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How can that be? For no very good reason I can think of, the idea of the Businessman/Poet intrigues the reading public no end. (If a surgeon plays the violin in a chamber group no one gives it a second thought.) Perhaps the two stereotypes, the “hardnosed” businessman and the “Romantic” poet, are at opposite […]
People often ask me how I come up with my poems. While I can’t provide a set rule for how poems come to me, or how I write them, here’s a little story about how one poem came to me. One snowy January day I was looking for a sales slip in order to exchange […]
A century ago the early Modernists, in their mania for the experimental, pushed all the boundaries of poetry. The traditional verse forms of 19th century poetry were abandoned for a century of free verse. The nostalgic poetry of the Edwardians (Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?) gave […]
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Poet, Vietnam veteran, and inaugural president of the Poetry Foundation—John Barr writes about survival, love, and the wildness of being human.
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