Tuesday, April 27, 2010

April 27th Poetic Ticker Clicking

News Article Tape:
Blog Entry Tape:

April 27th forum announcement

Dear Poetry Aficionados,

Poetry & Poets in Rags blog


This coming Friday is the last day of Planetary Poetry Month. I've been waiting for today, so that I could share with you the project that the Globe and Mail took on for the occasion, and which Great Regular Judith Fitzgerald wrote about on April 1. Their books blog, In Other Words, has been guest edited all April by poet rob mclennan, who has, as of today, brought us 17 articles in which one poet writes about another, including featured poems. Our headliner contains links to each of those items.

That's where News at Eleven begins. From there, we travel all over the world and back in time, ending at the Back Page, in an article that travels through Vermont, and features the poetry of Robert Frost. Also in poetry news, featured in each of our sections is poetry by, poetry in tribute to, and articles about Peter Porter, who has died.

There is much more to read, so I'll let you get to it. Thanks for clicking in.

Yours,
Rus

Our links:

IBPC: Poetry & Poets in Rags

Poetry & Poets in Rags blog

IBPC Home

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News at Eleven: Shalott Revisited [by Phoebe Tsang]

is reprinted from her poetry collection Contents of a Mermaid's Purse. The book, according to a recent Vancouver event's media release, is an "existential exploration of love and mortality via fairytales and nature." Rich with shades of fable, the wonder of the quest, urban myth, and the storytelling of legends, blended together with hints of surrealism throughout, the narratives of these mostly lyrical poems and prose poems will hold your attention breathless.

Shalott Revisited

from The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: Poetry Month: Joe Blades on Phoebe Tsang
also The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: Poetry Month: Wanda O'Connor on Artie Gold
also The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: Poetry Month: Clint Burnham on Jeff Derksen
also The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: Poetry Month: Angela Carr on Kate Eichhorn
also The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: Poetry Month: Stan Rogal on Gregory Betts
also The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: Poetry Month: Sharon Harris on Jennifer LoveGrove
also The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: Poetry Month: derek beaulieu on Helen Hajnoczky
also The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: Poetry Month: Jesse Patrick Ferguson on Peter Norman
also The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: Poetry Month: Nicole Markotić on Nikki Reimer
also The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: Poetry Month: Rob Budde on Ken Belford
also The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: Poetry Month: Sachiko Murakami on a.rawlings
also The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: Poetry Month: Phil Hall on Laurie Duggan
also The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: Poetry Month: Monica Kidd on Stan Dragland
also The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: Poetry Month: Marcus McCann on Nicholas Lea
also The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: Poetry Month: Stephen Collis on Kim Minkus
also The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: Poetry Month: Kim Minkus on Stephen Collis
also The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: Poetry Month: rob mclennan on Pearl Pirie

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News at Eleven: Random Ageist Verses

An original poem by Peter Porter, one of a collection of new poems commissioned by Carol Ann Duffy on the theme of ageing for the Guardian, and published for the first time this year.

from The Guardian: Random Ageist Verses by Peter Porter
also George Szirtes: Peter Porter, 1929-2010

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News at Eleven: Did he enjoy passing on his literary knowledge

and enthusiasms to students? "Yes, I think so," he reflects. "A poet regards himself or herself as a kind of link in a very long chain, although you can’t lay down the law about poetry. A lot of poetry, like any other arts, slides past the rational part of the mind. There is something mysterious about poetry in the end, something that resists being explained too much."

All you can do, says Edwin Morgan, is give various pointers to what you enjoy and the kind of poetry you would like to see. "And of course it can help to see yourself as passing on the torch to another generation, but it would be foolish to think you could do this by yourself, obviously. We’re all part of some much larger attempt to make sense of things."

from The Herald: Poetry--Edwin Morgan at 90

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News at Eleven: "Farrokhzad is an intellectual woman,

broad-minded, freedom loving, and brave, who expresses all her feelings as a woman. She can be and in my view has always been a model for other women. This is something that the Islamic republic cannot tolerate," Khoi said in an interview with the BBC.

The decision not to include [Forugh] Farrokhzad in the country's official book of poets is likely to draw more criticism and condemnation from intellectuals and women's rights activists. A Facebook page has already been created, titled "The Name of Forugh Farrokhzad is Always Alive," and many Iranians have posted Farrokhzad's pictures and poems to protest.

from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: Prominent Female Poet Not Included in Iran's Book Of Poets

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News at Eleven: A few tapes were missing, including those

for Robert Creeley and John Ashbery, and some people had to be left out, but the end result is one of the best books you will ever read on how poems are actually made.

