How I fell back in love with poetry

The beginning

I read poetry in school. In college. The way most of us do—assigned, analyzed, quickly forgotten. And then, for years, I lost touch with it entirely.

Until I picked up Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space. It's a book about how we inhabit houses, corners, drawers—but it's sprinkled with verses. Fragments of Rilke, Baudelaire, Supervielle. One thing led to another. I started seeking out the poems themselves. And somewhere in that seeking, I fell in love again.

The beauty of poetry is hard to describe. The poet laureate Tracy K. Smith once said that poetry is "a language that sits really close to feelings that defy language." That's as close as I've come to understanding why these words matter.

Why this matters now

We live in a world where everything seems boxed in. Quantified. Formatted. Templated. Edited. Everything is a bland knock-off of a knock-off of another knock-off.

I think we're all born with an innate sense to see the world like a poet does. To notice the strangeness of ordinary things. To sit with ambiguity. To wonder. But we lose it—with age, with time, with the relentless pressure to be productive, to optimize, to move faster.

What I'm convinced of is this: we need to reclaim our poetic sensibility. To revel in ambiguity, in the lack of easy meaning, in mystery, in the confounding nature of reality. To take in life—all of it, the grief and the joy, the happy and the sad—with a poetic and philosophical openness.

That's what this site is for. Not to teach you to write poetry. But to invite you to read it. To reclaim some of that magic we tend to lose with age and time.

The notes in the margins

Each poem here comes with reading notes—observations, not explanations. They're not meant to tell you what a poem means. They point to patterns, tensions, and moments you might have missed. A thoughtful friend sitting beside you, noticing things aloud.

The notes might be wrong. They might miss the point entirely. That's okay. Poetry resists being explained away. The poem is still there, waiting for your own reading, your own encounter.

Three ways to begin

• Wander

  Let chance decide. Poems appear one at a time, like cards dealt from a deck. Skip what doesn't speak to you, save what does. Most people find something they weren't looking for.

• Browse by feeling

  Looking for something specific? Find poems organized by emotional resonance—stillness, wonder, grief, joy, longing, defiance. Start where you are.

• Linger

  There's no rush here. Read slowly. Re-read. Let the words settle. Poetry rewards patience—and so does this site.