Craig Arnold’s “Uncouplings” appeared in October’s issue of Poetry, and it has been rolling around in my mind since then. I’ve always wanted to write a poem that finds words within words, like Arnold does here — “drawing laughter from slaughter” is about as far as I’ve gotten.

I like the way he works from the trite phrase “there is no I in teamwork” through words that are related to healthy bonds between two people–together, relationship, communication, listening skills–twisting each one to a negative connotation. The last two stanzas–marriage and family–amount to “grim area” and “my fail.” The latter acts as a jarring but understated culmination, and a surprise– I’d never noticed that those words could be gotten from “family.”

It’s a spare poem but one packed with meaning and technique that feeds it.

I was a judge at a slam at which Arnold was competing in Deadwood in 2002. He was drawing audible gasps from the audience with his performance of his poem “The Power Grip,” a piece about a specific sexual maneuver, which he described in graphic (but poetic) detail. The older ladies at the slam were horrified. I thought it was hilarious.

Arnold is now a professor at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, last I heard. His collection “Shells” is required reading, in my opinion. He has a new book out, “Made Flesh,” from Ausable Press. I’ll let you know when I’ve read it.

“The Last Bath” by Bob Slaymaker appeared in Slipstream a few years back. It begins: “Four of us kids in the tub, unsupervised for the moment.”

The poet goes on to describe a usual, innocent bathtime scene of naked siblings. But the poem turns on the last line of the third strophe: “he holds his small penis and pisses/and gleefully I catch the clear arcing stream/in my mouth …”

That somewhat jarring, and yet hilarious, shift happens just as the parents return to the room and subsequently decide the shared baths must end. Unforgettable.

Karl Kirchwey’s The Red Portrait appeared in the March issue of Poetry and immediately became a favorite for me. The sonnet is about a dream in which the writer’s deceased mother returns to him and he feels  the urgent need to catch her up on all that has happened in his life since she died. It’s very moving.

The mother is wearing a red dress and red lipstick, which prompts this parenthetical line: “I wonder if that means she lives in hell.” The poem becomes more urgent as it goes, with the author wanting his mother to see his family and know about his life’s work. He ends with “But she smiled at me and began to fade.”

In the magazine, the poem is accompanied by a Q&A with the author, who I have not read before. He talks about the origins of the poem and says it is modeled on Milton’s “Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint.”

I took my first creative writing class as a junior in high school, and that’s where I first encountered the poems of E.E. Cummings. In fact, Cummings was one of the first poets i can remember reading.

One of my favorites is “i like my body when it is with your body.” The poem combines a certain playfulness and technical ingenuity. And as a hormone-laden teen, of course, the topic can’t be beaten: “i like kissing this and that of you,/i like slowly stroking the shocking fuzz/of your electric fur.”

And even though their styles are quite different, Cummings here reminds me of Walt Whitman in the way his lyricism shines through.

“The Goldfish Floats to the Top of His Life” by Ted Kooser is about men working for “great companies” and feeling like they get nothing in return. The author sets up the frustration early in the poem with an image of a dead fish paired with diction that clearly signifies that workers mean little to corporations. He then moves to “their wives finding them slumped in the shower, their hearts blown open like boiler doors.” Kooser ends with such men back at their desks, preferring “to have died in their sleep.”

“Goldfish” speaks to me because that’s often how I feel, and I think many people — not just men, either — feel about their careers. The poem can be found in Kooser’s “Sure Signs” collection.

I recently read Li-Young Lee’s collection “Rose.” One of the poems that sticks with me is “The Life,” a piece about a father holding his son as the child falls asleep. The reader sees the boy “limp/and heavy in my arms,/ and I don’t need to see his face/ to know his eyes are closed.”

The father mentions being too tired to stand up with the boy and so staring out a window as the dark of night fades into dawn.

I think I like the poem because I’ve done the same thing enough times to feel what the poet wants me to feel.

Lee has a plain-spokeness that I like, and “Rose” covers themes of family and fatherhood that I have explored in my own poetry. So when he titles a poem “The Life” and puts a sleeping son in the lap of his weary father, I connect with it deeply.

“There is no happiness like mine.”

That’s a line from Mark Strand’s “Eating Poetry,” one of my longtime favorite poems. Strand’s surrealistic imagery gives the poem its verve. He uses a stereotypical librarian and a pack of dogs to outlandish effect in describing the force of ecstasy that poetry is to the poet. The poem ends: “I romp with joy in the bookish dark.”

That’s how I feel when I know I’ve got a poem on the right track.