Here are Robert Pinsky, James Merrill, Lucille Clifton, Stanley Plumly, Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Simic, Frank Bidart, Galway Kinnell, Li-Young Lee, Eamon Grennan, Marilyn Hacker and more than a dozen others talking about how they think and work. [Pearl] London herself prepared for her guests by reading everything they had written, both poetry and prose.

from The Washington Post: Michael Dirda reviews 'Poetry in Person'

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News at Eleven: In his amusing introduction to this polymorphous

collection of more than 1,000 poems by 185 poets, the former United States Poet Laureate Robert Hass mentions the 'small gap in my acquaintance with Greek poetry' between Callimachus and Cavafy--a gap of, well, more than 21 centuries.

Greece can boast the longest continuous poetic tradition in European literature, by a very long chalk: from Homer (c700BC ?) to, in this case, Pavlina Pampoudi (born 1948).

from The Daily Telegraph: The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present ed by Peter Constantine, Rachel Hadas, Edmund Keeley and Karen Van Dyck: review

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News at Eleven: When major poets release their collections

of "new and selected poems," fans often ask two questions: Do the compilations provide valuable insights? Are the new poems as good as the old ones? In many cases, the answer to one or both is no, and what should have been a literary milestone feels like repackaging.

Readers are hoping for two affirmatives from Robert Hass and Kay Ryan this spring.

from The Christian Science Monitor: Poetry reviews: "The Apple Trees at Olema" and "The Best of It"

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News at Eleven: But while somewhat predictable

in its conception, On Whitman is revelatory when it comes to explaining [Walt] Whitman's poetic gifts. With generous quotations from Leaves of Grass, [C.K.] Williams returns us to Whitman's music, his remarkable fusion of language and song. "Until the poem has found its verbal music," Williams writes, "it's merely verbal matter, information." Williams' keen ear helps us appreciate the "dance of vowels" in such phrases as "the blab of the pave" and "the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor."

"My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach," Whitman wrote in "Song of Myself," and Williams contends that it is the wondrous musicality of that voice that makes Whitman great.

from The Philadelphia Inquirer: Checking in with Walt Whitman

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News at Eleven: [Daisy] Hay nods seriously:

"There is no denying that the consequences of those ideals were felt more acutely by the women. These women were left on the ash-cast of history to pick up the pieces. It would have been easy to have written a pretty bleak book about men becoming villains and women becoming victims. But I think that would have been completely wrong, because the women had agency and made decisions--particularly Mary and Claire. I wanted to tell an even story. Because once you decide that Byron is a villain, you stop investigating everyone. You want to know the complications. If you are going to write about the way people engage with and react to others, that needs to be a complicated story."

from The Daily Telegraph: When Poets Became Monsters

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News at Eleven: Having learned from past mistakes,

[Walter] Skold sought permission from cemeteries ahead of time so there's no suspicion about satanic rituals or disrespectful behavior.

The idea of a day of remembrance was inspired by Skold's discovery that the nation's literary forebears have been neglected. Communities have readings at the graves of Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton and other famous poets, but many others are in danger of being forgotten, he said.

Wisconsin's poet laureate, Marilyn L. Taylor, said Dead Poets Remembrance Day is a wonderful idea.

from The Associated Press: A day to honor poets? Quoth the raven 'Evermore'

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News at Eleven (Back Page): Using a map originally drawn by a biologist

more than 40 years ago, [Lisa] Thornton leads me toward a wedge of forest on the cliffs. We clamber up a hillside over spongy soil until we reach a stone ledge covered in moss and fern--and a stately stand of 80-foot-tall hemlocks, perhaps 500 years old. The trees survived, Thornton says, because they were virtually inaccessible to Native Americans, European pioneers and timber companies. I'm reminded of Frost's poem "Into My Own":

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as 'twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

from The Smithsonian: Vermont's Venerable Byway
also The Smithsonian: Vermont's Venerable Byway: Photo Gallery

