The first poem I memorized was “Pinkle Purr” by A.A. Milne. I was around seven years old when I encountered it and was immediately enchanted. It’s a children’s poem, four stanzas, all with the same hypnotic AA/BB/AA rhyme scheme. It’s a poem about a kitten, Pinkle Purr, and his mother, Tattoo, and their changing relationship…
Few teenagers would want the world to read their poems. At 13, Charlotte Brontë collected her verse in a humble anthology that already hinted at her ambition to become an author at a time when few women wrote for a public audience. Written in the winter of 1829, the poems in Brontë’s “Book of Rhymes”…
Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll find out about the national youth poet laureate’s love letter to the school she attends. We’ll also get details on a nonprofit group’s purchase of the Metro Theater building on the Upper West Side. Some universities have alma maters. Harvard sings to “Fair Harvard,” and Yale harmonizes about “Bright…
Maria Teresa Horta, a Portuguese feminist writer who helped shatter her conservative country’s strictures on women, died on Feb. 4 at her home in Lisbon. She was 87. Her death was announced on Facebook by her publisher, Dom Quixote. The Portuguese prime minister, Luis Montenegro, paid tribute to her on X, calling her “an important…
The Harvard Sentences are hundreds of sentences that have been used for many decades to test technologies in which understanding speech is essential, like telephone systems and hearing aids. I came across the list recently and was charmed by it. Some sample sentences: It’s easy to tell the depth of a well. The hogs were…