I recorded this while sitting on the shady bank of the Provo River, shoes off and feet in the water. It was over 90º outside, and my spot was one of the best places I can imagine along the entire Wasatch Front today.

Text of poem

This is the second sonnet in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Renascence and Other Poems, published in 1917.

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied

Who told me time would ease me of my pain!

I miss him in the weeping of the rain;

I want him at the shrinking of the tide;

The old snows melt from every mountain-side,

And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;

But last year's bitter loving must remain

Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!

There are a hundred places where I fear

To go,—so with his memory they brim!

And entering with relief some quiet place

Where never fell his foot or shone his face

I say, "There is no memory of him here!"

And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

This is a fun little poem, both highly felt and still deliberately clever. Millay is often a clever poet, and sometimes I think her cleverness gets in the way of sentiment. I don’t know if that’s the case here, but I don’t think so. What do you think?

Read more about this poem or subscribe at luckywords.net

Recorded on a lovely afternoon in early June 2025, up on Cascade mountain, a couple thousand feet above my house. In the recording, I promised a photo. Here it is:

The recording might be a bit quiet, and I apologize about that. If it’s annoying to you, just send me a note so that I’ll be motivated to find a better solution next time.

Text of poems

Sonnet 4

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend

Upon thyself thy beauty's legacy?

Nature's bequest gives nothing but doth lend,

And being frank she lends to those are free.

Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse

The bounteous largess given thee to give?

Profitless usurer, why dost thou use

So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?

For having traffic with thyself alone,

Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.

Then how, when nature calls thee to be gone,

What acceptable audit canst thou leave?

Thy unused beauty must be tomb'd with thee,

Which, used, lives th' executor to be.

Sonnet 5

Those hours, that with gentle work did frame

The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,

Will play the tyrants to the very same

And that unfair which fairly doth excel:

For never-resting time leads summer on

To hideous winter and confounds him there;

Sap cheque'd with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,

Beauty o'ersnow'd and bareness every where:

Then, were not summer's distillation left,

A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,

Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,

Nor it nor no remembrance what it was:

But flowers distill'd though they with winter meet,

Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

Sonnet 6

Then let not winter's ragged hand deface

In thee thy summer, ere thou be distill'd:

Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place

With beauty's treasure, ere it be self-kill'd.

That use is not forbidden usury,

Which happies those that pay the willing loan;

That's for thyself to breed another thee,

Or ten times happier, be it ten for one;

Ten times thyself were happier than thou art,

If ten of thine ten times refigured thee:

Then what could death do, if thou shouldst depart,

Leaving thee living in posterity?

Be not self-will'd, for thou art much too fair

To be death's conquest and make worms thine heir.

My voice was quite deep because I was dealing with the beginning of a cold that is still lingering.

I decided to do three sonnets at once because, frankly, the procreation sonnets get a little tiresome after a while. Every one has something interesting in it, but my whole goal is to give you a hook to learn to enjoy/appreciate poetry like this.

If you’re actually paying attention to what you’re reading, and if you pause to think and reread, you will of course see that Shakespeare is making an economic argument in sonnet 6. Basically, if one kid brings happiness, then ten kids will bring 10x happiness. The alternative without children, says Shakespeare is that your only heirs will be worms. Ouch.

If you head to the website you can see some unrelated photos I took at my recording spot

I grabbed some quick pictures with my phone of the wildflowers that were growing on the trail that day.

Beardtongues, mule’s ears, buckwheat, salsify, starwort, and flax. What a wonderful world, don’t you think?

All is well,

Jeff

Recorded on site and in one take on the banks of the Provo River, May 2025.

Today’s poem is by Susan Marsh who is in her own words a “writer, poet, artist” based in Wyoming. That career description is one I aspire to, though, of course I’d choose Utah. The poem was published in 2022.

Text of poem

“One Patch of Quilt” by Susan Marsh

We know about the way they treat the chickens

But on a budget, buy the cheaper eggs.

One man says wolves are meant for shooting,

Another lives with a wolf named Cucumber.

At the sight of a snake my mother grabbed the hoe.

I got there first, carried it to the woods and let it go.

Rescued from a backhoe's jaw, a rubber boa

Spent the winter eating crickets in a terrarium

Until it was warm enough to be set free.

The friend who kept it became an expert

In the ways of rubber boas, small shy snakes

Most of us have never seen.

