This week’s poems are arranged around the themes of retrospection and anniversaries in honor of the Close Reads Podcast celebrating its tenth year. Today, we have Rhina Espaillat turning over rich soil. Happy reading!

Today’s poem is a little hopscotch down memory lane. Happy reading.

Weatherford is author of over seventy books including fiction, non-fiction, and poetry inspired, she says, by “family stories, fading traditions, and forgotten struggles that center on African American resistance, resilience, remarkability, rejoicing and remembrance.”

Today’s bittersweet poem glimpses the life of Arthur Rowanberry across time and beyond. Happy reading.

Karina Borowicz was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts. She earned a BA in history and Russian from the University of Massachusetts and an MFA from the University of New Hampshire. Borowicz spent five years teaching English in Russia and Lithuania, and has translated poetry from Russian and French. Her first collection of poetry, The Bees Are Waiting (2012), won the Marick Press Poetry Prize, the Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry, the First Horizon Award, and was named a Must-Read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her second book, Proof (2014), won the Codhill Poetry Award and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Nightboat Press Poetry Prize. Borowicz lives with her family in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Today’s poem is a cautionary tale about achieving popular successes. Happy reading.

“Mark Ford summarized Graves’s ‘wholesale rejection of 20th-century civilization and complete submission to the capricious demands of the Goddess’ with a quote from The White Goddess: ‘Since the age of 15 poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric.’”

-via Poetry Foundation

Today’s poem is an invitation to an encounter with the Real. Happy reading.

Today’s poem is neither the first nor last to mythologize America’s sixteenth president. What is it about Lincoln that makes him so attractive to artists of every succeeding generation? Happy reading.

Today’s poem–from British humorist Roger Woddis–is a witty-yet-withering sendup of double-morality. Happy reading.

Today’s poem comes from the largest surviving trove of Anglo Saxon poetry–the Exeter Book. Happy riddling!

Louise Imogen Guiney is known for her lyrical, Old English-style poems that often recall the literary conventions of seventeenth-century English poetry. Informed by her religious faith, Guiney's works reflect her concern with the Catholic tradition in literature and often emphasize moral rectitude and heroic gallantry. Today Guiney is praised for her scholarship in both her poetry and in her numerous literary and historical studies.

-bio via Poetry Foundation