April 27th Poetic Ticker Clicking
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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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
"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."
[Walter] Skold sought permission from cemeteries ahead of time so there's no suspicion about satanic rituals or disrespectful behavior.
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":
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."
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."
Petersen, Oregon's sixth poet laureate, had no trouble expressing how she felt about being named to the two-year position Monday
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.
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."
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
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."
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.
Black Holes Walking
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.
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."
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.
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."
April 25, 2010
by Carolyn Forché
Goat
A Prelude
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
more than 30 years ago, [Gene] Lees was also a lyricist and composer who wrote the words for a number of classics, including the English lyrics for Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim's "Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars." As a collaborator, Lees also wrote "Waltz for Debby" with pianist Bill Evans and "The Right to Love" with composer Lalo Schifrin.
honoring special days of his friends and family. These cards often contained poems or mathematical puzzles for the recipient to figure out.