This quarter I would like to introduce you to our current Poet Laureate, Arthur Sze.
The Library of Congress announced the appointment of Arthur Sze as the nation’s 25th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry on September 15th, 2025.
Arthur Sze was born in New York City in 1950 to Chinese immigrants. He is the author of 12 poetry collections, most recently “Into the Hush” (2025), as well as the prose collection “The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems” (2025). His other poetry collections include... (read more)
I enjoyed reading many of the poems of Arthur Sze. Perhaps because I love hummingbirds so much, I chose this one to share here:
A
black-chinned hummingbird lands on a metal wire and rests for five seconds; for five seconds, a pianist lowers his head and rests his hands on the keys; a
man bathes where irrigation water forms a pool before it drains into the river; a mechanic untwists a plug, and engine oil drains into a bucket; for five seconds, I
smell peppermint through an open window, recall where a wild leaf grazed your skin; here touch comes before sight; holding you, I recall, across a canal, the sounds of men laying
cuttlefish on ice at first light; before first light, physical contact, our hearts beating, patter of female rain on the roof; as the hummingbird whirrs
out of sight, the gears of a clock mesh at varying speeds; we hear a series of ostinato notes and are not tied to our bodies’ weight on earth.
Valentine's Day comes along in the first quarter of the year. My favorite Valentine has always been my Mom. I never forget her on Valentine's Day. When she was living: flowers, card, gifts, came every year. And even now that she's gone: I visit and bring her a rose.
When going through her cedar chest where she kept mine and my brother's keepsakes, I'd found she'd rubber-banded together a stack of the cards we'd given her each year for various holidays.
In that stack was a typed page I'd given to her one Valentine's while I was still in high school. I had typed out this poem by Helen Steiner Rice:
A Mother's Love
by Helen Steiner Rice
A Mother's love is something that no one can explain, It is made of deep devotion and of sacrifice and pain, It is endless and unselfish and enduring come what may For nothing can destroy it or take that love away . . . It is patient and forgiving when all others are forsaking, And it never fails or falters even though the heart is breaking . . . It believes beyond believing when the world around condemns, And it glows with all the beauty of the rarest, brightest gems . . . It is far beyond defining, it defies all explanation, And it still remains a secret like the mysteries of creation . . . A many splendoured miracle man cannot understand And another wondrous evidence of God's tender guiding hand.
Helen Steiner Rice is, perhaps, not so very "in vogue" today.
But, at one time, especially in the United States, everyone knew her name. In fact, all one had to do was open up a greeting card and there'd, more than likely, be one of her poems.
Often referred to as the "poet laureate of inspirational verse," Helen Steiner Rice (May 19, 1900 – April 23, 1981) was an American writer of both inspirational and Christian poetry. This author of inspirational verse had quite an inspirational life herself and her biography is well worth examination.
I wanted to salute you as my Featured Poet this quarter, Mrs Steiner-Rice. And thank you for saying the words so beautifully that I (and I'm sure quite a few others) could not express as well. Your poem about a Mother's love that I poorly re-typed on a (now quite yellowed with age) sheet of typing paper in my sophomore Typing class is one that I'm sure my own Mother found quite moving.
Little did I know I'd come across it 50 years later and be brought to tears myself.
Life sure has a funny way of coming around again.
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3rd Quarter 2025:
Born in Saigon, poet and editor Ocean Vuong was raised in Hartford, Connecticut, and earned a BA at Brooklyn College (CUNY). In his poems, he often explores transformation, desire, and violent loss.
Vuong is the author of the poetry collections Time Is a Mother (2022) and Night Sky With Exit Wounds (2016), the winner of the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize, and the chapbooks No (2013) and Burnings (2010), which was an Over the Rainbow selection by the American Library Association.
In May 2025 he released his new novel The Emperor of Gladness. His novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019), was longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal in Fiction, the 2019 Aspen Words Literacy Prize, and the PEN/Hemingway Debut novel award; the novel was also shortlisted for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and won the 2019 New England Book Award for Fiction.
"Take your time with these poems and return to them often." - Washington Post
His honors include fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Poets House, Kundiman, and the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts as well as an Academy of American Poets Prize, an American Poetry Review Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets, a Pushcart Prize, and a Beloit Poetry Journal Chad Walsh Poetry Prize.
The New York Times bestseller Time Is A Mother simply wowed me!
Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the cost of being the product of an American war in America.
