Poetry & Poets in Rags

Dear Poetry Aficionados,

Poetry & Poets in Rags blog

After poet Javier Sicilia's son got killed in the drug wars raging in Mexico, a war that has killed over 35,000 people in the last five years, he is now a voice against the systemic violence taking place in our neighboring country, violence, drug lords, and organized crime that is spreading north. He finds that he cannot write poetry since his son's death. This is where we begin our News at Eleven section this week, in the heart of National Poetry Month.

Our Back Page, the eleventh article in News at Eleven, is about two books, 100 Great Poems for Boys, and 100 Great Poems for Girls, keeping it pink and flowery for the girls, and keeping it boisterous and battling for the boys. There's just so much good stuff this week in Great Regulars as always. And this week, I am struck as often is the case, by the tragedy and loss in our Poetic Obituaries section.

I'll let you get to reading. Thanks for clicking in.

Yours,
Rus

Our links:

IBPC: Poetry & Poets in Rags

Poetry & Poets in Rags blog

IBPC Home

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since Mr. [President Felipe] Calderon launched a military confrontation with criminals in late 2006, and the violence shows no sign of abating.

So when Mr. [Javier] Sicilia, who also contributes to the Mexican news magazine Proceso, called for a series of simultaneous marches around Mexico to protest against the violence earlier this month, people responded.

Thousands took to the streets in Mexico City, around the country and even outside some Mexican embassies with the rallying cry "Estamos hasta la madre!", a colloquial expression meaning "enough is enough".

from BBC News: Mexico poet Javier Sicilia leads anger at drug violence
then Salem-News.com: Mexico: The Hour of the Poet

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the Iraq war that saw her [Maxine Hong Kingston's] arrested and briefly imprisoned, she says "it was the most truly peaceful demonstration I have ever participated in, real non-violence, palpable feelings of love. I could feel love between me and the next woman and the next and I swear the air turned pink, so warm and happy, and the feeling of community, I mean everyone, and we had the most peaceful gentle arrest."

Her account of this dramatic day is not without humour. '"My wife is gonna kill me," said a black cop; "I'm arresting Alice Walker."'

from The Guardian: Maxine Hong Kingston: Singing along with Whitman

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Friday after outspoken Chinese writer Liao Yiwu said Beijing refused him permission to travel to New York for a literary festival.

Liao, who spent four years in jail after writing the poem "Massacre" about the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, was slapped with a ban on leaving China days before he was due to fly out, festival organizers said.

Rushdie, who had invited Liao to take part in the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature opening Monday, said that he and other writers "emphatically protest this travel ban."

from AFP: Protest as China bars writer's travel

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their creations. The poet Ovid was exiled by Augustus Caesar to a little hell-hole on the Black Sea called Tomis. He spent the rest of his days begging to be allowed to return to Rome. So Ovid's life was blighted. But the poetry of Ovid has outlasted the Roman Empire. The poet Mandelstam was murdered by Stalin's executioners, but the poetry of Mandelstam has outlived the Soviet Union. The poet Lorca was killed by the thugs of Spain's Generalissimo Franco, but the poetry of Lorca has outlived Franco's tyrannical regime. We can perhaps bet on art to win over tyrants. It is the world's artists, particularly those courageous enough to stand up against authoritarianism, for whom we need to be concerned, and for whose safety we must fight.

from Telegraph: China must set Ai Weiwei free

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Even though he was not yet 25 and had barely broken into print, he picked the most brashly ambitious model for his project: Pound's ongoing Cantos. The politics didn't match up: The young Zukofsky was a Marxist, Pound an enthusiast for Mussolini. But the wager to write an open-ended long poem was similar. "A" was to unite poetry and politics, bringing serious art of all eras into close contact with the present. From the beginning, Zukofsky planned to write 24 sections, which he called movements, as if the poetry were music.

from Philadelphia Inquirer: Mammoth poem of a century

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has lived on Maui, with his wife, on what was once a Hawaiian pineapple plantation. He's ventured more deeply into Buddhism, into the preservation of rain forests, while maintaining his abiding belief in poetry--as he once told the journalist Bill Moyers--"as an expression of faith in the integrity of the senses and of the imagination."

a feathered breath a bird
flies in at the open window
then vanishes leaving me
believing what I do not see

from American-Statesman: A Poet Laureate, in his prime

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that a poetry relay race was no easy task.

"To write 10 lines in less than two days . . . doesn't sound like much," she says, "but if you're a poet, it's quite an assignment."

