Celebrating National Poetry Month
Our best stories about poetry and poems offer free links to poems from contemporary and classic American poets.
Poems by 10 Contemporary Black Poets
Poems by Black poets, including Morgan Parker, Hanif Abdurraqib, Simone White, Terrance Hayes, and more.
The Poem That Inspired Radical Black Women to Organize
Beah Richards is best known as an actor, but in 1951 she wrote a sweeping poem that influenced the Civil Rights Movement.
The Linguistic Case for Sh*t Hitting the Fan
Idioms have a special power to draw people together in a way that plain speech doesn't.
America, Lost and Found at Wounded Knee
Stephen Vincent Benét’s lost epic “John Brown’s Body” envisions a nation sutured together after the Civil War, but fails to reckon with the war’s causes.
Robert Hayden’s Relatable Fatigue
There’s a constant attention to the burdens of history in Robert Hayden’s poems. Even amid the beauties of life, the ghosts of the past linger.
Everyday Life, Revisited—with Bernadette Mayer’s Memory
In the poet’s work, the small and ordinary rise to the level of heroic adventures. If we value human life, then we should value what makes up a life.
How Do We Know That Epic Poems Were Recited from Memory?
Scholars once doubted that pre-literate peoples could ever have composed and recited poems as long as the Odyssey. Milman Parry changed that.