Best Poems of 2023

These are the poems, the best poems, the poems that made reading the lesser poems worthwhile because I knew I would find poems that were this good if I just kept looking, but, really, reading the other poems was okay even so, there being poems among them that were quite enjoyable and even the ones that I left behind after that quick read usually did things that I go to poetry for, that is, weird stuff or a heightened sense that what was being said was more than just a message but an incantation of sorts, a calling forth of powers beyond the denotative, a scrawling on the wall of a door that, once you push on it, gives into a room or a world or a limitless void, a place wholly new, or familiar and not, the fragrance of it stuck in my nose, a hunger meeting the hungers I failed to fully stuff up with bonbons and bon mots and bonfires, hunger to hunger hanging over the swamp, a miasma as pretty as a pail of pickles at the end of the rainbow freeze-dried and shellacked to the skin of a tuba. 

James Cagney ….. Between a Rock Wall and an Immigrant

Katerina Canyon ….. I Left Out ‘Bells and Whistles’

Michael Koch ….. Color Of

Michael Koch ….. Tempus Fugit, Part Two

Jeanne Lupton ….. tanka: “new house”

Rebecca Radner ….. I dreamed my daughter

Rebecca Radner ….. I thought I’d lost my keys

Rebecca Radner ….. My old friend Ferenc

Kelly Shaw ….. haiku: “at the county fair”

Orhan Veli Kanik ….. For You

Orhan Veli Kanik ….. Mahmut the dreamweaver

Julia Vinograd ….. An Extra Thanksgiving with a Friend

Julia Vinograd ….. Poem (homage to the surrealists)

Julia Vinograd ….. Remembrance of Things Present

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When I read a book of poems, I keep handy a small stack of placemarks. Should I read a poem I want to revisit, I tuck a placemark in next to it. Before leaving the book I go back to the marked poems and reread them. Often that’s it — I take out the placemark and move on. But those poems I’m not ready to let go I read a few more times over the course of days or weeks. If I decide it’s a poem I will want to read again and again as the years go by I copy it out by hand and add it to a three-ring binder. At the beginning of every year I read aloud the poems I copied out the previous year. And, of course, any time during the course of my days I can pull a binder from the shelf and reenter poems that worked for me — and rarely do they not work all over again.