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POETS Day! Leonora Speyer
There’s sadness and optimism and acceptance throughout "Fiddler's Farewell," and for all the promise of the precocious musician, it was written by the…
Jul 17
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Ben Sears
1
POETS Day! Edwin Arlington Robinson
In the age of “Make it new!” while everybody was scrambling in various directions to poke and prod the limits of verse, he went a scant backwards and…
Jul 10
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Ben Sears
Thoughts on a Red Card
Nit pickers and rule pedants unite. This one’s for you. Our man wasn’t given his Miranda warning.
Jul 6
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Ben Sears
1
POETS Day! Hendecasyllabics
The hecadecasyllabic poet has to guide the reader through multiple changes in the roll of the language while making it seem natural.
Jul 3
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Ben Sears
June 2026
Why ‘Soccer’ Is British, Not American – And Why Americans Should Keep Using It
The global push for ‘football’ is newer than you think — and Americans are preserving the original name.
Jun 15
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Ben Sears
1
POETS Day! Sir Philip Sidney Didn’t Get the Girl
The entirety—the pairing, the arrangement, the dysentery—was beyond his control. Had he been immediately smitten, things would have ended the same way.
Jun 12
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Ben Sears
POETS Day! Poems from Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium
He’s famously hard to decipher, threads his poems with an idiosyncratic symbolism and teases those who tried to put together a key, and prizes sound and…
Jun 5
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Ben Sears
May 2026
POETS Day! The Present in TS Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages”
A life of contemplation and worship may be well and good for saints and mystics, but what, asks the speaker in “The Dry Salvages,” about the rest of us?
May 29
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Ben Sears
Gentrified Camp Mountain Lake Red-Eye Gravy
Everyone but Heather and me was off fighting about line-cutting at the folding table buffet. He called us over, pulled us into conspiracy. “You want to…
May 24
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Ben Sears
1
2
POETS Day! Poems from Minna and Myself, by Maxwell Bodenheim
He a had a talent for image and metaphor that, with a little discipline, could have made something memorable. Instead, he drank and pissed it all away.
May 22
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Ben Sears
POETS Day! Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”
Pound was trapped, enamored by the static image, caught between the craft of Apollo and verve of Dionysus.
May 15
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Ben Sears
POETS Day! Dorothy Wellesley
W.B. Yeats gave her a surprising fifteen pages in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. For comparison, TS Eliot got twelve. Pound got six. He only gave…
May 8
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Ben Sears
1
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