In “Beyond the Red River,” McGrath looks out at the North Dakota prairie and embraces winter.
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Monthly Archives: November 2025
A Poem for Entering December
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Poem for the Blue Heron", “Beyond the Red River", December, Mary Oliver, Midwest prairie, Tom McGrath, Winter Comments closed
Trusting the Gift Within
Merwin’s “Gift” helps us understand the meaning of Advent.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Gift", "White Owl Flies into and Out of the Field", Advent, Mary Oliver, W. S. Merwin Comments closed
My Life as Bildungsroman
Upon leaving college, I came to see literature more as a means of escaping my life than as a way of engaging with it more fully. That’s because I was unsatisfied with this life.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged bildungsroman, Don Quixote, Henry Fielding, Main Street, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sinclair Lewis, Tom Jones Comments closed
Thanksgiving, a Time to Remember
A Thanksgiving poem by Linda Pastan in which joy and melancholy are intertwined.
ICE and W.C. Williams’s Ice Box Theft
An Atlantic article applies Williams’s famous plum poet to the “Sandwich Guy” arrested by ICE for “hurling a hoagie.” But the poem applies more to the agents.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "This Is Just to Say", ICE, Sandwich Guy, William Carlos Williams Comments closed
Cliff’s Reggae Defined Jamaica
To honor Jimmy Cliff, who died yesterday, I share a Kwame Dawes poem about the importance of reggae to his appreciation of Jamaica.
Normalizing Nooses and Swastikas
The Coast Guard recently attempted to soften rules against swastikas and nooses before retreating. These lynching poems remind us what is at stake.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Strange Fruit", Abel Meeropol, Beloved, Claude McKay, Holocaust, lynching, lynchings, MAGA, racism Comments closed
On Lawrence and a Sexual Awakening
In my latest life in literature installment, I look at the impact of D.H. Lawrence on my college relationship with my future wife.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Ars Poetica", "Hummingbird", "Prayer for My Daughter", "Tortoise Shout", Archibald MacLeish, D. H. Lawrence, French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles, Man Who Died, Marriage, sexuality, W. B. Yeats, Weddings Comments closed