There are writers you know about and writers you read. Before I heard him speak, Ta-Nehisi Coates was only the former to me—he came to my school and spoke to a packed auditorium about American self-conception, idealism, and his role in dislodging us from it. This week I’ve been sprinting through his amazing new book, Between the World and Me.

We met at the revolving hotel door. You’d shaved three weeks of growth while I had three glasses of wine in the lounge—I was too early, I’d gone and come back. You’re late, you said.

Who has dislocated the world? / and why are birds circling in our stomachs?

Separated by only seven years, Dylan Thomas and W.H. Auden had what might be called a friendly rivalry—at least, that is, from Thomas’ point of view. The hard-drinking Welsh poet once wished Auden a happy seventieth birthday—on his thirtieth.

Special Collections, University of Vermont Libraries. No matter how much of a political junkie you are, you must surely have had enough of the spectacle that is the 2016 campaign for the presidency.

A few years ago I heard a report on the radio about the spectacular mass hatching of Periodical Cicadas in the eastern seaboard states of the US. It put me in mind of Richard Wilbur’s poem, Cicadas.

"Some people forget that love is tucking you in and kissing you 'Good night' no matter how young or old you are." Her poetry is, perhaps above all, a masterwork of translation — the personal into the universal, the mundane into the monumental, the traumatic into the transcendent. Inside and between her verses, the most elemental human longings and concerns — love, loss, friendship, loneliness, freedom — at once new and even more immutable.

In the psychological journal, the secrets we carry from lifetime to lifetime are coined traumatic transmissions. How generations later, holocaust survivors’ children nightmare starving, still, how our dreams discover the larger narrative, turmoil in our genomes overwhelming, unnamable, all that liminal space the poets are so fond of uncovering, how my father’s father hoarded...

Maybe I’m a man like men are, chalky and underlit, and you’re a man like other men are, all salutation and no meat, maybe I’m a woman like women are, heavy with mist and gravel, or I’m an animal, or an arrow, or maybe I’m soaking wet, maybe I drowned again, I forgot my soap, I forgot to use a metaphor, like: you’re the surface ice I’ll break through from underneath.

Hey, not sure, if people post their own stuff here but I thought I would give it a go. If you like these two I have others, that I might share at a later stage. These poems were both written a few years ago, in the midst of a depression I'm mostly through, so they no longer reflect my views, but I thought maybe they might resonate with others in a similar place as I was. I used to find a comfort when I found someone dealing with the same things. Felt less alone.

I ignite incense bought from India by a German and wonder Where the dates went the pomegranates Where is the prophet is she watching running after me like a small child probably waving shouting fervently...

In its pursuit of explaining things that previously seemed beyond words, does reason stifle the imagination? Can rationalism coexist with a reverence for mystery? Two great poems with opposing views, composed over 200 years apart—“Lamia” by John Keats and “Water” by Philip Larkin—address these vexed questions through the entangled concepts of water and light.

If I should ever cease to be amazed and enraptured by the magic of clouds, I should wish myself dead. And I am hardly alone — since the dawn of our species, the water cycle’s most visible expression in the skies has bewitched artists, poets, and scientists like as a beautiful natural metaphor for the philosophy that there in an inherent balance to life, that what we give will soon be replenished.

By Jenni Herd, 16, from Kilmarnock, E. Ayrshire

Desiderata (Latin for ‘things to be desired’) is a famous poem with a complicated history. Max Ehrmann (1872-1945), a lawyer and poet from Indiana, wrote the poem sometime in the 1920s and distributed it locally, although it never received any widespread attention.

Taylor Mali is an American slam poet, humorist, teacher, and voiceover artist. "What Teachers Make" is likely his most famous poem.

In our moment of instant assessment and “if you like this, you’ll like that” algorithms, it would seem that we’re approaching the end of taste. As our muscle for cultivating taste weakens, and globalization thrives, the lines demarcating good and bad appear increasingly fluid, and therefore changeable, even irrelevant. It’s a democratizing notion, and a seductive one. But as you’ll read in the Boundaries of Taste, the second of this year’s four special inquiries into borderlines factual and...

Virginia Konchan reviews Julie Cohen's I Was Not Born today in Rumpus Poetry. Divided into six sections, I Was Not Born is a meditation on a subjectivized world whose missing center is what Regina Spector calls “I’m awake to feel the ache”: the ache of wondering, the ache of unrequited love, the ache of the body, as it trains itself, Orpheus-like, not to look back, not to remember, or, rather, to remember to forget, particular the event horizon of life, as Wallace Stevens says, being...