WATCH: A poem for Donald Trump's America: "Let them not say we did not see it. We saw" Acclaimed poet Jane Hirshfield offers some words on "a day worth remembering the fate of our shared planet" ...

I set an ant back out on its home ground and I wrote a poem. And of course, I did also a third thing, the same thing all of us, soon nationally, globally, were being asked to do: agreed to do nothing.

Poetry’s supposed timelessness means that we sometimes overlook its capacity to memorialize a precise moment, but Peter Gizzi’s “In Defense of Nothing” — an earlier poem from this major ...