2024 Poetry Town Newsletters
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.
DECEMBER 2024
1 Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Unable to find
2 Jane Hirshfield, Tree
3 Robert Phillips, Headlines
4 Ken Hada, Flagman on a Road Crew
5 Valentina Gnup, The Language of Waitresses, 1979
6 Charles Harper Webb, Summer of ’62
7 Fleur Adcock, Things
8 Robin Behn, In That Year
9 Stanley Kunitz, End of Summer
10 Allison Joseph, Elegy for the Personal Letter
11 George Bilgere, The Scar
12 Barton Sutter, A Little Shiver
13 Seamus Heaney, Sunlight
14 Marjorie Saiser, Every Last Thing Is Transitory
15 Kristen Lindquist, Transportation
16 Baron Wormser, Description
17 Jonathan Greene, City Scene in Snow
18 Katrina Vandenberg, Handwriting Analysis
19 Pablo Neruda, Walking Around
20 David Berman, Snow
21 Al Ortolani, Goldfish with the Faces of Old Men
22 Timothy Russell, In Simili Materia
23 Ted Kooser, Selecting a Reader
24 Thomas Hardy, The Oxen
25 Gary Johnson, For Maia
26 Debra Spencer, Moment of Inertia
27 Kaylin Haught, God Says Yes to Me
28 Ruth Stone, Before the Blight
29 Ellen Bass, The World Has Need of You
30 David Shumate, Chinese Restaurant
31 Thomas Hardy, The Darkling Thrush
NOVEMBER 2024
1 Sarah Freligh, Old Flame
2 Sharon Olds, Primitive
3 Stephen Dunn, The Inheritance
4 Danusha Laméris, Names
5 Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus
6 Eve Robillard, Everything Happens Twice
7 Paul Martin, The First Voyages Out
8 Maxine Cassin, My Captain
9 Wislawa Szymborska, The Kindness of the Blind
10 Jessica Gigot, Amends
11 Yusef Komunyakaa, Facing It
12 Nina Cassian, Temptation
13 Jo McDougall, Mammogram
14 June Robertson Beisch, To a Young Son
15 Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things
16 Rainer Maria Rilke, Archaic Torso of Apollo
17 Louis Jenkins, The Big Bang
18 Elizabeth Alexander, Ars Poetica #100: I Believe
19 James Tate, Suburban Bison
20 David Budbill, Winter: Tonight: Sunset
21 Kelley Jean White, Pandora
22 Joyce Sutphen, Guys Like That
23 Jean Nordhaus, To Hold
24 Richard Cecil, Internal Exile
25 Raymond Carver, Soda Crackers
26 Catherine Doty, Yes
27 Billy Collins, Breakfast
28 John Updike, Relatives
29 Richard Newman, Four Kids Pissing Off the Overpass...
30 Jericho Brown, Odd Jobs
OCTOBER 2024
1 BIlly Collins, What She Said
2 J.R. Solonche, The Poem of the Future
3 Donna Masini, Slowly
4 Connie Wanek, Talking to Dad
5 William Heath, The Vet
6 Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays
7 Heather Swan, Boy
8 Barbara Crooker, This Summer Day
9 Maggie Smith, First Fall
10 George Bilgere, Europe
11 AE Hines, What Did You Imagine Would Grow?
12 Howard Nemerov, The Consent
13 José A. Alcántara, Archilochus Colubris
14 Kelle Groom, Oldest Map of the World
15 John Ashbery, Myrtle
16 Laura Foley, What Stillness
17 Neal Bowers, Cryptography
18 Nathan Spoon, Poem of Thankfulness
19 Seamus Heaney, The Forge
20 Jim Daniels, American Cheese
21 Robert S. Foote, An Interruption
22 Maxine Kumin, Morning Swim
23 Tom Chandler, Hard Music
24 Philip Larkin, Talking in Bed
25 Louise Glück, All Hallows
26 Ruth Stone, Train Ride
27 Marie Howe, Walking Home
28 David Kirby, Taking It Home to Jerome
29 Joseph Mills, Turning
30 Mary K. Stillwell, Moving to Malibu
31 Ron Wallace, Blessings
SEPTEMBER 2024
1 Joseph Mills, We’ve Had This Conversation Before
2 Connie Wanek, A Sighting
3 Ann Iverson, Waves and Wet Kisses
4 Greg Delanty, From Woody’s Restaurant, Middlebury
5 Margaret S. Mullins, Lonely Harvest
6 Grace Paley, He Wanders
7 Dorianne Laux, Dark Charms
8 John Balaban, Passing through Albuquerque
9 Kirsten Dierking, In the Produce Aisle
10 Davi Walders, Anniversary
11 Charlotte Parsons, Nine-Eleven
12 Kari Gunter-Seymour, When the DJ Plays Bad Company...
13 Thomas McGrath, Beyond the Red River
14 Krista Lukas, The Day I Die
15 Richard Wilbur, The Death of a Toad
16 Theodore Deppe, The Russian Greatcoat
17 David Lee, Loading a Boar
18 Jane Attanucci, Falling
19 Rozel Hunt, Fabulous Pizza
20 John Donoghue, In the Design Review Meeting He Said
21 Marjorie Saiser, She Gives Me the Watch off Her Arm
22 Peter Makuck, Toward Paris
23 Steve Straight, Imperfection
24 Sue Ellen Thompson, Sewing
25 Dana Gioia, The Road
26 Thomas Hardy, A Thunderstorm in Town
27 Tony Hoagland, Meadow
28 Kay Ryan, Blandeur
29 Frank O’Hara, Autobiographia Literaria
30 Brian Bilston, America Is a Gun
AUGUST 2024
1 Ellen Bass, For My Daughter on Her Twenty-First Birthday
2 Thomas Hardy, During Wind and Rain
3 Lyuba Yakimchuk, Crow, Wheels
4 Wallace McRae, Reincarnation
5 D.C. Berry, On Reading Poems to a Senior Class at South High
6 Karen Schubert, Non-Traditional Student
7 George Bilgere, Robert Frost
8 Tom Wayman, Did I Miss Anything?
9 Billy Collins, Tension
10 Fanny Howe, But I, Too, Want to Be a Poet
11 Jane Hirshfield, For What Binds Us
12 George Bilgere, Post-Olympics
13 Louis Jenkins, Baloney
14 Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn, The Golf Links
15 Ross Gay, A Small Needful Fact
16 Ron Koertge, Grand Avenue
17 F.J. Bergmann, An Apology
18 Tony Hoagland, Little Champion
19 Peter Harris, Will We Survive?
20 Linda Hasselstrom, Clara: In the Post Office
21 Gillian Wegener, Nature Walk
22 David Hernandez, Sincerely, the Sky
23 Thomas R. Smith, Trust
24 Irene Blair Honeycutt, Blessing
25 Sean Sexton, Untitled Poem
26 Paul Violi, At the Cottage of Messer Violi
27 Linda Gregg, A Dark Thing Inside the Day
28 George Bilgere, Little League
29 Naomi Shihab Nye, Generations
30 Charles Simic, The Partial Explanation
31 Mary Mackey, My Methodist Grandmother Said
JULY 2024