It all comes down to empathy

One patch of quilt acknowledging the other

For we lie together with stitches tight,

The only escape an irreversible rending of the fabric.

from The Earth Has Been Too Generous (Finishing Line Press, 2022)

I’m fascinated by the idea of interspecies connectedness. I love stories about people working to give rights to trees and rivers, even though it complicates my own interaction with them. In some respects, having empathy for the deer that sneaks down from the foothills at night to snack on suburban gardens is easy: they’re hungry and we just put the food out there in the open. Sometimes it’s harder for me to generate empathy with some of my fellow humans (sidelong glance at the driver of the Cybertruck in the parking lot, Mike Lee, RFK Jr., the person who leaves his empty McDonald’s wrappers on the picnic table and just leaves, any billionaire ever). Perhaps there is a pathway from generating empathy with the natural world and increasing my empathy with my fellow humans.

Of course, the route of natural-world-empathy goes through stewardship. I’m trying to learn more about how it all works together, the natural world.

And I’m looking at the dead tree right next to me, all its bark pulled off and unable to move the liquid from the river right there just twelve inches away to its leaves. Or to where its leaves used to be. That tree is dead, but it’s surrounded by healthy, living trees. The ecosystem in this stretch of river seems healthy. It’s thriving.

On a hike in Zion NP a couple of weeks ago, I had long stretches with no human interaction. I was by myself, and I found myself talking to the plants. When I saw one whose name I knew, I’d say hello as I passed. I’d say, “howdy there, firecracker penstemon. Lookin’ good!” I’d brush the juniper branches in a friendly, nice-to-see-you way. And I know I’m absurd. I’d shut up and keep my hands to myself when I would pass a person going the opposite direction, but so long as I was alone, I pretended that I was at a party, and greeting the people I knew.

Was this generating empathy or insanity? Kate laughed when I told her about it. Maybe it’s both?

Regardless, I hope you enjoyed this poem and some brief analysis. Marsh says that we are like squares of quilt; can you think of a different metaphor that describes how we relate to others (people or animals)? If you’ve got one, write it down: you’ve got a poem! You can share it with me, if you’d like. I’d love to see them.

In the spirit of getting more prescriptive, this is the first of an intermittent and irregular series about how and why of poetry. Today: the portability of poetry, illustrated with a classic by Carl Sandburg, “Why Did the Children Put Beans in Their Ears?”

## Text of poem

“Why Did the Children Put Beans in Their Ears?” by Carl Sandburg

"Why did the children

put beans in their ears

when the one thing we told the children

they must not do

was put beans in their ears?

"Why did the children

pour molasses on the cat

when the one thing we told the children

they must not do

was pour molasses on the cat?"

I promised in the recording that you'd have it just about memorized by the time I was done with the episode. Let me know if that's true or not. I strongly suspect that it is, or close enough at least.

When I say that a poem is portable, I mean of course that you can carry it in your head. But here's an interesting thing that's true of poetry and very few other forms of art: what you have in your head is not a copy of the art, and it isn't a memory of the art. You have the thing itself. If you have the poem memorized, you have the poem, the original, all the time.

You may remember a song's performance, and you may remember a piece of visual art, but each of those are just copies. But for a poem, what is the original? While the manuscript in the poet’s hand is of course a discrete object on its own, the manuscript is not the poem. The poem is the words, and words are abstractions. When we write the poem down, we are simply capturing it. When you read it and especially when you memorize it, the action isn't happening on the page, but in your head.

And so, this Sandburg poem. I intentionally chose something easy to remember and apparently straightforward. But as I point out in the podcast, there are layers here. By memorizing this poem, you will discover times when it resonates with you, and the poem will grow in significance. You'll discover more meaning as you stick with it.

Recorded live on the La Virkin Creek Trail in Kolob Canyon, Zion National Park, May 2025. You’ll hear the wind noise pretty prominently at times, and I’m sorry if it annoys you. Not sorry enough to do anything about it, because I personally find it kind of charming.

There are a bunch of photos you can see if you visit the website (luckywords.net) that don’t show up in podcast notes.

## Text of poem

“Variations on the Word Love” by Margaret Atwood

This is a word we use to plug

holes with. It's the right size for those warm

blanks in speech, for those red heart-

shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing

like real hearts. Add lace

and you can sell

it. We insert it also in the one empty

space on the printed form

that comes with no instructions. There are whole

magazines with not much in them

but the word love, you can

rub it all over your body and you

can cook with it too. How do we know

it isn't what goes on at the cool

debaucheries of slugs under damp

pieces of cardboard? As for the weed-

seedlings nosing their tough snouts up

among the lettuces, they shout it.

Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising

their glittering knives in salute.

Then there's the two

of us. This word

is far too short for us, it has only

four letters, too sparse

to fill those deep bare

vacuums between the stars

that press on us with their deafness.

