Poems from the Spring & Fountain Leaders’ Meeting

Each year, before Spring & Fountain, our poetry program for teachers, begins we meet with all of the Dodge Poets who will lead sessions around the state. We all come together to discuss the program, and we actually take part in a Spring & Fountain style session – we each bring 4 poems of our own to read aloud, with copies for everyone.

Each year, we like to share with you the poems we all had the change to discover in this meeting. In no particular order, these are the poems our group chose to read aloud to one another. We hope you find some poems you enjoy!

“A glass of beer” – James Kenneth Stephens
“Kidnap Poem” – Nikki Giovanni
“Shake the Dust” – Anis Mojani
“The Sun Rising” – John Donne
“First Warm Morning, Amsterdam Avenue” – Marcus Jackson
From “Kindness” – Naomi S. Nye
“Remodeling the Bathroom” – Ellen Bass
“The First Time Percy Came Back” – Mary Oliver
“Keeping Things Whole” – Mark Strand
“Kore” – Robert Creeley
“Alien Vs. Predator” – Michael Robbins
“I Take Back Everything I’ve Said” – Nicanor Parra
“Tonight I’ve watched” – Sappho
“The Death of a Small Town” – B.H. Fairchild
“Keats” – B.H. Fairchild
“Half February” – Charles Wright
“I Am a Wall in a House and I Have A Duty to Remain Erect” – Glenn Shaheen
“notes for the early journey” – Evie Shockley
“Seasons between Night and Day” – Michael McGriff
“St. Elizabeth” – Aracelis Girmay
“Canticle” –  Yusef Komunyakaa
“Hive” – Nick Flynn
“Carnival” – Rebecca Lindenberg
“Boy in Stolen Evening Gown” – Saeed Jones
“One Truth” – Hannah Sanghee Park
“Triage” – Jamaal May
“Caritas (St. Andrews Cathedral)” – Rachael Boast
From “Arriving Again and Again Without Noticing” – Linda Gregg
“Lamentations” – Norman Dubie
“The Collar” – George Herbert
“Five Flights Up”- Elizabeth Bishop
“During the Second World War” – Harvey Shapiro
“Spring” – Jim Harrison
“Space, between humans & gods” – Laura Kasischke
“Unsteady Yellow” – Tess Gallagher
“On Being Asked During A National Crisis to Write a Poem In Celebration of the Bicentennial of Ralph Waldo Emerson” – Maxine Kumin
“Discovery” – Anne Pierson Wiese
“Living By The Red River” – James Wright
“What To Do With Objects” from “A Week if Poems at Bennington” – Robert Bly