“In this highly anticipated second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong ruminates on time. It becomes a character of its own, both an obstacle and motherly, something that can nurture and hold. Written in the aftermath of his mother’s death, Vuong’s poems are raw with grief and darkness, but there are radical moments of joy and resilience even through that. Through these poems, Vuong sings loud and clear of everything worth living for and discovering..." --NPR, "Books We Love"
Selecting a single favorite poem of his was hard because I have so many. But I think this particular poem about the U.S. evacuation of South Vietnam is truly brilliant. I had to look up the word "aubade" and found the word's origins interesting given the colonial history of Vietnam. A song or poem that greets the dawn, or a morning love song, aubade can also refer to a song or poem about lovers parting at dawn. The form originated in medieval France.
Aubade with Burning City
by Ocean Vuong
South Vietnam, April 29, 1975:
Armed Forces Radio played Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” as a code to begin Operation Frequent Wind, the ultimate evacuation of American civilians and Vietnamese refugees by helicopter during the fall of Saigon.
Milkflower petals on the street
like pieces of a girl’s dress.
May your days be merry and bright...
He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips.
Open, he says.
She opens.
Outside, a soldier spits out
his cigarette as footsteps
fill the square like stones fallen from the sky. May all
your Christmases be white as the traffic guard
unstraps his holster.
His hand running the hem
of her white dress.
His black eyes.
Her black hair.
A single candle.
Their shadows: two wicks.
A military truck speeds through the intersection, the sound of children
shrieking inside. A bicycle hurled
through a store window. When the dust rises, a black dog
lies in the road, panting. Its hind legs
crushed into the shine
of a white Christmas.
On the nightstand, a sprig of magnolia expands like a secret heard
for the first time.
The treetops glisten and children listen, the chief of police
facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola.
A palm-sized photo of his father soaking
beside his left ear.
The song moving through the city like a widow.
A white ... A white ... I’m dreaming of a curtain of snow
falling from her shoulders.
Snow crackling against the window. Snow shredded
with gunfire. Red sky.
Snow on the tanks rolling over the city walls.
A helicopter lifting the living just out of reach.
The city so white it is ready for ink.
The radio saying run run run.
Milkflower petals on a black dog
like pieces of a girl’s dress.
May your days be merry and bright. She is saying
something neither of them can hear. The hotel rocks
beneath them. The bed a field of ice
cracking.
Don’t worry, he says, as the first bomb brightens
their faces, my brothers have won the war
and tomorrow ...
The lights go out.
I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming ...
to hear sleigh bells in the snow ...
In the square below: a nun, on fire,
runs silently toward her god —
Open, he says.
She opens.
___________
2nd Quarter 2025:
Two interpretations are found in this Easter Hymn -- how will you interpret it?
An Easter Hymn by A. E. Housman
If in that Syrian garden, ages slain, You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain, Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night The hate you died to quench and could but fan, Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.
But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by, At the right hand of majesty on high You sit, and sitting so remember yet Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat, Your cross and passion and the life you gave, Bow hither out of heaven and see and save. ______________________
How do you interpret this poem?
Is it about Jesus who lived in the Syrian region and was slain on the cross? Who died to quench sin and hate? Who is often named the Son of Man? Whose grave was torn open and who now sits at the right hand of God? Who bore a cross and gave his life to see and save?
Housman invites that interpretation, yes.
But Housman wrote in his later years that he was moved to write this poem during World War I. He was devastated, as were so many in those years, by the reports of the slaughter of men of all ages upon "no man's land" (that deadly space between the opposing side's trenches) that the men in those trenches often jokingly referred to as "the garden, where your guts got planted" - hence, Housman's reference to the garden where these men of all ages were slain.
Note also Housman's depressing view of war - that all these men die in vain,
their hopes and dreams to end and quench all hate
go up in smoke, a fire that they (or, all wars)
could but fan
- that is, only make worse.
The second stanza finds hope that these sons of men who bore their awful cross and gave their lives might still find purpose - their deeds remembered by us and, as a consequence, their deeds might still "see and save" us.
So you decide how you wish to interpret the poem.
A Shropshire Lad
A. E. Housman 1859 - 1936
During his years of study in London, Housman completed A Shropshire Lad, a cycle of 63 poems. After one publisher had turned it down, he then later helped subsidise its publication in 1896. At first selling slowly, it rapidly became a lasting success. Its appeal to English musicians who set many of the poems to music had helped to make it widely known before World War I, when its themes struck a powerful chord with English readers. The book has been in print continuously since May 1896.
A. E. Housman has always been one of my favorite poets. If you ever have the time, read his biography. Perhaps in reading it, you will understand my connection and affinity for him.
His love for his college mate Moses Jackson (an unrequited love that Moses never acknowledged) led Housman to write these words to Jackson:
Because I liked you better Than suits a man to say, It irked you, and I promised To throw the thought away.
