Here is the poem:

I Wonder If I Will Miss the Moss
—Jane Mead (1958-2019)

I wonder if I will miss the moss
after I fly off as much as I miss it now
just thinking about leaving.

There were stones of many colors.
There were sticks holding both
lichen and moss.
There were red gates with old
hand-forged hardware.
There were fields of dry grass
smelling of first rain
then of new mud. There was mud,
and there was the walking,
all the beautiful walking,
and it alone filled me—
the smells, the scratchy grass heads.
All the sleeping under bushes,
once waking to vultures above, peering down
with their bent heads the way they do,
caricatures of interest and curiosity.
Once too a lizard.
Once too a kangaroo rat.
Once too a rat.
They did not say I belonged to them,
but I did.

Whenever the experiment on and of
my life begins to draw to a close
I’ll go back to the place that held me
and be held. It’s O.K. I think
I did what I could. I think
I sang some, I think I held my hand out.

For The New Yorker, see here.

For a reflection on the poem by the poet Devin Kelly, see Kelly's Substack Ordinary Plots.

For more on Jane Mead, see The Poetry Foundation.

For the memorial service and the tribute by Kathleen Finneran, see Mead's personal webpage.

For the full text of the poem, see here:
https://mail.readwildness.com/25/zwart-rusting

For more on the poet Jane Zwart, see her personal website:
https://www.janezwart.com/

To see her new book and purchase a copy, see "Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best" at Orison Books:
https://www.orisonbooks.com/product-page/oddest-oldest-saddest-best-poems-by-jane-zwart

Special thanks to Universty of California Television (UCTV) for permission to share the audio of Momaday's reading. For the interview with Momaday from which this reading has been pulled, see "A Conversation with N. Scott Momaday -- Writer's Symposium by the Sea 2023" on Youtube. "The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee" appears in In the Presence of the Sun by N. Scott Momaday. Copyright © 2009 University of New Mexico Press, 2009.

For the text of the poem, see The Poetry Foundation here.

For more on Momaday, see his biography at the Poetry Foundation.

In this episode, we quote a few pieces from The New Yorker. Here they are, plus a few other resources.

"The Aesthetic Insight of W.S. Merwin" by Dan Chiasson

"The Final Prophecy of W.S. Merwin" by Dan Chiasson

"The Palm Trees and Poetry of W.S. Merwin" by Casey Cep

"When You Go Away: Remembering W.S. Merwin" by Kevin Young

See also The Poetry Foundation.

The poem originally appeared in Present Company (Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Thanks to the Wylie Agency for granting us permission to read this poem on the episode.

To see Katy's erasure, click on the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day feature.

Visit the Tupelo Press website to purchase a copy of Ore Choir: The Lava on Iceland.

The website includes a lesson plan for those who might want to introduce Katy's poetry into the classroom.

Haleh Liza Gafori's translations of Rumi's poetry appear in Gold (NYRB Press, 2022).

You can learn more about her work as a vocalist, poet, translator and performer here.

To learn more about Rumi, visit the Poetry Foundation website.

Cover photo from The Walters Art Museum

For more on Carl Phillips, please visit the Poetry Foundation.

For more on David Baker, please visit the Poetry Foundation.

"To Autumn" has been read from Carl Phillips' latest book of poetry, Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020.

The latest book by Carl Phillips is a collection of essays called My Trade Is Mystery. Purchase at Yale University Press or Amazon or wherever you get your books.

Carter Revard was a prolific poet and scholar. To learn more about his work, click here.

"What the Eagle Fan Says" was published in How the Songs Came Down (Salt Publishing, 2005).

To learn more about accentual verse, read this brief treatment by poet Dana Gioia.

Thanks to the Georges Borchardt, Inc. for granting us permission to read this poem. You can find "Primary Care" in Alternative Medicine (Duke University Press, 2013).

Links:

• Campo reads Primary Care
• Campo Author Page
• Campo at the Poetry Foundation

You can find the text of "An American Sunrise" here, though this is an earlier version of the poem. The final version appears in her finished book of the same title, which you can find here.

For an introduction to The Golden Shovel form, see here.

Links:

• Joy Harjo Official Site - Joy Harjo
• An American Sunrise by Joy Harjo | Poetry Magazine
• An American Sunrise - Joy Harjo
• Introduction: The Golden Shovel by Don Share | Poetry Magazine

To read the text of this poem, click here or see below:

To learn more about Walt Whitman and his work, visit the Walt Whitman Archive, a magnificent compendium of information about Whitman's life, cultural context, and editions of Leaves of Grass.

