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December 19, 2018
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Next Line, Please

Each Tuesday, our readers contribute a new line of verse—or a completed poem—in collaboration with a renowned poet.

Previous posts

An Ample Meal

by David Lehman | Tuesday, December 18, 2018

The Life of Words

by David Lehman | Tuesday, December 11, 2018

A Hole in One

by David Lehman | Tuesday, December 04, 2018

Time to Tee Up

by David Lehman | Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Hazards, Brawls, and the Value of Bad Titles

by David Lehman | Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Title Precedes Text

by David Lehman | Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Like People in Novels

by David Lehman | Tuesday, November 06, 2018

An Epigraph in Search of a Poem

by David Lehman | Tuesday, October 30, 2018

“It Was I”

by David Lehman | Tuesday, October 23, 2018

The False Confession

by David Lehman | Tuesday, October 16, 2018
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THIS WEEK’S ARCHIVE PICK

A Christmas Feast

by William Zinsser

During a routine cleaning spree, William Zinsser came across a memento from a long-ago Christmas: a dinner menu from 1944, the year he spent the holiday with the 885th Bomb Squadron. “We lived in tents, hunched against the frozen Italian winter, keeping warm with a makeshift stove,” recalls Zinsser. Yet in the midst of the fighting, one man typed up a Christmas dinner menu, styled like those in a fancy restaurant. “Alone of all American holidays, Christmas has been held inviolate,” read a note typed on the back, “[so] men may have a brief respite from the grim business of war to restock their spiritual strength.” For Zinsser, the true nourishment that Christmas came not from the dinner, but from those words.