Muske-Dukes says the collaborative nature of the poem meant poets were in conversation with one another, reacting to what the previous one had written. So when poet Micheal Ryan of the University of California writes, "How many poets does it take to change a light bulb? . . . How many poets does it take to change a country? How many presidents? How much pain?" the next poet, Brenda Hillman of California's Saint Mary's College, responds with this:

from NPR: 'Crossing State Lines': 54 Writers, One American Poem

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that despite [David] Ferry's achievements as a translator, "in the end, it will be his poems that last. In a time when most poetry relies on intense surface energy, Ferry's effects are muted and subterranean--but then, in their cumulative effect, seismic."

Robert Pinsky, a CAS professor of English and three-time U.S. poet laureate, describes Ferry's poems as "essential parts of an evolving, lifelong work of imagination, at the highest level."

from BU Today: David Ferry Wins One of Poetry's Top Prizes

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of poetical greats, from Wordsworth to TS Eliot. But the poet wasn't always so precise in her reading: a 1962 report sees Cope's teacher advising her that "meticulous attention to detail in the study of her set-books is required if she is to fulfil her promise".

The report is one of the items in the huge archive of Cope's personal effects which has just been acquired by the British Library for £32,000. From 40,000 emails--the most substantial literary email archive ever bought by the Library--to poetry notebooks, school reports, Word files, early school work, correspondence and accounts books, the collection spans Cope's life to date and fills 15 large storage boxes. Cope's school reports--kept for the author by her mother--see the 16-year-old Cope's English teacher note that "Wendy's ability to penetrate to the heart of a question is of great value", while the author is also praised for her "power of expressing herself concisely and forcibly".

from The Guardian: Wendy Cope's archive sold to British Library
then The Chronicle of Higher Education: Archive Watch: British Library Purchases Poet's 40,000 E-Mails
then BBC News: Extensive Wendy Cope archive acquired by the British Library

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baptized as a Catholic, and her daughter was the illegitimate child of a Jewish schoolteacher. [Eavan] Boland cites a poem where Langässer speaks to "anemone," and it's not clear if she means a flower or a child. The poem and its subject of innocence seem out of place in Germany of 1946, but Boland provides us with the key. In a letter dated January of that year, Langässer wrote Cordelia lebt!--Cordelia lives. The poet wrote of flowers because her child had survived Auschwitz. This story is important: Men make history, while women, if they're lucky, survive it.

The story is actually even more dramatic than that, cleverer and rich with mother love, but this should be left for readers to discover.

from San Francisco Chronicle: 'A Journey With Two Maps,' by Eavan Boland

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are Emily Dickinson, Emma Lazurus, Laura Richards and Julia Ward Howe, who snuck in with the warlike "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" alongside the good, solid, masculine fare of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling. Girls are given great poems--Frost, Manley Hopkins, Shelley--but in terms of subject matter there's a preponderance of flowers and feelings, garrets and staying inside watching the rain. Why Bunyan for girls, not boys? Because girls are naturally more devout? It's depressing to consider the thought processes that went into these selections.

from The Guardian: Verse and worse: choosing poems for readers' gender

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crossed this divide. As Rattigan lay dying, he was asked by the BBC to make a filmed obituary. At the time, he was one with the radical tendency. But then he read the plays.

"I thought, 'Crikey, I'm wrong, we have done this man an injustice!'"

He visited him in hospital not long before his death to show him the film. Rattigan wept and asked Darlow to write his biography, telling him to ignore any resistance from his friends. He finally succumbed to bone cancer in 1977, aged 66, in Bermuda. He died a rich man. Some of his plays had been filmed and he was the writer of several successful films. But he still could not get over rejection by his theatrical peers.

from Bryan Appleyard: from The Sunday Times: On Rattigan

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just sitting here? Think their own thoughts. Invent their own narratives. Imagine their own poems coming into life. Poets know that to thrive in the art it's necessary to be in the zone of the imagination, be in the moment of creation, be in the moment of what one imagines the world to yearn for. And then: to create that world. Wallace Stevens calls this the "supreme fiction."

That's what poets do. And, as Richard Wilbur illustrates in his poem, "The Writer," the freedom to think and dream and imagine and build can only be earned in the act of earning it.

The Writer

from David Biespiel: The Oregonian: Advice for students and artists: 'Don't just do something, sit here'

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a book of poetry, and editor of Riding Shotgun: Women Write About Their Mothers, a collection of essays. Her newest book of poetry Pretend the World, was published earlier this year by Holy Cow! Press. Kysar teaches at Anoka-Ramsey Community College and the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.

from Marianne Combs: Minnesota Public Radio: State of the Arts: Minnesota Poetry: Kathryn Kysar's "Faultlines"

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of life rather than entire days," [Carrie Anne] White said. "The more variety we put into our day, the more bursts of life we will be able to savor on a nostalgic afternoon later in life. I've been trying to keep this in mind as I push through these final days in high school."

