The dreamcatcher is an American Indian craft item, and its symbolism can certainly serve as a muse for poetic exploration. Both dreamcatchers and poetry can explore the ethereal and imaginative realms, and like a dreamcatcher, the poet can draw inspiration from cultural symbols and rituals, incorporating them into our work to convey a sense of connection to heritage or the spiritual. Both serve as vessels for encapsulating the intangible aspects of life, whether it be the beauty of dreams or the complexities of human emotion. This poem is written in the rampage, a poetic form of 8 lines and 85 syllables that depends on an interior rhyme scheme and was crafted by Robert Bly.

The poem accounts for a Mexican border town antique store. Written in the Villanelle poetic form, the poem is about hope and the joy of discovery in vintage possessions.

The famed Minnesota poet Robert Bly has had a huge influence on my writing and I have grown to love his poetic form, the ramage. The idea of this particular work was to share a sense of desperation one can sometimes encounter in the deep South as warm nights activate a symphony of pests.

Here, I offer a poem with an open rhyme scheme, focusing on celebrating the beauty of the heritage of a place, in this case, the Chilean seaside city of La Serena. I suppose it could be considered a descriptive poem or lyrical because it both aims to depict scenes vividly and evoke emotions relating to the setting and emphasizes personal emotions or feelings for this place. The city translates in English to “the serene.”

A playful poem full of rhetorical devices such as alliteration, assonance, homophone, ambiguity, imagery, and imagination of a shepherd and sheep, set in the Scottish Highlands.

A light-hearted poem about the novelty of fortune cookies and the humor of finishing off their words of wisdom with an all-to-familiar twist.

A simple poem of emotion.

The ghazal (pronounced “guzzle”) is a form of amatory poem or ode use here. It originates in Arabic poetry. Medieval Persian poets embraced the ghazal, eventually making it their own. Consisting of syntactically and grammatically complete couplets, the form also has an intricate rhyme scheme. Each couplet ends on the same word or phrase (the radif), and is preceded by the couplet’s rhyming word (the qafia, which appears twice in the first couplet). The last couplet includes a proper name, often of the poet. In the Persian tradition, each couplet was of the same meter and length, and the subject matter included both erotic longing and religious belief or mysticism.

The late Chilean poet and Nobel Laureate, Gabriela Mistral, was born this week in 1889. This series of free-form haikus follows my journey into her Andean birthplace, deep within the Valle de Elqui.

Poetry has a very particular relationship with time. Sometimes we can feel the instance of a curious corner of an experience, even from years past.