Lines of Thinking

Two poems by Puerto Rican Victor Hernández Cruz, and one by President Emeritus Manley from Malaysia.

Two poems by LoVerne Brown, read by President Emeritus Manley between the ocean and the art of Ed Ruscha at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

May 15th is nearly upon us. If plans hold, on that day my family and I plus two dogs, a cat and six suitcases will depart from Washington, Dulles International, for a long trip to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Beyond the surging signs of spring, April is also national poetry month AND the beginning of baseball season. It’s a double header of the best sort.

At 101 Lawrence Ferlinghetti had outlived his era-mates by many years. That, it occurred to me, may have been bittersweet: the deepening saturation of truth and beauty “happily amid complexity and paradox” and the physical absence of those we write and make for.

Poems that help us see red—these are what I delight in sending to you on a snow-blown afternoon from Yellow Springs.

One of my most satisfying interludes with poetry involved “wrapping” an entire 65,000-square-foot building in a poem by Arthur Rimbaud.

The Japanese poet and diarist Sei Shonagon noted among the tricks of time and distance the deceptive proximity of the last day of the year and the first day of the new year: things that were near and far at the same moment.

Jubilation abounded in many places last Saturday when the 2020 presidential election was called for Joe Biden. Spontaneous and lighthearted, it brought back to me lines from Maya Angelou’s deeply voiced verse “On the Pulse Of Morning” from the 1993...

Just today I awoke to the news that Louise Glück had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. “Wonderful,” I thought. As I was already planning for this month’s offering to share some lines of translation from Seamus Heaney, who received the...