Produced exclusively for our members, the Fall–Winter issue features cover art by Childe Hassam; essays by B. K. Fischer, Eunsong Kim, and Rena Priest. Become a member to receive your digital and physical copy of the most recent issue of American Poets.
One of the most widely distributed poetry magazines featuring a panorama of poems, essays, and more by American poets
American Poets Magazine
- Unbinding Poetic Lives by Eunsong Kim
- River as a Verb: Reading Ecopoetry with High School Students by B. K. Fischer
- “The poetry of earth is ceasing never…”: Reflections on Ecopoetry by Rena Priest
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Browse features from previous issues:
Years ago, when I was a young Black woman barely recognizable to myself because of the churn of heat and anger just beneath my surface, I found the writings of Audre Lorde. It was the universe, or the ancestors, or intuition that brought Audre Lorde to me, a Black woman, a Black woman writer, and a Black mother.
“We think back through our mothers,” as Virginia Woolf famously said. I think Edna St. Vincent Millay should be seen as one of our poetic mothers, along with poets like H. D. and Muriel Rukeyser. Swept under the rug of modernism and disdained in MFA programs, a renascent Millay looks surprisingly current. She sounds a lyrical battle cry for women’s freedom, for social justice, for the nuances of human emotion, and for the loveliness our monetized culture has trashed…
In his essay Democratic Vistas (1871) Walt Whitman writes, “Democracy… is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted.”
Excerpted from How to Love a Country: Poems (Beacon Press, 2019).
On the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Ai’s poetry collection, Killing Floor, which received the Lamont Poetry Selection in 1978 and is being reissued by Tavern Books this month, Major Jackson re-examines the celebrated poet’s work.
Eileen Myles moved from Boston to New York City to become a poet in 1974.
So much of what makes art interesting and human are its particulars. Everyone comes from somewhere, in time and place, and it is both inane and gross to pretend that this does not matter, when it matters more than almost anything. And yet, as Aleixandre writes, “Love, sorrow, hatred, death are changeless.” This too seems true to me.
When I went to the University of Virginia’s bookstore to pick up semester readings for Fall 1999, what I noticed about
Among the medieval artifacts in the British Museum is an example of what’s called an acoustic pot.
A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favor rather than silver and gold.
