Welcome to Earth Poet — a weekly newsletter exploring timeless quotes and the meaning they hold for how we live today. Each letter unpacks the words of cultural icons — writers, artists, provocateurs — and reflects on what they might offer us now, in the blur of modern life. Each piece includes journal prompts and grounded takeaways. Free readers receive biweekly essays and midweek digests. Paid subscribers unlock weekly reflections and the monthly Dead Poet Advice column — where voices from the past answer questions from the present.
What is Earth Poet?
“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.”
— James Baldwin
Each week we deep dive into one quote from a cultural icon — a writer, artist, thinker or provocateur — and dig in. Not just to admire what they said, but to ask what it stirs in us now. “The purpose of art,” James Baldwin once wrote, “is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.” That is what we attempt to do here: uncovering the questions we didn’t know we were carrying, and using them to see our world — and ourselves — a little more clearly, so we might move through it with more intention, softness, and change that begins quietly, from within.
“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.”
— Agnes Varda
Alongside each reflection, you’ll find journal prompts, thought experiments and the occasional list of grounded takeaways, all crafted to make the ideas not just thought-provoking, but usable, resonant, and capable of reshaping the way life is lived.
Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and publication archives.
Dead Poet Advice Column
And once a month, there’s Dead Poet Advice — your avant-garde advice column. You can write in with your questions — about love, work, meaning, mess — but you won’t know who’s answering. It might be Joan Didion. Werner Herzog. Susan Sontag. Fran Lebowitz. James Baldwin. Agnes Varda. Virginia Woolf. John Berger. The answers arrive in their voice — precise, strange, poetic, sometimes tender, sometimes scathing.
Consider it a séance of the intellect — wisdom from the ones who’ve already said it best.
If you would like to send your question to Dead Poet Advice, please use this message button.
What You’ll Receive
Free Subscribers
A full Earth Poet reflection in form of an essay every second Saturday
A monthly midweek digest with highlights from essays and Instagram
Occasional posts, notes & previews of Dead Poet Advice
Paid Subscribers
Weekly Earth Poet essays — every Saturday
The full monthly Dead Poet Advice column
A monthly midweek digest with highlights from essays and Instagram
Bonus prompts and behind-the-scenes notes
Full archive access & comment function
Additional tools for journaling and writing with prompts
If you’ve ever underlined a sentence and kept it close, this is your kind of place.
Subscribe for free to begin, or go deeper as a paid reader.
Thank you for being here.
