I wrote this parody based on Gerard Manley Hopkins's "God's Grandeur" in 2016, but it is unfortunately more relevant than ever.

Enjoying this new book by #DanaGioia and reading its essays in no particular order.

Snow flurries outside my window where I'm visiting in Boston. I've been living away from here so long I'd forgotten how much I like some of the white stuff to usher in the Solstice.

This old poem of mine draws on that. I rarely write free verse anymore, but the cadences of this feel flurry-like.

Here's a Bluesky- and winter-themed poem by the lovely Amherst hermit-poet Robert Francis.

Reading Ruth Pitter while I'm traveling over the holidays. She is so musical and contemplative. I love the rhyme scheme and supple meters in this quiet poem from the 1930s about keeping going.

💔 I feel the same way about my cat Checco, who disappeared 5 months ago. Here he is, lying on flagstones similar to the ones Ace is on. The last time I dreamed about him he was at the door taking his time about coming in or not. 😼

Maria Luisa Spaziani is my favorite postwar Italian poet. Among the many things I like is her creative engagement with the Italian tradition from Dante and Petrarch through Leopardi and Montale, as well as her deep absorption of the French symbolist poets. This poem is a case in point.

I agree, cat pics are obligatory. On twitter Saturdays used to be #caturday. Here's Blue, who happens to be gray.

My essay "Dante and Jerusalem" is in this book that draws on a conference in Florence in 2018 that explored the amazing connections between Florence and Jerusalem. The book is beautifully illustrated and quite expensive as a result, but your local or university library might (just might!) order it.

The poets who lived through 20th-century autocracies wrote news that stays news. Their voices are still fresh and alive while the lies and rhetoric of their age’s sociopathic leaders were dead from the start. Here's a poem from 1930s Italy, by Giuseppe Ungaretti, from my book of his Selected Poems.

Against the divisiveness of our times, in this poem that I wrote in 2016 I imagine rain as a great equalizer.

I've been translating some of Maria Luisa Spaziani's poetry. She is perhaps best known as Montale's muse (his "Volpe" or Fox), but she was much more besides. She was a fabulous and prolific poet in her own right. Spaziani died in Rome in 2019.

This one is from her first collection, in the 1940s.

Reading this new book by Dana Gioia. Besides the great cover photo and the title (which quotes Bellini on opera's aim), the book is a highly readable reflection on opera as dramatic poetry. I recommend it.