This weekend I read my first New Yorker in months, and my favorite passage came near the front of the book. Talk of the Town covered a middle school field trip to the New York Botanical Garden and the re-imagined garden of Emily Dickinson's family. The trip came on Poem in Your Pocket day, and each student picked his or her favorite. For one student, it was Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How Do I Love Thee?"

That kid returned later in the article when a class exercise had each student write verse to follow one of Dickinson's great openings, "The skies can't keep their secret!" We get the expected kid rhymes ("So they let it out in a crash / Crack boom bash") and then we get Alan.

Alan Zhong, the Elizabeth Barrett Browning fan, concluded his effort with the lines "It doesn't matter who you are, you will all be corpses soon / Shadows will fall over the land / Fire will burn through the crust / The kings of Hell will rise from disgrace / And steal the soul of us." James Baker, a friend of Zhong's, explained, with a shy smile, "It just flows through his veins, darkness, but he's actually a really nice guy."

Ha! Alan Zhong, good for you, kid. I don't know what your teen years are going to do to you, but don't stop writing. The boring way is never the right way, and you get that. It's okay to be the nice guy who gets the darkness. That's what invented rock 'n' roll, America and the Bible.

Two examples to that effect, the best of poems I've read recently–

1. "Waving Goodbye," by Elizabeth Spires. I have had it bookmarked for about two weeks, unable to decide whether it was a relationship poem or a break-up poem. The title immediately suggests the latter, but the narrative is more complicated. A couple, joking, wave farewell to their image in a reflective globe. Are they: waving to playful youth, their briefly captured time together or, more optimistically, the idea of being captured? Amazing how much two weeks changes perspective.

2. "Majesty," by Keith Waldrop. (I promise I'll get poems outside the Poetry Foundation feed someday.) It's about the terror of love. I think.

Rarely has a large or distant expedition
ever succeeded in its object, as may be
seen in the failure of foreign missions, of
human development, the immediate phenomena.

And sex.

The whole idyll vanishes. Southward along
a coastline, down among cities. Across the
gulf to the promontory. Probably
astonished. Not without mistrust.

And the last verse — "You are now my prisoner," it starts off — is total, wonderful bullshit. (Alan Zhong, I'm sorry for the language. Also, about sex, ask your parents.) In a love, we step forward in the early goings, would-be monarchs hoping to peacock enough to make people believe. But we're really only doing so because people are scary and we don't know what they want. We wish we knew! We hope to hang on and…

The suggested reading list for national education standards is out, and Emily Dickinson dominates. She gets five entries, far more than anyone else. Shakespeare gets three entries. Frost gets two. The entry every broadcast is gonna mention? Mr. Popper's Penguins. Too fun not to say.

But, kids, you know what's not as fun as penguins? Death. You know what Emily Dickinson wrote about all the time? Death. Kids, when she was your age, Emily Dickinson missed all kinds of school, was terribly afraid of death and then she dropped out of college. Happy reading!

For 2nd-3rd graders: "Autumn"

The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry's cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town.

The maple wears a gayer scarf,
The field a scarlet gown.
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I'll put a trinket on.

Analysis: Autumn, children, means the nearing of death. It never means anything else. You think autumn means the start of school? Ah, well.

(more…)

My wheel is in the dark.

Your favorite Sunday newspaper insert and mine, The Mini Page, has a feature this week on "2005 Birth Anniversaries." Included are Alexander Hamilton, Hans Christian Andersen, Jeannette Rankin, Frances Perkins, Maria von Trapp, and Emily Dickinson.

Emily Dickinson is most famous for her poetry.

She was born in Amherst, Mass., 175 years ago. She seldom left her home, and the only people she usually saw were her family.

Because she was so private, we still know little about her life.

No love for poetry.