Garrison Keillor’s latest anthology, Good Poems, American Places, is the strongest and most engaging of the three he has published with the goal of re-introducing poetry to people who have never understood or enjoyed it before. Part of the book’s appeal comes from the subject matter – American geography and culture – which is explored in dozens of lively, accessible poems that allow readers to experience everything from the shore to show business, prison to porches, and life in small towns and large cities. The book brims with vivid descriptions of coffee shops, hardware stores, barns, nursing homes, theaters, and more. Keillor is a delightful tour guide, both in his introduction and in his arrangement of the poems, which he selected because the writers were simply “carried away by a particular place.” Keillor wants readers to be carried away too, and he succeeds beautifully. "Good Poems, American Places" would be a great read on the commuter rail or at the beach on a lazy summer day.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