One way that White savors these "small bursts" is by writing poetry. In fact, she relies pretty heavily on poetry to help her understand the world around her.

from Bill Diskin: Independent Tribune: Poetry Corner: Student focuses on simple things in her poetry

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Rings

for both to say

I might have raised your hand to the sky

from Carol Ann Duffy: The Guardian: Poems for a wedding

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like poison weeds/Bloom well in prison-air:/It is only what is good in Man/That wastes and withers there:/Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,/And the Warder is Despair." But still such lamentation can be understood as personal experience, not as indictment of an existing system. He later avers, "But God's eternal Laws are kind/And break the heart of stone." This claim reveals the speaker's ultimate understanding of karma or sowing and reaping.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol

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of Sri Sathya Sai Baba, the respected spiritual leader. I would like to convey my condolences and prayers to all the followers, devotees and admirers of the late spiritual leader.

The Dalai Lama

April 25, 2011

from Tenzin Gyatso: The Office of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama: Message of Condolence

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a few pounds is that now you will get more bang for your buck, in terms of caloric expenditure. That was something that made me feel better when I was eight months pregnant and had to enter my weight on the elliptical machine. I had never burned so many calories so quickly! Good thing, too. And while you're struggling to fit into that mini skirt, always, always, always remember that you'll still be beautiful no matter what.

[by Lucille Clifton]

homage to my hips

from Kristen Hoggatt: The Smart Set: Ask a Poet: Break a Sweat

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by William Carlos Williams

As the cat

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Poem (As the cat) by William Carlos Williams

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End of Days
by Marge Piercy

Almost always with cats, the end

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: End of Days by Marge Piercy

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Lamium
by Louise Gluck

This is how you live when you have a cold heart.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Lamium by Louise Gluck

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Little Things
by Julia A. Carney

Little drops of water,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Little Things by Julia A. Carney

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Staff Sgt. Metz
by Dorianne Laux

Metz is alive for now, standing in line

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Staff Sgt. Metz by Dorianne Laux

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Excerpt from The Tempest Act 4, Scene 1
by William Shakespeare

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Excerpt from The Tempest Act 4, Scene 1 by William Shakespeare

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I don't think I would like it. It is, of course, unimaginative in the extreme to insist, or expect, that a translator should have anything in common with the writer he is translating (though biographers, for example, have certainly been known to take on the coloration of their subjects, after long study and immersion in the details of their subjects' lives). In any case, a connection between the outlines of my personal life and those of Verlaine's would be irrelevant to a translation: what is relevant is that my work and his might have something in common (see under "Flesh and Spirit," discussed above). As for living vicariously . . . I suppose you are correct that poetry always requires an act of the sympathetic imagination.

from Karl Kirchwey: Princeton University Press blog: Of Flesh and Spirit: Karl Kirchwey on Translating Verlaine

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to observe people at their tasks, and here's a fine one by Christopher Todd Matthews, who lives in Virginia.

Window Washer

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 318

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Tattoo
by Ted Kooser

What once was meant to be a statement--

from Ted Kooser: Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Tattoo

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almost unconsciously into iambic pentameter--this was the age of Shakespeare, commentators are always reminding us--and right from the beginning the translators embraced the principles of repetition and the dramatic pause: "In the beginning God created the Heauen, and the Earth. And the earth was without forme, and voyd, and darkenesse was vpon the face of the deepe: and the Spirit of God mooued vpon the face of the waters."

The influence of the King James Bible is so great that the list of idioms from it that have slipped into everyday speech, taking such deep root that we use them all the time without any awareness of their biblical origin, is practically endless: sour grapes; fatted calf; salt of the earth; drop in a bucket; skin of one's teeth; apple of one's eye; girded loins; feet of clay; whited sepulchers; filthy lucre; pearls before swine; fly in the ointment; fight the good fight; eat, drink and be merry.

from Charles McGrath: The New York Times: Why the King James Bible Endures

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encourage me to become a writer. We spent many Saturdays walking around Greenwich Village--going to bookstores. I mailed poems to him while I was at Howard. I loved to visit his apartment not far from Grant's Tomb in Manhattan. Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms surrounded my brother. Boy, could he play the piano and organ. He once attended Julliard. He also had a deep interest in Egypt and Ethiopia. He loved animals and took the name of St. Francis . . .

[by E. Ethelbert Miller]

Fire

from E. Ethelbert Miller: E-Notes: It's Almost Easter. I Need the Memories and the Eggs

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[by E. Ethelbert Miller]

The Help

After a hard day's work

from E. Ethelbert Miller: E-Notes: The Help

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Ai Weiwei has been named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, amid growing calls for his release.

