Day 143 | Finding the One Brief Note by Maxine Kumin

Day 103 | Finding the One Brief Note by Maxine Kumin

Day 121 | Almost Spring, Driving Home, Reciting Hopkins by Maxine Kumin

Day 101 | Almost Spring, Driving Home, Reciting Hopkins by Maxine Kumin

Day 110 | Personal Helicon by Seamus Heaney

Day 8 | Personal Helicon by Seamus Heaney

Day 95 | American Sonnet by Billy Collins

Day 137 | American Sonnet by Billy Collins

Day 83 | Because You Asked About the Line Between Prose and Poetry

Day 43 | Because You Asked About the Line Between Prose and Poetry

Day 7 | Digging by Seamus Heaney

Day 11 | Digging by Seamus Heaney

Day 158 | American Sonnet by Billy Collins

Day 137 | American Sonnet by Billy Collins.

Day 143 | Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare

Sonnet 18
William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed,

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Day 118 | Almost Spring, Driving Home, Reciting Hopkins by Maxine Kumin

Day 101 | Almost Spring, Driving Home, Reciting Hopkins by Maxine Kumin.

Day 116 | Carlos by Theodore Deppe

Carlos
Theodore Deppe

My first day leading the prison writing workshop: Carlos

complimented my choosing the chair nearest the door.

 

I read a poem by Whitman that once sent me hitchhiking

and Carlos stood up, asked to read a section from his four hundred-page work-in-progress,

 

a poem that turns on his first finding Neruda’s “One Year Walk”;

he said it lit up the night like a perfect crime, so I left everything—

 

I had no choice—walked three thousand miles to the Pacific.

From memory he recited a passage in which his father left the family

 

a small fortune, all counterfeit: though I doubted the facts, I can still see

that worn briefcase, almost-perfect hundreds stacked neatly in shrink-wrapped packs.

 

I was young, it took me two weeks to accept that I could teach this lifer

nothing. World of concrete floors and everlasting light:

 

he was grateful to God who gave him a blazing mind not granted to anyone living or dead,

and wouldn’t have changed a word anyway.