The last photo Trisha Fountain took with her mother in May, 2006. Fountain’s mom died the week after her graduation. She said the poem “Epitaph” has helped offered her comfort.

Trisha Fountain

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Trisha Fountain

The last photo Trisha Fountain took with her mother in May, 2006. Fountain’s mom died the week after her graduation. She said the poem “Epitaph” has helped offered her comfort.

Trisha Fountain

Last month, we asked NPR readers what poetry means to them. We received nearly 500 responses, from lifelong poetry fans to those who have only recently come to enjoy the genre. From sparking the imagination to helping with mental health, listen to poems read by NPR readers and see how poetry has affected their lives.

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Poetry to heal from grief

Dozens of readers shared stories of how poetry helped them process grief. Trisha Fountain of Ann Arbor, Mich., lost her mother to cancer the week after she graduated from college. “The months that followed were filled with feelings of confusion, anger, sadness, emptiness and lack of purpose,” she said.

Six months later, Fountain spent her first birthday without her mother at the funeral of her friend’s mother, who died of the same cancer. She heard Merrit Malloy’s “Epitaph” read at this funeral. Now 40 years old, Fountain still remembers the poem. “This poem allowed me to feel seen, held, directed and connected to my mom in a way that my grief didn’t allow me to process before that moment,” she said. “Throughout the last few decades, I have shared that poem with countless others during the loss of their loved ones as a way to ‘pay it forward’ and attempt to gift others with the same comfort and life affirmation it gave to me.

Many readers shared their love for “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop. Melissa McNabb of Michigan said it was the first poem that made her gasp aloud when reading it. Aerie Treska of Baltimore, Md., said the poem took her breath away, “both because of the rawness of the speaker’s grief and the poem’s deceptively simple, yet elegantly complex structure, rhythm, and diction.” Treska calls it a “master class in the power of poetry to bear witness.”

Poetry for mental health

For many readers, poetry has been a transformative force in their lives as they battle various mental health struggles.

“Poetry has been an outlet for my emotions in stressful times, most often while I was depressed,” said Evan De Back of Johnston City, Tenn. The 39-year-old sometimes feels like he can’t express himself to others because his emotions are too raw. “[Writing poetry] helps me process and move past emotions that would otherwise mire me in rumination.” De Back reads a poem he wrote called “The Things I Didn’t Do.”

Poetry to inspire confidence

Some readers said they always have a poem they reach for when they need a reminder of everything they are capable of achieving. “In poems, we readers see our mirrored reflection and gain new insight into ourselves,” Lara Cowell of Honolulu, Hawaii, said. Cowell read Kimberly Blaeser’s “About Standing (in Kinship), because of how it “celebrates our collective strength and power when we work in synergy, harmony and friendship.”

Evan Wang of King of Prussia, Pa., said poetry helped both him and his community blossom. Once a self-described “timid student,” Wang now performs his poetry as a Youth Poet Laureate. “Poetry found me — a first-generation American living in the quiet suburbs — in this vastness, took my hand, and helped me find myself. He shares his poem, “Muse for Night.”

Poetry to rouse the imagination

Hayley Kelsey of Florida calls poetry the highest literary art. “It comes closer to rendering the world around us than any other,” she said. “It has opened my eyes and ears to the wonders of the world again and again: sound, images, perception.”

Many other readers agreed that poetry sparks their imagination and stimulates their senses. Coel Whitemab of Honolulu, Hawaii, believes “poems are for everyone and everything” because everyone will interpret a poem differently. “Poetry sets me free…to imagine my life as a bird soaring on the breeze of imagination and thoughtfulness,” he said.

Nina Laubach of Lawrenceville, N.J., shares her favorite poem, “Absence, Presence,” by Luisa A. Igloria. “I love how this poem moves through time, seasons, and generations and also returns us to our present, daily mundane lives,” she said. “It is…as if imagination was not some alternate, secondary path, but rather the very essence of expressing the experience, memory and longing to be human.”

The author is a writer and cartoonist based in Los Angeles. She is the author of “Drawn Together: Illustrated True Love Stories” (Voracious, 2022). She’s on Instagram: @drawingolive

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published 950- to 1,000-word essay. (Occasionally we work with artists and cartoonists on illustrated stories.) Email your essay to LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.

For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at considerthis@npr.org.

May 1988: General view of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky.

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May 1988: General view of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky.

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1. Saturday marks the 150th running of the Kentucky Derby at the Churchill Downs Racetrack.

Crowds will cheer as the thoroughbreds thunder around a mile and a quarter track. The race itself only lasts around 2 minutes, but the tradition runs deep in America.

Excitement ramped up a few days ago as post positions were assigned to the horses in this year’s race. The last horse to be called was West Saratoga – a longshot gray thoroughbred. Its owner Harry Verruchi credits veteran horseman Larry Demeritte for finding the horse, saying that Demeritte “can look to a horse and see more than normal people can see.”

Larry Demeritte is a horse trainer in his 70s. In an interview with NPR’s Scott Detrow, he said he’s been around horses for as long as he can remember.

“My dad was a horse trainer and he put me on the horses back when I was pretty young… I know them before I know myself, and I know I wanted to be in the horse industry,” he remembers.

“I said ‘Well, I don’t want to be a jockey because their careers don’t last long. I know I’m not going to be a worker, so I have to be a horse trainer because I could do that til’ I die.’”

2. Horse racing wasn’t always so exclusive.

Demeritte is the first black trainer to participate in the Derby in 35 years, and the first person ever from the Caribbean to do so. Before 1989, there hadn’t been a Black trainer since 1951. Black trainers, jockeys, and grooms are a rarity at the Derby these days, but that wasn’t always the case.

The first Kentucky Derby was in 1875. Oliver Lewis won the first Kentucky Derby, and his horse was trained by Ansel Williamson, both of whom were Black men.

Ronald Mack is the founder of the Legacy Equine Academy, and in a Kentucky Educational Television documentary about the history of Black horsemen, he noted that 15 of the first 28 winners of the Kentucky Derby were Black jockeys, “And so there was dominance and prominence in the industry.”

Black people played a key role in the early history of the Kentucky Derby, but they were forced out through Jim Crow segregation. Today, Demeritte hopes the sport can open its doors to more people:

“We need to sell our sport better than we do… We need to form more syndicates because it’s getting pretty costly now to own a racehorse. It’s like any other sport… car racing and all of them, they all have syndicates…so [many] sponsors. I feel like that’s what we have to do to let the middle class know in America that it’s not a sport of kings. Anyone can play it, and the reward is so great when you have success in it.”

3. Persisting through illness.

Demeritte has faced three separate cancer diagnoses over the years, as well as a rare disease called amyloidosis. Despite struggling with his health, he says he’s kept a positive outlook through his faith in God.

“I feel like I’m here for a purpose. And I think this is my purpose, the opportunity to make a difference in someone’s life… Anything is possible. But you have to work at it, you know? That’s the way I look at life.”

He says he never lets his illness stop him from being focused on the task at hand. And looking toward this weekend, he’s excited for the big day, and he’s confident about West Saratoga’s chances.

“When you do things you love, it’s nothing tough about it. Get that smile put on your face when you see a horse train good that morning for you. And that’s the good thing is Saratoga, he don’t have too many bad days,” he says.

“He’s such a cool horse.”

For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at considerthis@npr.org.

This episode was produced by Jonaki Mehta.

It was edited by Jeanette Woods.

Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.