It's not love we don't wish

to fall into, but that fear.

this word is not enough but it will

have to do. It's a single

vowel in this metallic

silence, a mouth that says

O again and again in wonder

and pain, a breath, a finger

grip on a cliffside. You can

hold on or let go.

In this recording, as usual I break down some of my favorite lines/images/phrases, but I also use it to help illustrate my favorite definition of what poetry is: saying with words something that cannot be expressed in words. Which is a paradox, yes. But poetry is a paradox. And that’s why so many people dislike it.

I had originally written “that’s why so many people struggle with it,” but I realized that “struggling” is the point at issue here. Good poetry will always require some effort, some struggle. Poetry is trying to hang out at the edge of what language can do. All good poems are trying to say, “there’s no word in the language for this thing, and I’m going to try to explain it to you.” That’s what Atwood is trying to do here. Is it any wonder that it requires a little bit of effort from the reader? And in this case, don’t you feel just a little bit that you want to explain it better than she does? I hope you do, and I hope you try.

One of my favorite things on this hike was seeing all the flora and fauna. I of course like hiking with all the dramatic cliffs and geology, but I always get a thrill when I see a firecracker penstemon (penstemon eatonii) in glorious, full bloom.

And many, many lizards. I edited out of the recording where I saw a lizard and then went quiet for a full minute just watching it watching me. I think this is a western whiptail (aspidoscelis tigris), which is one of the cooler names for a lizard.

Strava recorded my hike as 15.88 miles, which I think is slightly exaggerated, but boy howdy were my knees feeling it by the end. Absolutely worth it, but it took a day to recover. I’m certainly glad it wasn’t warmer, and I’m glad to be getting back to my home turf tomorrow.

All is well,

Jeff

Text of poem

Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest,

Now is the time that face should form another,

Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,

Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.

For where is she so fair whose uneared womb

Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?

Or who is he so fond will be the tomb

Of his self-love, to stop posterity?

Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee

Calls back the lovely April of her prime;

So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,

Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.

But if thou live rememb’red not to be,

Die single, and thine image dies with thee.

Recorded on site and in one take in the Uinta National Forest up at about 6500 ft of elevation, just up the road from my house. The sun was shining, the orange-crowned warblers were singing.

This poem is another of Shakespeare’s procreation sonnets (and there’s still a number left to go), but this one is doing some interesting things with what it means to be a man (and a woman). Why is the woman nothing more than a field to be tilled in one line, and in another she is the model of the handsome young man? Is Shakespeare a creepy sexist or not? For sure he’s objectifying women, but according to Shakespeare do they play a contributing role or are they just functional?

This is always a fun poem to talk about with students, because they have feelings about like “unbless some mother” or “disdains the tillage of thy husbandry.” And then they get confused and worked up about “thou art thy mother’s glass”—and for good reason. It’s confusing! Some students find this process very frustrating, but then I can see some others start to light up, and when they can crack open a poem and start to see how it works, they glow a little: something that was opaque before is not at least partially comprehensible.

One of my goals in teaching poetry is to get them to slow down, pay attention, and to think deeply about what’s on the page. It’s a difficult skill for young people today, mostly because the world of social media is opposed to slowing down, opposed to paying attention, and opposed to thinking deeply. A hot take on a poem is almost always going to be wrong, or if not wrong, it’s so superficial that it might as well be wrong.

Even though I’ve taught poems for years and years, I still will find something that I didn’t understand or I didn’t see before. And then I’ll be embarrassed: how many students did I corrupt with my only partial understanding? Who am I to be teaching? On good days I realize that my newly-enlightened state is still only partial, and that I’ll surely find something new in the future that will make today’s reading look superficial and immature. And on and on.

Did you get just a little out of today’s poem? Is it making you think? If so, it’s doing its job, and you’re doing yours. Good work, all of us.

Recorded on site next to the river, up Provo Canyon in the second week of April 2025. As I was talking, the sun came from behind the mountain on the east and I went from slightly chilly to filled with glorious light. It was a good day.

Text of Poem

Here is is: “Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day” by Delmore Schwartz

Calmly we walk through this April’s day,

Schwartz was a Jewish-American poet in the mid 20th century, and was very much a New Yorker. He spent most of his career teaching, and isn’t very widely read anymore. I think his poetry is more cerebral than sensual, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it does make it hard to get excited at the first reading.

He died young (well, 52 feels young to me for anyone to die) of a heart attack, but had spent much of his adult life struggling with alcohol addiction and mental health issues.