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Great Regulars: Discussing the movie's message, [James] Cameron slips

into business-presentation mode as if I'm a potential investor. "Here is my nutshell analysis of how the film works. You've got your venal, corrupt and greedy human beings who represent the worst aspects of ourselves, and you've got the noble, spiritual, brave and beautiful Na'vi who represent the best aspects of ourselves. This is science fiction made by humans for humans. It's not made for a Na'vi audience. They laugh at these pink, venal little creatures and the audience comes out of the theatre siding with the Na'vi, the better parts of themselves which they wish they could be."

from Bryan Appleyard: The Sunday Times: James Cameron: Beyond the third dimension

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Great Regulars: [John] Glenday is fascinated by sudden changes

and fallings away, by the quiet spaces between things but, most of all, by endings and beginnings--"beyond the last bee/dying in the honeysuckle,/beyond the cirrus and the fallstreaks//of tomorrow's rain--/the sound of things becoming/what they never will again."

from Charles Bainbridge: The Guardian: Grain by John Glenday and Perfect Blue by Kona Macphee

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Great Regulars: Words don't fail Paulann Petersen.

Petersen, Oregon's sixth poet laureate, had no trouble expressing how she felt about being named to the two-year position Monday

"Thrilled. Excited. So honored to be walking where Bill Stafford and Lawson Inada walked," Petersen said.

Stafford was Oregon's poet laureate for 15 years (1974-89) and is a particular favorite of Petersen's.

from Jeff Baker: The Oregonian: Paulann Petersen named Oregon's sixth poet laureate

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Floyd Skloot says the process works in reverse, too, that Rebecca helps him with his work and made editing suggestions that turned his essay "A Measure of Acceptance" into a Pushcart Prize winner. For a poet who thinks in metaphor, he knows a lot about science. For someone who talks fast and goes in a million directions at once, she's great at organization and structure.

"What made it so clear that this story was leaping off the page was Becca's capacity to create scenes," Floyd Skloot says.

from Jeff Baker: The Oregonian: Like father, like daughter: Rebecca Skloot follows her father's literary path

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Great Regulars: Night of the Golden Butterfly is the fifth

and final volume of [Tariq] Ali's Islam quintet. His intricate historical novels have spanned the Moors in Spain, the Ottoman empire, medieval car-tographers in Palermo and the battle for Jerusalem, before finally bringing us to modern-day Lahore, the cultural heart of the "Fatherland" (the name Pakistan is never mentioned), where four college students begin a friendship based on shared Marxist fantasies, a love of Punjabi poetry, irreverence and the hormonal palpitations of young love.

from Fatima Bhutto: New Statesman: Night of the Golden Butterfly

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Great Regulars: Natalie Merchant: I thought that,

to really convey childhood through these poems, and all aspects of childhood, we had to address the loss of innocence and the passage into the next phase of life, so, innocence and experience.

The Charles Causley poem is about this boy standing on the key, talking to the sailor, offering him a silver penny and an apricot tree.

Natalie Merchant: And the sailor never comes back because a war breaks out. And the boy waits and waits.

from Jeffrey Brown: PBS: Newshour: Poetry Series: Classical Poems Turn Lyrical on Natalie Merchant's New Album
also Jeffrey Brown: PBS: Newshour: Poetry Series: Natalie Merchant Is Well-Versed on Her New Album

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Great Regulars: A spate of residents' complaints has now brought

a letter from the police to the gallery. "My assessment is that Whip Girl is acceptable but I have some concerns about Tite Street," wrote the poor officer charged with checking out the show. "Tite Street appears to show a man having rear entry sex with a woman who is bent double and not wearing any knickers. Of course, this is not the appropriate place to have a debate about art versus pornography. It is my assessment that Tite Street should not be able to be clearly viewed from the street. I strongly advise that Tite Street is moved."

from Olivia Cole: The London Evening Standard: Keep the police away from our art exhibitions

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Great Regulars: It's been fun to watch Todd Boss' first book

of poetry Yellowrocket take off like, well, a rocket (better that than to compare it to yellowrocket itself, which is a weed!). I've known Boss for years through his job as PR Director for the Playwrights' Center, but never would have suspected the man with the high energy, smiling eyes and great story pitch was also the source of beautiful poetry springing from deep introspection and more than a few dark days.

from Marianne Combs: Minnesota Public Radio: State of the Arts: Minnesota Poetry: Todd Boss' "Ere We Are Aware"

