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POETRY TOWN NEWSLETTER

This free email newsletter is delivered daily to your inbox. Every day George selects a poem by a writer he’s crazy about and he says a few words about why he picked it. Use the Subscribe button on the bottom of this page to receive Poetry Town tomorrow.​

These are the 2025 issues of Poetry Town. Click here for the 2024 issues.

NOVEMBER 2025

1 Michelle Boisseau, At My Brother’s Place

2 Jonathan Greene, The Return

3 Julia Hartwig, Demand It Courageously

4 C. K. Williams, Droplets

5 Frank O’Hara, Lana Turner Has Collapsed!

6 D. H. Lawrence, Piano

7 Margaret Atwood, Siren Song

8 Lawrence Raab, My Life Before I Knew It

9 Naomi Shihab Nye, So Much Happiness

10 Galway Kinnell, When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone, 10

11 James Doyle, The City’s Oldest Known Survivor of the Great War

12 Hayden Carruth, The Fantastic Names of Jazz

13 Thomas Lux, A Little Tooth

14 Dean Young, Only One of My Deaths

​15 Joseph Mills, Horses

16 Connie Wanek, Rain Changing to Snow​

17​ William Stafford, Any Morning

18 Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Fifteen Years Later, I See How It Went

19 Dorianne Laux, Against Endings

20 Faith Shearin, The Sound of a Train

21 Tom Hennen, Clouds Rise Like Fish

OCTOBER 2025

1 Kenneth Rexroth, Only Years

2​ Czeslaw Milosz, Incantation

3 Stephen Dobyns, The Invitations Overhead

4 Miller Williams, Listen

5 B. H. Fairchild, Old Men Playing Basketball

6 Susan Olds, Topography

Willa Schneberg, Biscuits

8 Robert Bly, Call and Answer

9 César Vallejo, Black Stone Lying on a White Stone

10 April Lindner, First Kiss

11 Matt Cook, Carp Gallbladders

12 Ginger Andrews, Rolls-Royce Dreams

13 Leonard Nathan, Boys at the Edge

14 Ann Stanford, Our Town

15 Robert Morgan, The Grain of Sound

16 Rosanna Warren, Summertime

17 Raymond Carver, Happiness

18 Gwendolyn Brooks, The Bean Eaters

​19 Edward Hirsch, Early Sunday Morning

20 John Kenney, When Are You Planning to Turn Off Your Kindle?

21 George Bilgere, Gratitude

22 Margaret Hasse, Belongings

​23 Rita Dove, Dawn Revisited

24 Billy Collins, Aimless Love

25 Marjorie Saiser, Looking Around in the Galaxy

26 Dean Young, Skipping the Reception

27 Mark Halliday, Do It Deftly

28 Dana Gioia, Marriage of Many Years

29 Ron Koertge, Books on Tape

30 Elton Glaser, Swerve

31 William Meredith, Parents

SEPTEMBER 2025

1 Henri Cole, Oil & Steel

2 Andrea Carlisle, Emily Dickinson’s To-Do List

3​ Linda Pastan, Late Afternoon, St. John

4 Ted McMahon, Rendezvous

5 Robinson Jeffers, Carmel Point​​

6​ Jane Kenyon, Man Eating

7 Susan Deborah King, Toast

8 Stephen Cushman, Beside the Point

9 Charles O. Hartman, Ticket

10 Catherine Jagoe, Man in a Parking Lot

11 Charlotte Parsons, Nine-Eleven

12 Carl Dennis, We

13 William Stafford, What’s in My Journal

14 Matt Cook, A Girl in Milwaukee and a Girl in Brooklyn ​

15 George Bilgere, Once Again I Fail to Read an Important Novel

16 Thomas Lux, Regarding (Most) Songs

17 David Lehman, A History of Modern Poetry

​18 Elise Partridge, Supermarket Scanner

19 James Richardson, Another End of the World

20 Edwin Romond, Willy Loman

21 Susan Cataldo, At the Children’s Violin Concert

22 Leslie Monsour, The Bachelor

23 Yosa Buson, On the One-Ton Temple Bell

24 Philip F. Deaver, The Worriers’ Guild

25 Tom Chandler, Ten Degrees

26 Gregory Orr, Father’s Song

27 Charles Simic, Serving Time

​28 Howard Nemerov, Learning by Doing

29 Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind, Number 20

​30 John Updike, Saying Goodbye to Very Young Children

AUGUST 2025

1 Naomi Shihab Nye, Jerusalem

2 Ron Carlson, The Neighborhood So Far

3 Muriel Spark, The Lonely Shoe Lying on the Road

4 Charles Darling, At the Airport Baggage Claim

5 Ellie Schoenfeld, Patriotism

6 Shari Wagner, The Farm Wife Sells Her Cows

7 Mark Perlberg, Real Estate

8 Jerry Roscoe, Bouquet

9 Stanley Plumly, Glenn Gould

10 Joyce Sutphen, Bookmobile

11 Laure-Anne Bosselaar, A Parisian Blackbird

​12 Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Courage That My Mother Had

