanted plants may sympathize with James McKean from Iowa as he takes on Bindweed, a cousin to the two varieties of morning glory that appear in the poem.
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Everywhere I travel I meet people who want to write poetry but worry that what they write won't be "any good.
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Most of us have taken at least a moment or two to reflect upon what we have learned from our mothers.
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Contrary to the glamorized accounts we often read about the lives of single women, Amy Fleury, a native of Kansas, presents us with a realistic, affirmative picture.
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Writing a poem can be hard. If you're having trouble, read these tips and hopefully your problem will be solved.
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A worm in an apple, a maggot in a bone, a person in the world.
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Midwestern poet Richard Newman traces the imaginary life of coins as a connection between people.
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When I complained about some of the tedious jobs I had as a boy, my mother would tell me, Ted, all work is honorable.
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A circus is an assemblage of illusions, and here Jo McDougall, a Kansas poet, shows us a couple of performers, drab and weary in their ordinary lives, away from the lights at the center of the ring.
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