Poem Guides

Bridging two languages and generations in one intricate poem.

In the realm of the world-class talkers.

A poet uses a punctuation mark to plot a crime.

On Robert Duncan’s incantatory summons.

How a poem about a rural stone wall quickly became part of debates on nationalism, international borders, and immigration.

Our choices are made clear in hindsight.

Robert Hass, Baudelaire, Marx, and a bomb-building anarchist.

A lost father warms a house.

Witness the making of a new American poetics.

A queer childhood and the demand to “sound straight.”

The poet shows how reality and imagination can become one.

In this “Troubles” elegy, the poet revisits a fisherman and pub-goer he once knew.

This poem finds its author not raving but frowning.

The incinerating vision of this Plath classic.

The creation of life and the masterful merging of metaphor and reality.

Touch, risk, trust, improvisation—“the intellect as powerhouse of love.”

After the poet lost his wife, he found his voice.

How a poem brings language to loss and speaks to the dead.

A poet revisits his legendary teacher’s advice.

A long-lost meditation on heartbreak and pain.