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Great Regulars: She's undeniably better-known these days

for her fiction, but the poetry has remained a constant; her most recent collection, Glad of These Times, came out in 2007, and last month she won the £5,000 National Poetry Competition for her poem "The Malarkey", submitted on impulse at the last minute, which judge Ruth Padel described as "completely arresting". "I was surprised by how moving it was, to win," [Helen] Dunmore says.

from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: A life in writing: Helen Dunmore

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Great Regulars: For further information on the two-day

moveable feast, feel free to contact [Terry Ann] Carter who, incidentally, agreed to allow IOW to exclusively feature but one of the poems gracing the pages of her third full-length collection, A Crazy Man Thinks He's Ernest in Paris, coming soon to better bookstores near you:

Binary Numbers: Breaking the Code

from Judith Fitzgerald: The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: All aboard!

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Great Regulars: Beginning with new poems,

"The Best of It" is the work of a pastoral poet, comfortable with her [Kay Ryan's] own counsel but keenly aware of the cost of self-sufficiency. "No unguent/can sooth/the chap of/abandonment," she writes in "Polish and Balm," a poem about the mystery of a dead woman's objects. "Who knew/the polish/and balm in/a person's/simple passage/among her things."

Few American poets have used the thin line so well, to such mournful effect.

from John Freeman: Los Angeles Times: 'The Best of It: New and Selected Poems' by Kay Ryan

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Great Regulars: The speaker addresses her beloved in absentia,

whom she had seen earlier in the day. She remarks that she is shedding tears as she appears to be looking at his picture or perhaps just visualizing him as in a dream.

She ponders the cause of her tears: "How/Refer the cause?" She asks him if she is the cause of her sadness or "is it thou?"

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Barrett Browning's Sonnet 30

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Great Regulars: Reading is always an excellent way

to cope with insomnia, and I think that the best poems to read when you can't sleep are epics. If you've already read the classics, let me direct you to a couple of contemporary poems that may do the trick: Derek Walcott's Omeros--which is truly an epic at more than 300 pages across seven books--revisits Greek myth and branches out to explore the slave trade and Caribbean history.

from Kristen Hoggatt: The Smart Set: Ask a Poet: Sleeper Hit

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Great Regulars: "Since I don't have many poems,

it's important that I read them twice," she [Kay Ryan] said, and that repetition suited her platform style, drawn from her teaching experience.

But, it was all fun, thanks to Ms. Ryan's wry honesty.

"Maybe we have a world of crap poetry right now," she ventured, "that doesn't get to a lot of us. But, there is a lot of exhilarating work out there, too."

from Bob Hoover: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Long ride required to hear Kay Ryan

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Great Regulars: And with that, I tell him how--visiting me

once at college--Mother got gunched out of her brains with my pals. In my twenties, she sat in on a poetry workshop with Etheridge, and afterward, I found her on his back step sharing a blunt with him and a bunch of young brothers. Which embarrassed me at the time, since she flirted like a saloon floozy, but also since her lack of maternal posture always unconsciously felt like some failure of mine on the child front.

from Mary Karr: ABC News: Book Excerpt: 'Lit' by Mary Karr

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Great Regulars: After a Noisy Night

by Laure-Anne Bosselaar

The man I love enters the kitchen

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: After a Noisy Night by Laure-Anne Bosselaar

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iPoem
by George Bilgere

Someone's taken a bite

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: iPoem by George Bilgere

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My Father's Corpse
by Andrew Hudgins

He lay stone still, pretended to be dead.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: My Father's Corpse by Andrew Hudgins

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Ode to Chocolate
by Barbara Crooker

I hate milk chocolate, don't want clouds

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Ode to Chocolate by Barbara Crooker

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Stripping and Putting On
by May Swenson

I always felt like a bird blown through the world.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Stripping and Putting On by May Swenson

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The Telephone
by Louis Jenkins

In the old days telephones were made of

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: The Telephone by Louis Jenkins

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Wild Geese
by Charles Goodrich

I'm picking beans when the geese fly over, Blue Lake pole

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Wild Geese by Charles Goodrich

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Great Regulars: These poems do achieve an extraordinary

intimacy of tone, but they also conjure, for that reader, a full spectrum of responses to mortality, from calm ("I reflect quietly on how soon I will be going") through self-mocking ("What? You're going to be Superman at seventy-seven?") to something darker ("the pitch of para­lysed horror/that his prime is past"). And it is the calm that impresses most, after the disturbances of passion, as Walcott speaks of "that peace/beyond desires and beyond regrets/at which I may arrive eventually."

from Karl Kirchwey: The New York Times: Derek Walcott, Man of Many Voices

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Great Regulars: Tell a whiny child that she sounds like

a broken record, and she's likely to say, "What's a record?" Jeff Daniel Marion, a Tennessee poet, tells us not only what 78 rpm records were, but what they meant to the people who played them, and to those who remember the people who played them.

