Our fearless queens select and dissect favorite poems--to say why and how poems endure.

I Remember is a 1970 memoir written by author and artist Joe Brainard, depicting his childhood in the 1940s and '50s in Oklahoma as well as his life in the '60s and '70s in New York City. Brainard followed I Remember with I Remember More (1972) and More I Remember More (1973), both published by Angel Hair. Read Olivia Laing’s short, fabulous review of Joe Brainard’s book I Remember in The Guardian here. Of it, Laing says, “The Bible aside, I can't think of a more original or lovely book.”

Ada Limon’s poem “The Contract Says We’d Like the Conversation to be Bilingual” appears in Limon’s book The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. You can read the whole poem here. 

Hear Terrance Hayes read “Talk” and "The Blue Terrance" at the Folger Library here. 

Alexander Pope's sonnet "Sound and Sense" can be read here. 

James L. White’s prose poem “An Ordinary Composure” appears in The Salt Ecstasies and you can read it on a blog here.

 Rick Barot, “Wooden Overcoat” was featured on The Slowdown, and you can listen to that episode here. And you can read the whole poem here.

 Watch Maggie Anderson read from her work here (with Mira Rosenthal; ~16 min).

 While I couldn’t find “Let the Boats Drift” online, I can recommend “Let Evening Come,” which you can read here. 

 Read Larry Levis’s “In the City of Light” here.