When you read a poem, you might be struck by its form on the page, the page etched with careful words, the words teased into line breaks. But when you hear it? Then you meet the poem in a more ...

Humans spend most of their waking hours playing with what novelist Rudyard Kipling called “the most powerful drug used by mankind”—words. In the laboratories of our minds, we sort, slice, and string ...

In “What is Poetry? Part 1,” Jeffrey Thomson mentions everything from badgers and hurricanes to subways and Times Square. Somehow that makes the “Part 2” poem from his new book, “Half/Life: New & ...

Once, in my youth, I took a graduate philosophy seminar I thought would be about law and justice: Instead we discussed the semantic implications of punctuation marks. After class, I found myself ...

Poetry is close to my heart. I would be lost without its very specific magic, its ability to spark wonder and shock and to open up fresh vistas on life in God. But as W. H. Auden famously says in his ...

Poetry therapy is an expressive arts therapy utilizing poems, lyrics, metaphors and more. It can be used to address a range of issues and conditions, including depression and PTSD. Poetry therapy can ...

When I was in the seminary, our English teacher, Fr. Ignatius Burrill, introduced us to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I'll always remember these lines from "As Kingfishers Catch Fire": I say ...

A freshman dorm mate won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry nearly a decade ago. His book sold, according to the last count that I saw, 353 copies. Sure, there is at least one young contemporary poet, ...