78 RPM

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 265

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Great Regulars: [by E. Ethelbert Miller]

Black Holes Walking

This is the day he leaves.

from E. Ethelbert Miller: E-Notes: Black Holes Walking

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Great Regulars: Sun [Wenguang] said these limitations

are evidence that the Internet restrictions specifically target Uyghurs as an ethnic group.

"Over the past nine months, 10 million people have been living blindfolded, deaf, and silent," he said.

"Here exists not only an ethnic segregation, but also a hostility towards technology," Sun said.

"I am ashamed that this kind of backward policy is being implemented in my country in the 21st century."

from Luisetta Mudie: Radio Free Asia: Call To Open Up Online

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Great Regulars: Poetry on the page, says Robert Pinsky,

is like a musical score: it's meant to be heard. And so the College of Arts & Sciences professor of English, former three-time U.S. poet laureate, and author of several acclaimed books of poetry, prose, and translation is bringing his verse to life in a series of soulful readings to musical accompaniment. In these spirited performances Pinsky, whose first ambition was to be a jazz saxophonist, combines his passion for jazz and his conviction that poetry is "very physical." The result--call it jazz rap--is a merging of music and poetry into "a single manifestation of art," he says.

from Robert Pinsky: BU Today: Speaking Jazz

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Another poem in A Boy's Will, "Pan With Us," acknowledges a changed, modern world with a little more nostalgia for the old mythological creatures of poetry. The pathos of grayness in the second line--almost a cinematic dissolve of the old pipe-playing, sexual, half-animal creature--justifies and animates the grammatical inversion of the following line: "The gray of the moss of walls were they," which, like the poem, is partly a lament for old ways and partly a parody of them:

"Pan With Us"

Pan came out of the woods one day,--

from Robert Pinsky: Slate: Old Made New

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Great Regulars: If she is the self, or soul,

perhaps "the regions which/Are Holy-Land" denote the Unconscious. The poem ends on its only dimeter line, a curtailment suggesting perfect sufficiency. This is the limit past which poets--and readers--travel only in silence. Unusually, for Poe, "To Helen" leaves a lot unsaid. But, personally, I'd rather have this one exquisite lyric than any number of his narratives.

[by Edgar Allan Poe]

To Helen

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Books blog: Poem of the week: To Helen by Edgar Allan Poe

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Great Regulars: "I write poems because I need art

in order to seek full expression," [Peter] Sears said in an e-mail exchange. "The effort is exciting. I am really fully engaged only when I am working on a poem. If I don't write for a while, I get a little musty and irritable. Were it not poetry, it would be some other art. I believe art is actually a way of knowing as in discovering what you know but cannot otherwise access."

from B.T. Shaw: The Oregonian: A chat with Corvallis poet Peter Sears

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Great Regulars: You can have all the known facts down

in place as a sound basis for well-crafted arguments, and yet . . . you don't feel quite convinced. You have a gnawing suspicion that something has been left out, or overlooked, or misunderstood. These suspicions prompt you to take a fresh look at the problem and, lo and behold, everything suddenly falls into place and you just know you've got it at last--and it isn't as you had reasoned it to be. That falling into place happens because you have grasped the aesthetic component.

from Frank Wilson: When Falls the Coliseum: That's What He Said: The operating mystery is what truth is all about

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Great Regulars: Earthquake

by Farzana Ahmad

I am an orphan now,

from CounterPunch: Poets' Basement: Ahmad, Yankevich and Moser

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Great Regulars: The first mention of Shakespeare's

playwriting career is found in 1592, when rival dramatist Robert Greene wrote that he was "an upstart crow." He had written the "Henry VI" trilogy in the preceding years, followed in 1592 by another history play on the War of the Roses, "Richard III."