13 Stuart Kestenbaum, Harmony

14 Kirsten Dierking, Nuthatch

15 Anne Sexton, Young

16 Paul Zimmer, A Final Affection

17 Faith Shearin, Smoke

18 Patricia Fargnoli, The Undeniable Pressure of Existence

19 T.R. Hummer, Who Remembers Davenport

20 Leonard Nathan, Out on the Flats

21 Abigail Gramig, Requiem

22 X. J. Kennedy, A Scandal in the Suburbs

23 Cindy Gregg, Thoughtful Voyeur: Woman and Cantaloupe

24 Tom Hennen, From a Country Overlooked

25 Eavan Boland, The Necessity for Irony

26 Lisel Mueller, Fiction

27 Philip Larkin, Wires

28 Jane Kenyon, April Chores

29 Louise Bogan, The Dragonfly

30 Steve Kowit, Small Boats

31 Ken Hada, Old Men

JULY 2025

Ginger Andrews, Prayer

2 Lucille Clifton, note, passed to superman

3 Wislawa Szymborska, Some Like Poetry

4 Walt Whitman, America

5 Barbara Crooker, American Robin

6 Connie Wanek, Long Nights

7 Nancy Miller Gomez, Growing Apples

8 Alan Berecka, The Great Escape​

9 Ron Wallace, The Facts of Life

10 Thomas Lux, The First Song

11 Danusha Laméris, Today the Pleasures

12 David Lehman, March 8

13 David Moreau, Borrowed Time

14 Howard Nemerov, A Primer of the Daily Round

15 Jane Kenyon, Otherwise

​16 Billy Collins, Oh, My God!​

17 Wendy Cope, Postcards

18 David Lee, Veal, 1948

19 Christopher Kempf, National Anthem

20 Charles Simic, Summer Morning

21 George Bilgere, Stolpersteine

22 ​Philip Metres, One Tree

23 Marjorie Saiser, Final Shirt

24 Ada Limón, Almost Forty

25 Rhina Espaillat, When We Sold the Tent

26 Nancy Krygowski, Weed Whacker

27 David Allen Sullivan, Dragonflies at Dawn

28 Kari Gunter-Seymour, Amesville Girls

29 Leslie Monsour, Fifties Music

30 Tom C. Hunley, I Do What I Can

31 Marie Howe, Hurry

JUNE 2025

1 David Salner, Eight to Midnight

2 B.H. Fairchild, A Starlit Night

3 Freya Manfred, Old Friends

4 Joan Mazza, Part of the Landscape

5 Todd Davis, Thankful for Now

6 Kristen Case, Morning

7 Bill Mayer, National Pastime

8 Jane Hirshfield, I Ran Out Naked in the Sun

9 Edward Hirsch, American Summer

10 Athena Kildegaard, Ripe Cherries

11 Elton Glaser, The More Things Change

12 January Gill O’Neil, In the Company of Women

13​ Alice Wolf Gilborn, Leaning to the Light

14 Andrea Potos, The Cardinal Reminds Me

15 Christina Olson, Broken Sonnet on Teeth

16 Neil Elder, Not Watching Tennis

17 Paul Violi, On an Acura Integra

18 Jo McDougall, Mothers and Daughters

19 Kirsten Dierking, Wilderness

20 Amy Woschek Schmidt, Abundance

21 Jack Gilbert, Failing and Flying