Part of what makes this poem a little difficult is how he uses his verbs. Look these lines from the end of the poem: “My memory restore again and again / The smallest color of the smallest day.” What exactly is going on there? It would be a lot easier if he said “my memory restores [present tense] again and again…” because he would be telling us that his memory brings back tiny snippets of memory. Or imagine this version, “I wish that my memory could restore again and again…” to show that much is lost from his memory, but he wishes it were back. Or even, “To my memory: please restore again and again…”

Schwartz of course doesn’t give us that clarity, so we have to make it up ourselves. Which is part of what makes poetry cool, but it’s also work, and I get it, people don’t want to work for their leisure.

Next up

Shakespeare’s sonnet #3 is next on the docket. Yes, it is another procreation sonnet, but I think that sonnet #3 is a particularly good one.

This was recorded two weeks ago, on a day that I woke up and it was dumping snow. I went up Rock Canyon, which was just gorgeous. Now, just twelve days later, it’s warm and delightful.

Sorry about the sound quality, too. I was not planning to record, and this was just me and my phone.

Text of poem

William Shakespeare’s sonnet 2, “When forty winters shall besiege thy brow”

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,

And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,

Thy youth’s proud livery so gazed on now,

Will be a totter’d weed of small worth held:

Then being asked, where all thy beauty lies,

Where all the treasure of thy lusty days;

To say, within thine own deep sunken eyes,

Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.

How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use,

If thou couldst answer ‘This fair child of mine

Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,’

Proving his beauty by succession thine!

This were to be new made when thou art old,

And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

This is the second of the “procreation sonnets” and we’ve got a bunch more to go.1 Once we get past the procreation sonnets, things mix up a bit. But for now, the speaker (who might be Shakespeare or might be Shakespeare playing a character) has just one theme: telling the handsome young man to have some babies. Now.

What we see in this poem different from the first sonnet is an extended description of aging. Now, in this sequence, reaching the advanced age of 40 means that you’re *really* old. I take some umbrage at the sentiment. All intelligent people know that when you’re 40, you’re just getting started. Right?

Text of poem

“Spring” by Edna St. Vincent Millay

To what purpose, April, do you return again?

Recorded (and edited and posted!) while on site on the banks of the Provo River, on the morning of April 8, 2025.

Notes and thoughts

This is one grumpy poem about springtime, don’t you think? Millay is always a gutsy poet, and likes to poke you in the eye. What a gem.

What is she so grumpy about? Maybe it’s just me, but when I read the news today, sometimes I feel the same tension between the budding spring and the mean spirited chaos from all three branches of government. Amidst all the selfishness and greed, April’s new life might feel like the work of an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Millay won the Pulitzer in 1923 and died in 1950.

For the past few years, I’ve recorded a series of podcasts every April for National Poetry Month. It’s 2025, and I’m doing it again. Woohoo!

The original goal was to do a new poem every day: 30 poems over the course of the month. That is always too much work: finding the poems, doing some research, recording (on site outdoors!), editing, and posting. A daily podcast, even just a little ten minute job, could be a full-time job. In the past, I’ve had a full-time job and I don’t have the energy for two, and so I’d fade.

My plan this year is to play it by ear. I suspect that I’ll start out strong and midway through the month have a couple of hiccups that slow things down. It’ll be an adventure for the both of us!

Shakespeare’s Sonnet #1

Here’s the text of the poem:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,

Recorded on-site on a single track trail up Provo Canyon.

Some interesting links

* Sir Patrick Stewart reading the sonnet in the early days of Covid: video

* The Wikipedia page about controversies surrounding the word “niggardly” which, I remind you, is not etymologically related to the n-word.

Over the upcoming days and weeks, we’ll go through a number of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and a bunch of other poetry as well. If you have favorite poems, or poems that you’ve always felt guilty because you didn’t “get” them, send ‘em my way! I’ll do a podcast about it and you’ll get a wedge into understanding what you previously considered ununderstandable.

The real goal of these is to help non-poetry people grow to be poetry-tolerant. You know who I mean: folks (maybe like you?) who say, “why do they have to make everything so difficult? Why can’t poetry just say what they mean?” Or maybe folks who when they see something in poetry, they just stop reading and move onto something else.

If that’s you, you’re missing out. Poetry is one of the great art forms. Every culture throughout history has poetry, and it’s important. Reading poetry will put hair on your chest. Or if nothing else, you could learn to enjoy it.

I am genuinely excited for this. Which is nutty, I know! But I really do love poetry, and I like talking about poetry, and people have enjoyed listening to me talk about poetry before.

Do you know anyone who already enjoys poetry (or who might enjoy poetry) that might like listening to a slightly gruff-voiced guy read and give a (very brief!) explication? If so, forward this email on to them. Ask ‘em to subscribe! Wait: have you subscribed? It’s free! What’s stopping you?

Until next time.

All is well,

Jeff