Moses Jackson (1858–1923) as an undergraduate c. 1880
To put the world between us We parted, stiff and dry; "Good-bye," said you, "forget me." "I will, no fear," said I.
If here, where clover whitens The dead man's knoll, you pass, And no tall flower to meet you Starts in the trefoiled grass,
Halt by the headstone naming The heart no longer stirred, And say the lad that loved you Was one that kept his word.
Houseman makes more subtle references to his homosexuality in other poems as well. His poem "Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?", written after the trial of Oscar Wilde, addressed British society's general attitudes towards homosexuals.
In the poem the prisoner is suffering "for the colour of his hair", a natural quality that, in a coded reference to homosexuality, is reviled as "nameless and abominable." Oscar Wilde, a man with very light blonde hair, refused to wear it greased as was the custom. And in British society at the time, men who wore their hair ungreased and natural (as did women) were considered effeminate. Housman attacks the ridiculousness of this social expectation and for many years following the poem's publication also refused to grease his hair.
Housman was a professed atheist and was often at odds with the religious benefactors of the university. When, during his tenure, an immensely rare Coverdale Bible of 1535 was discovered in the UCL library and presented to the Library Committee, Housman (who had become an atheist while at Oxford) remarked that it would be better to sell it to "buy some really useful books with the proceeds." A remark that the Dean of Housman's school demanded Housman provide a written apology for in the school newspaper.
He never spoke in public about his poems until 1933, when he gave a lecture "The Name and Nature of Poetry", arguing there that poetry should appeal to emotions rather than to the intellect. His publications throughout his life as an independent researcher earned him a high academic reputation and appointment as professor of Latin at University College in London in 1892. In 1911 he became the Kennedy Professor of Latin at the University of Cambridge.
Today he is regarded as one of the foremost classicists of his age and one of the greatest classical scholars of any time.
Housman died, aged 77, in Cambridge. His ashes are buried just outside St. Laurence's Church in Ludlow. A cherry tree was planted there in his memory and still stands today. I encourage you to read A Shropshire Lad II, to understand the relevance of that tree planting
_______________
4th Quarter 2024:
“i don’t pay attention to the world ending.
it has ended for me many times
and began again in the morning.” ― Nayyirah Waheed,salt.
Nayyirah Waheedis a contemporary poet known for her evocative and powerful works that have left a lasting impact on modern literature. Born in 1979, not much is known about her personal life, as she prefers to keep a low profile and let her poetry speak for itself. Despite the mystery surrounding her biography, her poetry has garnered critical acclaim and is frequently shared through social media accounts. Her poetry is known for being "short and minimalistic" and "incredibly touching", covering topics such as love, identity, race, and feminism.
“you can not remain at war between what you want to say (who you really are) and what you should say (who you pretend to be). your mouth was not designed to eat itself. – split” ― Nayyirah Waheed,salt.
One of Waheed's most influential works is her debut poetry collection, "salt.," which was self-published in 2013. In addition to "salt.," Waheed has continued to publish thought-provoking poetry collections, including "nejma." Her unique voice and unapologetic exploration of personal and universal truths have earned her a dedicated following and cemented her status as a leading voice in modern poetry.
Here are a few more of my favorite lines from Waheed's poetry:
“never trust anyone who says they do not see color. this means to them you are invisible.” ― Nayyirah Waheed,salt.
“cry wild. you have probably never cried wild. but, you know what doors feel like. you have an intimacy with doors and that is killing you - - break” ― Nayyirah Waheed,Salt
“you see your face. you see a flaw. how. if you are the only one who has this face.” — the beauty construct” ― Nayyirah Waheed,Salt
“grieve. so that you can be free to feel something else.” ― Nayyirah Waheed, nejma
________________
2nd Quarter 2024:
After reading over these lines written by Etel Adnan two or three times and reflecting on them
the more I was in awe of their summation of the times we are living in --
and they left me feeling so helpless and afraid for the future of our planet.
While some gardener plants his red, white, and blue flowers
some angel moved in with me to flee the cold and warned me
temperatures on earth are rising
while we wear upon us some immovable frost
and, in sadness,
everyone carries his dying as a growing shadow.
from The Spring Flowers Own: “This unfinished business of my / childhood”
Etel Adnan 1925-2021
Poet, essayist, and painter Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon. The daughter of a Greek Christian mother and a Syrian Muslim father, she spoke both Greek and Arabic with her parents, but French became her primary language upon enrolling in a French Lebanese Catholic school at the age of five. While working for the French Information Bureau, she attended at the Ecole Supérieure de Lettres de Beyrouth, where she composed her first poems. Adnan also studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, the University of California at Berkeley, and Harvard University.
