Poetry For All

Today Sophie Cabot Black opens a three-episode series of poems written in response to Anne Bradstreet, the first published poet from America. This poem inhabits Bradstreet's voice, opening questions about faith and doubt and what she hoped to leave behind. We get the experience of looking back across a life, and wondering.

Sophie Cabot Black is a marvelous poet with four collections of poems, the winner of many prizes and fellowships. See her website for more details: https://sophiecabotblack.com/

This poem comes from a new book, Anne Bradstreet Now: Modern Poets Respond, that collects new poems and essays by a diverse range of extraordinary and prize-winning poets all responding to the world and work of Anne Bradstreet.

Click here for more details on the book.

Anne Bradstreet was a Puritan poet who came to what they called "New England" in 1630. Her book of poems, The Tenth Muse, became the first book of poems published in print by someone from North America. She has been read and taught for almost 400 years.

We also invite you to listen to Episode 9 of this podcast, which covers one of her poems.

Here is the poem:

What I meant to say was

(Anne Bradstreet, Andover Massachusetts, Autumn 1669)

Let the house burn again;

Already I outlive the New World,

The last dog dead, one cow

Remnant in the gleaning wind

Of leaf-fall and each child left

For elsewhere. To stay

Past those I buried; I do not know

What more to spend --

The government of man

By man brings no one home.

No longer do I want

To be upon this hill,

This place of so much wind

Where I keep writing

Past the end. I have broken

Each sentence, halved

Then half again, each word

Simpled down like old oxen

Kept as if to cover

The whole field, turn

By turn. Now the words

Come less, the clouds so fast

And now what I thought

I thought. For what

Have I survived:

To save each house,

A door sprung open, plain,

Willing each hinge

To work, verse

By verse to outlast,

Outlove whatever it is

You bring forth.

Photo of Sophie Cabot Black by Beowulf Sheehan

Special thanks to Evan Rosa for help with today's episode.

This live episode looks at the power of poetry for defamiliarizing the familiar and increasing our attention to the world around us. We met with First United Methodist Church in Normal, Illinois to discuss Richard Wilbur's sonnet and Abram Van Engen's book "Word Made Fresh."

Check out Abram Van Engen's book, "Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church," wherever you get books.

For the text of the poem, see here.

For more on Richard Wilbur, see The Poetry Foundation.

Credit Line: "Praise in Summer" from Collected Poems 1943-2004 by Richard Wilbur Copyright (c) 2004 by Richard Wilbur. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

In this episode, we continue our series on the villanelle with Patricia Smith's "XXXL." In this poem, Smith uses the constraints of the villanelle form to create a powerful portrait of familial love.

Patricia Smith is the author of numerous collections of poetry, a winner of the National Book Award for The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scribner, 2025), and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts.

In this episode, we continue our villanelle series with the incredible formalist poet A.E. Stallings. Every form begs for a bending of the rules, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in big ways. We look here at how slight bends in the rules bring home the poem.

For more on A.E. Stallings, see her biography at The Poetry Foundation.

Thank you to Northwestern University Press for permission to read the poem. This poem comes from A.E. Stallings' remarkable collection of poems titled Olives. We encourage you to check it out.

For another great villanelle of Stallings that is available online, see Daedal.

In this episode, we introduce the first villanelle in our three-part series on that poetic form. We begin with Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," a poem that attempts to stave off the inevitability of mortality.

To learn more about Dylan Thomas, visit the Poetry Foundation.