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22 Great Poems to Read (For Free)

RECOMMENDED BY THE LIT HUB STAFF

This April marked the 30th iteration of National Poetry Month, which was launched by the Academy of American Poets in April 1996. To celebrate, the Literary Hub staff recommended one great poem every (work) day for your reading pleasure. We don’t necessarily claim these poems are the “best” in any category (except, of course, when we do). We simply love them, and we want you to enjoy them along with us. That’s why we only chose poems that are available to read for free online: The internet is still good for something, after all.

Lucie Brock-Broido’s “Am Moor”

I first read this poem in grad school, in a class on the ecstatic in poetry, taught by the great poet Lisa Russ Spaar. It is an homage to the Austrian Expressionist poet Georg Trakl, who died of a cocaine overdose in the psychiatric ward of a military hospital in Kraków at the age of 27. Whether his death was intentional remains unclear, but he had been sent to the ward after a previous suicide attempt, which was precipitated by the stress of his work as a medical officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I.

I don’t think you need to know this or anything else about this poem to feel its ecstatic power: the resonant thuds of the lines are enough, the weaving of the baroque and the barren is enough, the playful seriousness is enough. But I like to read it as a sort of slant translation—am is German for on—that pulls relentlessly on the thread of sound and meaning until it gets to the very bleating heart of it. Besides, the moorlands are so hot right now, or so I’ve heard.

–Emily Temple, Managing Editor

Mark Doty’s “Visitation”

You’ve probably already read the final lines of Mark Doty’s “Visitation,” even if you don’t know that you know it. It ends: “What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?”

Anyone with a halfway active social media presence in the last ten or fifteen years has probably come across those lines in an image macro on some platform or other. I’m not here to litigate the impacts of social media on society’s collective reading habits—the verdict has already been rendered, a 5-4 decision with the majority in favor of “mostly bad”—but it’s well worth reading the full poem to at last arrive at those final, simple, thunderous lines. To wit:

A few years back, a good friend of mine started dating someone. Early on in the relationship he sent me a strange, distressed text: the relationship was going too well. He was falling for her too fast and, worse, he was worried that the depth of his feelings at these early stages meant that something was horribly wrong. When pressed he couldn’t actually identify anything that was off, but still he was convinced that being this happy with someone this quickly spelled doom.

Irrational fears can’t be soothed by logic. I sent him a few words of advice and followed it up with the full text of “Visitation”. Had I just sent him the last lines, the ones I wanted him to not just to read but feel, I don’t think it would’ve had the same impact. I’m reading the poem at his wedding next month.

–Calvin Kasulke, Associate Publisher

Alejandra Pizarnik’s “[All night I hear the noise of water sobbing.]”

Once when someone asked me what I like about Pizarnik, the first thing I thought to say was that I love how many of her poems feel damp and cold and hard, like it’s completely dark and she’s sitting alone by a stone fountain hidden far in a cave, and how much I also want to sit there in a puddle, shivering with her. That’s the sensory experience so much of her work evokes for me. I also like her other kinds of poems, the ones that conjure abandoned homes full of tchotchkes, death’s gardens, worlds inside mirrors, but “[All night I hear the noise of water sobbing.]” teleports me instantly into that wet, rocky place.

This poem burrows deep in the spaces between fleeing and yearning, longing and absence, rendering day and night as a cycle of sobbing produced by a speaker who is being watched, who embodies both the “you” and the “I,” who is a spectre surrounded by spectres. “All night I make night in me” is such a rockstar line. “All night I drown in your eyes become my eyes” is screamworthy.

–Oliver Scialdone, Community Editor

Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California”

Oh to wander the aisles of the local supermarket with Walt Whitman, watching the fluorescent light catch in his beard as he stands, stunned, over the shining produce. Ginsberg’s poem brings this dream to life, and we get to watch as a very confused Whitman wanders the aisles and muses about the disconnection from nature that haunts the modern world. It’s the kind of high/low idea that characterizes a lot of Ginsberg’s poems, but I feel that it’s done especially well in this piece. Also, it’s so catchy. Can a poem be catchy? I get lines of this poem stuck in my head all the time. I quote them to my best friend. “Who killed the porkchops? What price bananas?” I ask them, and they respond, “Are you my angel?”

I want to make it clear here that I’m not usually the kind of person who has whole poems stored in their head. But “A Supermarket in California” isn’t just any poem. It’s a perfect melding of philosophical ideas and concrete images. It’s a question about the state of the country but it’s also full of avocados and neon lights and blue cars in the driveway. Not every poem can evoke the waters of the Lethe in the same breath as it mentions artichokes and stacks of cans. But not every poem is “A Supermarket in California.”

–McKayla Coyle, Publishing Coordinator