To learn more about scholar Christopher Hanlon, click here.

Text from Leaves of Grass:

A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, soon out of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Margaret Noodin is the author of two bilingual collections of poetry in both Anishinaabemowin and English: Weweni and What the Chickadee Knows. She is a professor of English and American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she also serves as director of the Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education.

To learn more about Ahishinaabemowin, visit ojibwe.net.

To hear the sound of the spring peeper, click on this link.

Photo of Margaret Noodin © Troye Fox.

Thank you to Graywolf Press for permission to read this poem from Otherwise: New and Selected Poems by Jane Kenyon.

Click here for the full text of Twilight: After Haying.

See the Poetry Foundation for more on Jane Kenyon.

Links:

• Twilight: After Haying by Jane Kenyon - Poems | poets.org
• Otherwise | Graywolf Press
• Jane Kenyon | Poetry Foundation

To read more of Brenda Cárdenas's work, click here:

https://uwm.edu/english/our-people/cardenas-brenda/

To learn more about Ana Mendieta's work, click here:

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/ana-mendieta

In this episode we discuss her work with emblems, her scientific chemistry experiment with flowers, and her wonderment (both worried and confident, doubtful and awestruck) about the resurrection of the body and its reunification with the soul after death.

For a biography of Hester Pulter, see here:
https://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/about-hester-pulter-and-the-manuscript.html

For her poems, see the Pulter Project here:
https://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/

Here is the text of today's poem:

"View But This Tulip" (Emblem 40)

View but this tulip, rose, or gillyflower,
And by a finite, see an infinite power.
These flowers into their chaos were retired
Till human art them raised and reinspired
With beating, macerating, fermentation,
Calcining, chemically, with segregation;
Then, lest the air these secrets should reveal,
Shut up the ashes under Hermes’s seal;
Then, with a candle or a gentle fire,
You may reanimate at your desire
These gallant plants; but if you cool the glass,
To their first principles they’ll quickly pass:
From sulfur, salt, and mercury they came;
When they dissolve, they turn into the same.
Then, seeing a wretched mortal hath the power
To recreate a Virbius of a flower,
Why should we fear, though sadly we retire
Into our cause? Our God will reinspire
Our dormant dust, and keep alive the same
With an all-quick’ning, everlasting flame.
Then, though I into atoms scattered be,
In indivisibles I’ll trust in Thee.
Then let this comfort me in my sad story:
Dust is but four degrees removed from glory
By Nature’s paths, but God from death and night
Can raise this flesh to endless life and light.
Then, my impatient soul, contented be,
For thou a glorious spring ere long shalt see.
After these gloomy shades of death and sorrow,
Thou shalt enjoy an everlasting morrow.
As wheat in new-plowed furrows rotting lies,
Incapable of quick’ning till it dies,
So into dust this flesh of mine must turn
And lie a while forgotten in my urn.
Yet when the sea, and earth, and Hell shall give
Their treasures up, my body too shall live:
Not like the resurrection at Grand Caire,
Where men revive, then straight of life despair;
But, with my soul, my flesh shall reunite
And ne’er involvéd be with death and night,
But live in endless pleasure, love, and light.
Then hallelujahs will I sing to thee,
My gracious God, to all eternity.
Then at thy dissolution patient be:
If man can raise a flower, God can thee.

In this poem, we explore what makes a poem "poetry" versus some other genre, and we consider what difference such designations make while walking through a longer, narrative poem.

For the text of the poem, see here: https://poets.org/poem/gate-4

For more on Naomi Shihab Nye, see the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/naomi-shihab-nye

This poem comes from Honeybee: Poems and Short Prose.

The image has a creative commons license and can be found here.

Here is the poem in full:

THE COLLAR

I struck the board, and cried, "No more;
I will abroad!
What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free, free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store.
Shall I be still in suit?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What I have lost with cordial fruit?
Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.
Is the year only lost to me?
Have I no bays to crown it,
No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?
All wasted?
Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,
And thou hast hands.
Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,
Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
Away! take heed;
I will abroad.
Call in thy death's-head there; tie up thy fears;
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need
Deserves his load."
But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Methought I heard one calling, Child!
And I replied My Lord.

For more on George Herbert, visit the poetry foundation.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant — (1263)
by Emily Dickinson

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

For more on Emily Dickinson, see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/emily-dickinson

Links:

• Emily Dickons, Tell all the truth but tell it slant --
• Emily Dickinson | Poetry Foundation