​22 James Wright, The First Days

23 Tony Hoagland, Migration

24 George Bilgere, Horseplay

25 Tim Nolan, Signal from the Stands

26 Kymberly Taylor, Lessons

27 Steve Cushman, The Accident

28 Marge Piercy, The tao of touch

29 Barton Sutter, The Thousand-Foot Ore Boat

30 Matthew Dickman, The Mysterious Human Heart

MAY 2025

1 Lowell Jaeger, After Second Shift

2 Gail Mazur, Genealogy

3 Marjorie Saiser, Last Day of Kindergarten

4 Faith Shearin, My Grandparents’ Generation

5 Terri Kirby Erickson, Ice Cream Truck

6 David Ignatow, I Close My Eyes

7 Louis Jenkins, Cult Following

8 Danusha Laméris, Improvement

9 Charles Brice, Stinky

10 Jonathan Greene, Summer Trips

11 George Bilgere, Schwinn

12 Thomas Lux, “I Love You Sweatheart”

13 Nin Andrews, Melvin

14 Donald Hall, The Coffee Cup

15 Jeffrey Harrison, Temple

16 Kevin Carey, Reading to My Kids

17 Andrew Gent, History

18 Tony Hoagland, Jet

19 Susan Dworski Nusbaum, The Substitute

20 Marie Howe, Prayer

21 Michael Simms, Who Will Tell Them?

22 Denise Duhamel, Poem in Which My Mother Snapped

23 Deborah Garrison, Into the Lincoln Tunnel

24 Connie Wanek, So Like Her Father

25 Jared Carter, For Jack Chatham

26 George Bilgere, Memorial Day

27 Richard Newman, Bless Their Hearts

28 Mark Halliday, Tossed Cup

29 Billy Collins, The Monet Conundrum

​30 Philip Levine, What Work Is

31 Edwin Romond, One Good Thing

APRIL 2025

1 Philip Larkin, The Trees

2 Barbara Crooker, Tomorrow

​3 John Kenney, Are You in the Mood?

4 Ernest Hartsock, Strange Splendor

5 Czeslaw Milosz, Encounter

6 Terrance Hayes, What I Am

7 Ron Padgett, The Stapler

​8 Reed Whittemore, The Lovers

9 Jeanie Greensfelder, Birth and Death

10 Tomas Tranströmer, Allegro

11 Ada Limón, How to Triumph Like a Girl

12 Connie Wanek, Umbrella

13 Tim Seibles, Naïve

14 Mark Nepo, Not According to Plan

15 Elizabeth Kuhn, Bathrooms

16 Ellen Bass, The Thing Is

17 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

18 Dorianne Laux, Dust

19 Kim Stafford, For the Bird Singing Before Dawn

20 Bill Holm, Sparrows

21 Linda Pastan, Bess

22 Louise Glück, Nostos

​23 Dana Gioia, Summer Storm

24 Alicia Ostriker, Song

25 Gavin Ewart, Sonnet: Daffodils

26 Fleur Adcock, The Three-toed Sloth

27 Philip Larkin, Travellers

​28 Jack Ridl, From Our House to Your House

29 Sally Bliumis-Dunn, Work

​30 Carl Dennis, The God Who Loves You

MARCH 2025

1 Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Aanabhrandhanmar Means “Mad About Elephants”

Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

Robert Frost, Unharvested

Wesley McNair, The Rules of the New Car

5 ​​Jim Harrison, The Bear

6 Jeffrey Harrison, Interval

7 William Meredith, Marriage Tree

8 George Bilgere, The Forge

9 ​Mark Halliday, Quite Frankly

10 Marcus Jackson, Whereabouts

11 Lynn Powell, Acceptance Speech

12 David Wagoner, The Escaped Gorilla

13 Maxine Kumin, Game

14 Carol Ann Duffy, Tea

​15 Ann Higgins, Cherry Tomatoes

16 Wendy Cope, A Reading

17 John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

18 W.H. Auden, Epitaph on a Tyrant

19 Jeanne Marie Beaumont, Afraid So

20 Sara Littlecrow-Russell, Apology to the Wasps

21 Thomas Lux, Ode to the Joyful Ones​​

22 Billy Collins, Hippos on Holiday

23 Naomi Shihab Nye, What Is Supposed to Happen

24 Joseph Stroud, Knots

25 C.G. Hanzlicek, Egg

26 Brian Bilston, Refugees

27 Wislawa Szymborska, Vermeer

28 Tom Hennen, Plains Spadefoot Toad

29 Simon Armitage, Hercules

30 James Wright, A Blessing

31 James Crews, Love What Comes

​​

FEBRUARY 2025

1 James Tate, Treason

2 Harvey Shapiro, New York Notes​​

3 Naomi Shihab Nye, The Time

4 Jared Carter, Early Warning

5 Billy Collins, Adam Names the Fish

6 June Robertson Beisch, Lobster

7 Marilyn Donnelly, On Mondays

8 Barbara Quick, The Bread My Mother Gave Me

9 Charles Wright, 15

10 Thomas Lux, A Streak of Blood That Once Was a Tiny Red Spider

11 Connie Wanek, Girdle

12 ​Grace Cavalieri, Tomato Pies, 25 Cents

13 Faith Sheirin, Picking the Kitten

14 Kim Dower, They’re Taking Chocolate Milk Off the Menu

15 Ramon Montaigne, On the Beach

16 Richard Wilbur, A Barred Owl

17 Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Bus Stop

18 William Notter, Half-Rack at the Rendezvous

19 Tony Hoagland, Field Guide

20 Michael Milburn, To My Son’s Girlfriend

21 Simon Armitage, Evening

22 David Budbill, What We Need

23 Dan Gerber, Only This Morning

24 Margaret Hasse, What the Window Washers Did

25 Paul Hostovsky, Gauguin’s Grandson

26 ​Galway Kinnell, Promissory Note

27 Beverly Rollwagen, Up and Down

28 ​David Lehman, February 7

​​

JANUARY 2025

1 Annie Lighthart, The Hundred Names of Love

Charles Bukowski, the great escape

3 Michael Ryan, When I Was Conceived

4 Twyla Hansen, For No Good Reason

5 Sally Fisher, Where I Come From

6 Patrick Phillips, The Singing

7 Olivia Stiffler, Grandchildren

8 Jennifer Maier, Love at First Sight

9 Alarie Tennille, In the Beginning

10 Robyn Sarah, Riveted

11 Mark Halliday, Chicken Salad

12 Adam Zagajewski, Try to Praise the Mutilated World

13 John Ashbery, Composition

14 Daniel Hoffman, Ants

15 Ross Gay, Wedding Poem

16 John Arthur, Wayfare

17 June Robertson Beisch, The Titanic

18 Jeanne Lohmann, Reminders

19 Robert Bernard Hass, Siren

20 R.S. Gwynn, Shakespearean Sonnet

21 George Bilgere, Zero

22 Donald Hall, Old Timer’s Day

23 Malena Mörling, For Bartleby

24 Sebastian Matthews, American Image

25 Robert Phillips, The Changed Man

26 Louis Jenkins, A Disappointment

27 Miller Williams, Love Poem with Toast

28 Gary Johnson, Montana

29 John Updike, Slum Lords

30 Anne Stevenson, Living in America

31 Kevin Griffith, Denmark, Kangaroo, Orange

2024 Poetry Town Issues here

For information about poetry readings or reprinting George’s poems, contact him at:
George Bilgere
Website by Merry Bilgere
© 2001–2025.

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