Former U.S. poet laureate Ted Kooser talks about his new love letter to a passing heartland America.

Novelist Nicholson Baker’s humorous take on poetry, rhyme, and the tortured lives of poets.

He was “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” Author Edna O’Brien reads into the poetry and many lovers of the great Lord Byron.

“Death be not proud.” “My love is a fever.” We look at 500 years of poets making sonnets.

Who needs an iPod if you’ve got poetry in your head? We’ll talk about the powerful pleasures of learning poems by heart.

Bad-boy poet Rimbaud lived hard, died young, and inspired generations — for better and worse. Novelist and biographer Edmund White tells the tale.

We look back on money, greed, and the bubble with a hedge-fund poet.

We sat down with California poet Kay Ryan, recently named the next poet laureate of the United States, to talk about her wordplay, her worldview, and where it all comes from.

The world is too much with us, goes the sonnet. And in fourteen lines we’re off, into the “jewel box” of poetic form. How do I love thee? Death, be not proud. My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun.
For five hundred years and more, from Petrarch and Shakespeare to Ginsburg and Seamus Heaney, the [...]

Eight hundred years ago this week, in the mountains of a Persian-speaking realm now known as Afghanistan, a great mystic poet of the Islamic world — and now the whole world — was born. In his lifetime, Jalaluddin Rumi and his family fled before invading Mongols, across what’s now Iran and into Turkey.
Today, his ecstatic, [...]