2026 Anthology Call for Poetry Submissions: In celebration of our 15th anniversary in 2026, dVerse Poets Pub invites poets from around the globe to contribute to our upcoming anthology, Krisis: Poetry at the Crossroads. Submission Period: April 1, 2025 – June 30, 2025. Check it out here!

Welcome to the dVerse Poets Pub! I’m Dora of Dreams from a Pilgrimage and this is Poetics where we relax to the sound of each other’s musical voices dialoguing, as it were, through our poetry. Of course, reading poems online doesn’t quite possess the immediacy of face-to-face conversation. But inserting actual dialogue into poems can capture something of its connection between reader and poet as well as between characters in a poem.

Many poets have put dialogue or speech to good rhetorical use, sometimes to create drama and tension, or intimacy, sometimes to confront, persuade, or advise.

Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue, “My Last Duchess” (1842), comes to mind where the unreliable speaker addresses an emissary from the family of his next prospective bride. He begins:

“That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will ‘t please you sit and look at her?”

By the end of the poem, we’re left in little doubt as to the speaker’s diabolical character.

In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” the poet recounts “a midnight dreary” when

“. . . suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
’Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.’”

The tension famously escalates from there with his “whispered word, ‘Lenore?”

“This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, ‘Lenore!’—
Merely this and nothing more.”

Thomas Hardy’s “The Ruined Maid” is a satirical conversation between two women in different states of life and strata of society.

David Wagoner captures both the intimacy and anxiety of a phone call in “When You Call and Say You’re Lost.” He writes:

“But after you’ve been driving for hours
and you call and say, ‘I’m lost, where am I?’
I hear the sound of your voice become
for a moment the sound of the road, the wind,
the tires, your breath, the dark, the moonlight.”

Adopting a chummy tone, T.S. Eliot invites us into “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” with the words, “Let us go then, you and I,” only to chide us peremptorily with “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’/Let us go and make our visit.”

Avuncular poet Robert Frost is famous for using dialogue in his poems. In “Mending Wall,” he riffs off his neighbor’s oft-repeated old saw, “Good fences make good neighbors” and writes:

“If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself.”

The author of Les Misérables, Victor Hugo implores “an isolated Faun/In old deserted park” to “Speak to me” and receives a chastening reply in “The Marble Faun” (1837). Death and Spirit argue in Emily Dickinson’s “Death is a Dialogue between” (#976). Thomas Hardy predicts how his neighbors may speak of him in “Afterwards.” Charles Lamb’s casual remark to a fellow traveler provokes an unexpected response in “Blindness.”

Contemporary poet Anne Carson in an LRB essay last month imagines a “rough translation of a recently discovered and hitherto unknown fragment of text. It appears to take the form of an interview between the Roman love poet Catullus [who died at the age of 30] and John D. Pepper [a 19th century physician who developed Parkinson’s at the age of 30]”:

“John D. Pepper: Death.
Catullus: Death made me grow up.
John D. Pepper (henceforth Pepper): Love.
Catullus: Love made me endure.
Pepper: Malady.
Catullus: Malady does not rest.
Pepper: Passion.
Catullus: Passion bewildered me.
Pepper: Parsnips.
Catullus: Parsnips taste like violets.
Pepper: Violets.
Catullus: Violets smell like parsnips.
Pepper: Gods.
Catullus: Gods cause me to be silent.
Pepper: Bureaucrats.
Catullus: Bureaucrats make me melancholy.
Pepper: Tears.
Catullus: Tears are my sisters.
Pepper: Laughter.
Catullus: I wish I had a splendid laugh.
Pepper: Warfare.
Catullus: Ah, warfare.
Pepper: Humankind.
Catullus: Humankind is glass.
Pepper: Roses.
Catullus: I hate roses.
Pepper: The line.
Catullus: A line is just a lure.
Pepper: Why not take the shorter way home.
Catullus: There was no shorter way home.”

Then there are poems about conversations, the when, what, how and why of them, like Ogden Nash’s dislike of preemptive apologies in “Just Keep Quiet and Nobody Will Notice,” and Frost’s answer to a neighbor’s hailing in “A Time to Talk”.

Your challenge? What I’d like us to do this week is to employ dialogue (even if it’s just a line of it) to good rhetorical effect in our poetry. Another option is to simply write about the act of conversing (as in the last two examples) when it may be obligatory, welcome or intrusive, or conversational tics that charm or set you off. Whichever way you choose, let’s “dialogue it in”!

New to dVerse? Here’s how to join in:
* Write a poem in response to the challenge.
* Post your poem on your blog and link back to this post.
* Enter your name and the link to your post by clicking Mr. Linky below (remember to check the little box to accept the use/privacy policy).
* Read and comment on your fellow poets’ work –- there’s so much to derive from reading each other’s writing: new inspiration, new ideas, new friends.
* Mr. Linky will remain open until 3pm EST on Thursday, April 10th.