Thoughts about poetic form. In my last two essays I talked about what form — rhyme and meter — can do for a poem. This poem shows what form — in the shape of a web — can do for a hungry spider. The Orb Weaver In the pre-dream of…

some useful hints — Can you recall ever giving a poetry reading that might have gone better, or might better not have happened at all? It happens to all of us. …

Poem — In the Carboniferous House a pillar of gnats stands in the absence of a prophet’s glance, dragonflies flirt with forever amber. In the Herpeterium Dimetrodon, under improvised sail, duck-billed Hadrosaur, helmet- headed Pachycephalosaur show you don’t need brains to inherit the earth. Gigantopithicus (9’ 600 lbs) shows what the…

If poetry is a matter of sounds, then sound must be the basic unit of form. Putting it another way, what do assonance, alliteration, rhyme, meter, rhythm — all of the tools in the toolbox used for constructing form in poetry — have in common? All of them, in their…

Poem — It seemed I heard the one they called the Armouress complain, longing for the days when she was young. Le Testament, Francois Villon My poet-punk, poète maudit, When it comes to women you know shit. Look at the girls who’ve eyes to see What God gave them for tush and tit: They set their…

A video poem Be the first to receive my essays by subscribing to my biweekly newsletter. As thanks for joining, you’ll receive a free PDF of my out-of-print book, Centennial Suite. To read more of my work, please visit my website at johnbarrpoetry.com. John Barr’s poems have been published in five books, four fine press editions, and many magazines, including The New York Times, Poetry, and others. John was also the Inaugural President of the Poetry Foundation. His newest book, The Boxer of Quirinal, will be published by Red Hen Press in June 2023. You can view more of his work at johnbarrpoetry.com and on Instagram (@johnbarrpoetry).

A poem — I. No house outlasts its hill. Here, especially, fifty years will see bones, the basement scar, something in its place. But for now the half-moons of the hammer’s miss could have been carpentered yesterday; kernels of resin sweated from joists, still soft to the thumbnail, shine. In the room where the well probes…

If the history of Western literature were compressed into a single day, Homer would declaim the opening lines of The Iliad on the stroke of midnight; Dante would climb out of Hell at 6 pm; Chaucer would ride for Canterbury at 7; Shakespeare and Milton would follow them across life’s…

A poem — He comes when the light is right, banking the pond’s perimeter to land and step into a statue’s stillness. When the light is right the fish come in to feed, feeling it safe to nose among the weeds, to risk the proximity of feet, of legs that rise like reeds to a distant…