Genre: Poetry

In a recent video, Maggie Millner, Yale Review senior editor and author of Couplets: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), speaks about her favorite love poems, including June Jordan’s short poem “Resolution #1,003,” which she says “illustrates the way that love between two people can inspire a politics, a kind of political vision.” Spend some time thinking about the relationships in your life and who might inspire in you a sort of political vision. Write a poem that captures how to “love who loves me” and “stay indifferent to indifference,” as Jordan writes in her poem. How might the circumstances, breadth, and boundaries of your adoration for someone be political?

Did you know that the word robust comes from the Latin word robur meaning “oak tree?” Merriam-Webster’s “12 Words Whose History Will Surprise You” provides the fascinating etymological history of words such as boudoir, phlegm, amethyst, and assassin, essentially mini lessons demonstrating an English word’s linguistic origins from an assortment of languages, including Medieval Latin, Greek, Arabic, French, and Middle English. Jot down a list of some of your favorite nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and look up their origin stories. (Tip: Merriam-Webster often lists a word’s etymology in the “Word History” section.) Write a poem inspired by this newly discovered and intriguing story behind the language, incorporating past iterations of the word into your verse.