In 1594, he and others, including actor Richard Burbage, formed the theater company Lord Chamberlain's men, with which Shakespeare would spend nearly 20 years.

from findingDulcinea: Happy Birthday: William Shakespeare, Playwright, Poet and Actor

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Great Regulars: Blue

by Patrick McGuinness

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: Blue by Patrick McGuinness

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Great Regulars: By Stephanie Ann Barrows

April 25, 2010

Red poppies

from Lawrence Journal-World: Poet's Showcase: 'The Soul's Garden'

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Great Regulars: by Lisa Kelly

Benches. Every other one with the name of someone dead.

from Morning Star: Well Versed: In Loving Memory Of

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Great Regulars: The Lightkeeper

by Carolyn Forché

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Carolyn Forché: "The Lightkeeper"


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Goat
by John Kinsella

from The New Yorker: Poetry: John Kinsella: "Goat"



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A Prelude
by Richard Wilbur

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Richard Wilbur: "A Prelude"


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Great Regulars: By Joyce Gullickson

I sit in an auditorium

from San Antonio Express-News: Poetry: 'An Elegy to Art' (for Jean Valentine)

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Great Regulars: Peter Porter, the highly esteemed, prolific

and formidably erudite poet, has died at the age of eighty-one. Briefly the TLS's poetry editor during the 1970s, his association with the paper goes back to 1960, when his calling card of a poem, "Metamorphosis" (below), first appeared in print; he continued to contribute poems and reviews on an impressively wide range of subjects (including, in recent years, Shakespeare's poems) up to last year. Those contributions--and that uncompromising eye for an irony--will be much missed.

Metamorphosis

from The Times Literary Supplement: Poem of the Week: Peter Porter, 1929--2010

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Poetic Obituaries: Claudia [Jean Arney] will always

be lovingly remembered as "Super Mom" by her children, for the grace and dignity with which she endured this horrible disease (MSA) and for the eloquence with which she described life's great loves, joys and challenges in her poetry: "Don't give up! Celebrate what is left. Spend it wisely."

from Verde Independent: Claudia Jean Arney 1935--2010

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Poetic Obituaries: [Jason Beland] had a longstanding relationship

with books and language and put pen to paper himself in the form of stories, poems and lyrics to songs. He further expressed himself through music by playing the drums and guitar, and singing with other local musicians. He was a cook who loved to accessorize his main ingredients with herbs and spices that produced a delicious meal that even he, occasionally, could not replicate. Later in his young life, Jason developed an affinity and skill for horticulture.

from The Coloradoan: Don & Jason Beland

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Poetic Obituaries: Mrs. [Geraldine Ferris] Brice was an educator

and taught as a supervising teacher at Northwestern State University as well as being an educator in Rapides Parish Public School system. She held degrees in business and elementary education as well as a Masters degree from the University of Houston. Her interests include writing poetry, collecting books, Indian artifacts, colonial glassware and miscellaneous antiques.

from The Town Talk: Geraldine (Ferris) Brice

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Poetic Obituaries: Patricia [Buck] was an accomplished pianist

and a published poet. She had won awards such as the International Poet of Merit Award in March 2003 presented by the International Society of Poets and the Shakespeare Trophy of Excellence in 2005.

from Northfield News: Patricia Buck, 87

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Poetic Obituaries: [Amanda] Castro was a believer in the arts

and its power as an outlet of expression. As a poet, she wrote about social and political issues affecting Honduras, and toward the end of her life, about her coming death.

A proponent of women's rights, she was an activist in Honduras and founded places where women could express themselves through the arts, such as theater and poetry.

from The Rocky Mountain Collegian: Poet, activist, former CSU professor dies at 47

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Poetic Obituaries: [Leonard D. "Dee" Cox] enjoyed hunting,

fishing, camping and was an accomplished bowler. He had a great sense of humor, loved singing to the delight of his family and also wrote and memorized poetry.

from Uinta County Herald: Leonard D. Cox: May 2, 1920--April 17, 2010

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Poetic Obituaries: [Whitney R.] Harris regularly spoke in

public about the Nuremberg trials and his belief that the United Nations should create a permanent international war crimes tribunal. In 2005, he spoke at a Holocaust Observance Day ceremony in Richmond Heights, where he read a poem that he wrote only a few years before on what he called "the gravest inhumanities and killings that man has ever perpetrated on man."

The poem says in part: "A thousand years have passed. What was the number killed at Auschwitz? It matters not. 'Twas but a trifle in the history of massacre of man by man."

from St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Whitney Harris dies; was a Nuremberg prosecutor

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