“A black dream weighs upon me like lead, / For my foreordained death is approaching, / and great wars and great fires lie ahead.”

The great Russian poet Alexander Block wrote these words in 1902, when he was 22 years old. It seemed as if he knew that in less than 20 years, he would die of heart failure brought on by malnutrition. He lived through Russian revolutions in 1905 and 1917; he … Read More

“Geese cut a wedge out of the sky, drag the gray days behind them like a skein of old wool.”

CrookerToday is Thanksgiving Day — the perfect time to acknowledge with gratitude The Writer’s Almanac,  American Life in Poetry, and the Poetry Foundation. These organizations email poems to thousands of people like me who wish to read new work by new poets every day. I wouldn’t have heard … Read More