A poem that succeeds by doing something rare in the catalog: slowing down. Where many Plahm poems accelerate toward their climax through accumulation, fire, or cosmic expansion, this one decelerates—savoring...
One of the most important poems in the catalog—not for its length or ambition but for what it reveals: the origin of the Honeybee Bard. The confession that the speaker...
The most formally innovative short poem in Plahm’s catalog—a piece that turns the revision process itself into a finished work and, in doing so, says something genuinely interesting about how...
A poem that achieves something deceptively difficult: making stillness dramatic. The entire piece takes place inside a single embrace, and nothing happens except the accumulation of sensory detail—warmth, pressure, sound,...
A poem that succeeds through sheer infectious energy—the verbal equivalent of a conga line that picks up dancers as it moves through the room. The elongated “CooooooooBaaaaaaaaa!” is a bold...
A quiet, self-aware poem that achieves its effect through the precision of its central metaphor: the poet as dust mote. The image is perfectly chosen for a writer whose relationship...
A poem that proves formal constraint can be a source of discovery rather than limitation. The “-ug” rhyme scheme is the kind of self-imposed rule that could easily produce doggerel,...
A Christmas poem that earns its seasonal warmth through structural intelligence—the three-movement form (dream, waking, declaration) mirrors the experience of Christmas morning itself: the anticipation of sleep, the jolting delight...
The most formally accomplished short poem in Plahm’s catalog—a piece that achieves in fifteen lines what the synesthesia suite took five movements to build: a complete crossing of the senses...
A birthday poem that transcends the genre by converting the occasion into a meditation on time, perception, and the purpose of existence. The reverse-biographical structure is the poem’s most elegant...
A poem that accomplishes something difficult: it celebrates a specific woman while addressing a systemic condition, and it does both without reducing either to a slogan. The reclamation of “terrible”...
A poem that earns its anger through structure rather than volume. The two-column framework—politics of ambition versus politics of compassion—gives the piece an architectural clarity that most political poems lack:...
A poem that performs a remarkable structural trick: the first half disqualifies the poet, and the second half proves the disqualification wrong. The tension between “I can’t write poetry” and...
A poem that succeeds through the precision and consistency of its extended metaphor—the crankshaft conceit is sustained from first line to last, and every image earns its mechanical credentials while...
A poem that achieves something rare in Plahm’s catalog: sustained nature writing that serves the love poem rather than merely decorating it. The birch and crocus comparisons are the poem’s...
One of the most purely entertaining poems in Plahm’s catalog and a showcase for a voice the catalog doesn’t deploy often enough: the American raconteur, the bar-stool Homer, the man...
A poem that accomplishes in twenty-five lines what most visionary writing requires books to attempt: a coherent narrative of spiritual evolution from individual spark to cosmic fusion. The compression is...
A poem that finds the extraordinary inside the ordinary—and specifically inside the piles of stuff that accumulate in a life lived fully. The museum conceit is one of Plahm’s most...
One of the most self-aware and formally daring poems in Plahm’s catalog—a piece that interrogates its own reason for existing and arrives at an answer through bleeding rather than reasoning....
A poem that attempts something no other piece in the catalog has tried—a mid-poem code-switch from Plahm’s conversational modern voice into full Shakespearean pastiche—and largely succeeds. The two-fires conceit is...
A poem that succeeds by sustaining its physics metaphor through an impressive emotional range—from Shakespearean question to cosmic liberation to fire and pyre—without losing the thread. The gravity conceit is...
The most expansive and imaginatively ambitious poem in Plahm’s recent catalog—a piece that takes the paper-rocket conceit and rides it from a 3 AM pillow through the Milky Way to...
The "Taste of Honey" page features ratings of David's poems. The ratings are organized in batches from David's most recent poems at the front to his earliest submissions at the back. You can use the page number and date buttons below the boxed content to navigate. Recommended for use when browsing. You can also locate ratings for David's poems by visiting the Poetry Blog, selecting a poem and clicking on the "Ratings" tab. Recommended for use when reviewing specific poems.
