Poetry Letters

For almost ten years I have been sending out letters on poets and their poems. This website is linked to all those letters…

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Huck Gutman

Past Letters

2. On Reading These Pages - A Short Note
4. Zbigniew Herbert, “Five Men” 
5. Eugenio Montale, “Perhaps One Morning”
6. William Wordsworth, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”
7. William Carlos Williams, “To a Poor Old Woman”
8. Robert Frost, “The Oven Bird ” 
9. Pablo Neruda, “Ode to Tomatoes”
10. Elizabeth Bishop, “Sandpiper”
11. A Holiday Gift: “An Extraordinary Adventure Which Befell Vladimir Mayakovsky In a Summer Cottage”
12. Elizabeth Bishop, “In the Waiting Room”
13. Robert Hayden, “Frederick Douglass”
14. Anne Carson, “Essay on What I Think About Most”
15. Walt Whitman, “The Wound-Dresser”
16. Music and Transcendence: Beethoven, Mahler, Schonberg – and Rilke
17. Emily Dickinson, “As Imperceptibly as Grief”
18. Constantine Cavafy, “Comes to Rest”
19. William Wordsworth, “The World is Too Much With Us"
20. A. R. Ammons, “Corson’s Inlet”
21. A.E. Housman, “Terence, This is Stupid Stuff”
22. Zbigniew Herbert, “The Envoi of Mr. Cogito”
23. Charles Ives, “The Things Our Fathers Loved”
24. Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool” and “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock”
25. Seamus Heaney, “Singing School: 4. Summer 1969”
26. Charles Baudelaire, “A Rotting Corpse”
27. Vladimir Mayakovsky, "At the Top of My Voice"
29. James Dickey, “The Bee”
30. Maxine Kumin, “How It Is”
31. Zbigniew Herbert The Utility of Poems “Mr Cogito Reads the Newspaper”
32. Rilke, “Ninth Duino Elegy”
33. Larkin, Three Poems: “This Be the Verse,” “Mower,” and “Aubade”
34. Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
35. On the Limits of the Imagination
36. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “No Worst, there is none”
37. Guillaume Apollinaire “The Little Car”
38. A lighthearted interlude: Rossini
39. Arthur Rimbaud, “The Sleeper in the Valley” and “At the Cabaret Vert”
40. Bertolt Brecht, “When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain”
41. Paul Celan, “Once” and also “The Trumpet-Part”
42. Wilbur, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”
44. Frost “Nothing Gold Can Stay”
45. Rilke “On Music”
46. Stevens: “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself”
47. Paul Zimmer, “A Romance for the Wild Turkey”
48. William Carlos Williams, “Calypsos II,” a very short poem
49. Du Bellay and Baudelaire: “Heureux qui” and “Le Voyage”
50. William Bolcom “Lime Jell-O Marshmallow Cottage Cheese Surprise:”  Music, fun, and short
51. Mallarme and Yeats: “La Chair est triste” and “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”
52. Stevie Smith, “Not Waving but Drowning”
53. W. H. Auden, “Two of the China Sonnets”