The American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906), whose June 27 birthday we celebrate today, was the first African American poet to attain an international reputation, and he stood as posthumous ...

The title of this poem subverts expectations right away. After all, we associate summer with pleasure: vacations, the beach, sunshine. Each line operates in the declarative. Many lines end with a ...

If you refuse to believe it ends badly, return to 6. 9 At the end of the summer, you wrote bad poetry. Inexplicable, s—ty, broken-down poetry that couldn’t even be called poetry. It was humiliating.