204. Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note: Amiri Baracka

I know, another suicide poem. But this poignant and ends with hope. I write this a week after Amiri Baracka died. His death made me think about his post 9/11 poem, "somebody blew up america". It's quite the polemic. A study in anger--a dream denied (as Langston Hughes observed) just explodes, and Baracka is plenty...

22. Richard Cory: Edwin Arlington Robinson

I wrote a paper on Edwin Arlington Robinson and "Richard Cory" in eleventh grade, and after a student writes something that subject becomes, to them, the most important thing in the world. For years I thought of Robinson as one of the great American poets, even as I only really knew "Richard Cory". In my...