Adnan taught philosophy at San Rafael’s Dominican College from 1958 to 1972, where, in connection with the ongoing Algerian war of independence, she began to resist the political implications of writing in French. To address this conflict, she shifted the focus of her creative expression to visual art and began making abstract oil paintings. In response to the Vietnam War, Adnan began to write poems again, though in English rather than French.
thankfully I am not at the mercy of men
since trees live in my fantasies
men and trees long for fire
yet, call for the rain --
Who can explain?
I love rains which carry my desires away to the oceans.
from
The Manifestations of the Voyage
Influenced by Rimbaud, Lyn Hejinian, and Jalal Toufic, Adnan’s poetry incorporates surrealist imagery and powerful metaphorical leaps with language-based and formal experimentation, using unexpected and experimental techniques to address the nature of exile and political, social, and gender-based injustice. Adnan is the author of numerous books of prose and poetry, and is also a painter, sculptor, and weaver whose art has been exhibited internationally. Her many collections of poetry include Shifting the Silence (2020); Time (2019), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize; Surge(2018); Night (2016); Seasons (2008); There: In the Light and the Darkness of the Self and the Other (1997).
She lived in Sausalito California and in Paris with her partner, the artist and writer Simone Fattal. Adnan died in November 2021.
_________
1st Quarter: JANUARY, 2024
Born in Kirkuk in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1967, Kajal Ahmad began
publishing her remarkable poetry at the age of 21. She published four books of
her poetry (1999-2004), each of which earned her a considerable reputation for her brave,
poignant, and challenging work throughout the Kurdish-speaking world.
During the War in Iraq and as her own Kurdish people's
plight dominated the News she began to receive international notice as her
poems were translated and published globally. The
English-language Handful of Salt, a translated collection, was released in 2016.
Her writings reflect her
commitment to preserving Kurdish culture, the liberation of Kurdistan and to
gender equality.
An excerpt from In This Country of Terror I Love the Streets More Than Its Men
I need a street
Empty of bloodstains,
A street that has never seen
Or known terror.
Let it be flawless, let it be flawless, flawless
Like the sex of these girls they killed so unjustly.
Let it be long, let it be long, long
Like their agony.
I challenge you to read the entire poem and not sense her inner pain and anguish.
In addition to writing poetry, she also works as a journalist where she is able
to write social commentary and analysis, particularly on women's issues and
politics. She refuses to wear the
veil and writes about a conservative culture that restricts women's life
choices and the contradictions inherent in her homeland's cultural norms.
Because of this, Kajal's lifestyle has repeatedly drawn criticism in
conservative circles of her society.
The following poem of hers made me think of this current era I am witnessing - one where Lies are spun into Truth, and former Truths are now Lies. Where our heroes and great men of yesterday are, today, gleefully insulted by small men pretending to be great, stupid men with no honorable past brought to prominence by ego-hungry social media influencers who praise dictators. With their warped views on history the sheep who follow these men lead us on the frightening journey toward the inevitable repeating of the past.
Mirror
by Kajal Ahmad
My era's obscuring mirror
shattered
because it magnified the small
and made the great seem insignificant.
Dictators and monsters
filled its contours.
Now when I breathe
its jagged shards pierce my heart
and instead of sweat
I exude glass.
____________
4th Quarter, OCTOBER 2023
Steel engraving of Walt Whitman
This month I celebrate one of my favorite poets and share with you one of my favorite passages from his great work
Walt Whitman is considered one of the most influential poets in American history.
Whitman is often called the father of free verse. His work was controversial in his time, particularly his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described by some as obscene for its overt sensuality.
"Song of Myself" was included in that collection.
_____________
I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
One world is aware
and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.
My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,
I laugh at what you call dissolution,
For I know the amplitude of time.
I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,
Welcome! I am a 6th generation Texan and proud resident of Williamson County where I graduated from Granger High School and Georgetown’s Southwestern University. I have a B.A. in World Religions from that institution and my Masters of Divinity I received from the Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Austin. While I spent most of my career teaching high school and writing curriculum, I still have an abiding interest in the psychology of religion. I am fascinated by how our religious conditioning (or lack of) as adolescents impacts our cognitive development (including the spiritual beliefs we form in our minds as adults) and how these particular perspectives, unique to every individual, affect our life's journey. In my own journey today I'd be labeled Universalist / Unitarian. Other descriptors: Occasional Pollotarian / Regular Pescatarian; Bibliophile / Anglophile; Antiquarian / History Buff; Pragmatist / FreeThinker.
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