Certain places stay with you. Poets write about them to keep the spell alive – a sort of souvenir or charm. But they also write to look into the meaning of that enchantment -- our dreams, our wounds, and our values.

We will read good poems about a range of places, from the dark woods of Hardy and Frost to the cozy greasiness of a gas station of Elizabeth Bishop: “Oh, but it is dirty!/—this little filling station,/oil-soaked, oil-permeated/to a disturbing, over-all/black translucency. . .” From the sad squalor of a rental room (Philip Larkin) to the gaudy grandeur of Cleopatra’s barge (Shakespeare: “The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne/Burned on the water. . . “) and the dreamscapes by Coleridge (“Kubla Khan”) and even heaven and hell (Cathy Song and John Milton).

Don Barkin has degrees from Harvard College and Cambridge University. He has taught seminars for a number of years at Yale and Wesleyan. He has published three books of poetry. He has been a newspaper reporter and schoolteacher.