"Ai Weiwei is the kind of visionary any nation should be proud to count among its creative class," read the magazine's introduction to Ai, written by outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Beijing Jon Huntsman.

"Ai, 53, has shown compassion for his fellow citizens and spoken out for victims of government abuses, calling for political reforms to better serve the people," Huntsman wrote.

"It is very sad that the Chinese government has seen a need to silence one of its most innovative and illustrious citizens."

from Luisetta Mudie: Radio Free Asia: Artist Makes 'Time' List

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Because when all our passion is spent, we can recognize the world around us for what it is. We realize how "vain" we were in youth to boast of "fleeting things." When the money has dried up, the flashy car has broken down, and the moment of fame has quickly faded, we look to the horizon.

The first stanza ends with a couplet that captures something of the strange riddling magic of our days--and our transition from early exuberance to later reflection. It poses profound questions that are not easily answered by any reader.

from Christopher Nield: The Epoch Times: The Antidote--Classic Poetry for Modern Life: A Reading of 'Old Age' by Edmund Waller

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who invariably gets called a "flaneuse"--even by herself, in "Halt!"--probably because she writes about Manhattan in a Dorothy Parker sort of way, if Dorothy Parker had gone to Yale. As you might expect, she's a skilled hand at verse that is, if not light, certainly light-ish, as in "Freely From Wyatt":

I have become the forlorn type who buys
almond biscotti for a long night in,
glumly recapturing a sense of sin
through stomach-aches. It hath been otherwise.

This is fine and droll, sure, but her strongest writing takes on richer tones.

from David Orr: The New York Times: How Poets Achieve Their Styles

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United States Poet Laureate, a professor at Boston University and the author of 19 books, including translations of Czesław Miłosz and Dante Alighieri. "Samurai Song" comes from his latest collection, "Selected Poems," published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Samurai Song

from Robert Pinsky: Forward: The Arty Semite: National Poetry Month: Robert Pinsky's 'Samurai Song'

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so popular. They range from those where the author adds a startling new myth and message of his own, such as Philip Pullman in The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, to the kind which remains faithful to the original text but finds previously overlooked clues to revisionist readings. This week's poem, "Gethsemane Nude," by Robert Hamberger is one of the latter. It's from a sequence, "Bible Studies," which forms the final section of Hamberger's 2007 collection, Torso, and combines autobiographical sonnets about his first encounters with "The Good Book" with more freely structured poems concerning same-sex relationships depicted in the Old and New Testaments.

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Books blog: Poem of the week: Gethsemane Nude by Robert Hamberger

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"End of Market Day" with "Talking Out Loud About War, and Coming Home."

from Katherine Schulten: The New York Times: Poetry Pairing: April 21, 2011

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In the classroom, I generally wear a button-up shirt with a collar and slacks, not jeans. So I feel a little strange being the defender of Ginsberg's poetics in the classroom, but I brought it upon myself. This manic poem, with its wide, rolling lines, rising like bubbles, to the breaking point and beyond: it has a certain energy, a buzz, that lives on. It rages to tell us of a subterranean underclass of would-be leaders crushed by the materialist, military-industrial complex straitjacket of polite society.

from Andrew Varnon: flash & yearn: Prophetic Howl

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peace zone is based on a "peace park-condominium zone of peace" between Ecuador and Peru proposed by Professor Johan Galtung at a time of growing military confrontations between the two South American countries and published in his collection of peace proposals: Johan Galtung 50 Years (Transcend University Press, 2008, 263pp.)

The troops of the two countries would disengage and withdraw, and procedures would be established for joint security, patrolling, and early warning of military movements. A code of conduct would be drawn up. Thus the two countries with a history of hostility could use conflict creatively to grow together at the disputed point and at the speed national sentiments would tolerate and demand.

from René Wadlow: Association of World Citizens--UN Geneva: World Citizens Call for a Thai-Cambodian Peace Zone: From Periodic Flair-ups to Permanent Cooperation

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like all art, expands the space in our minds for our thoughts to move around in. Writing a poem helps us think creatively, and tell our side of a story. In a poem words have power and energy, and similes are like swords. Poetry communicates awareness.

Our nation's children, imagination and knowledge are some of our most important natural resources.

To celebrate Poetry Month here are some young graduates of my free verse poetry boot camps.

Clumsy Swan

By Madison Kadlec
Bellaire Elementary (5th)

from Terry Wooten: Traverse City Record-Eagle: Lifelines: Celebrating Poetry Month

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Leavings

Above, white fish bone

from The Christian Science Monitor: Leavings

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by Marc Beaudin

A night of rain gives way

from CounterPunch: Poets' Basement: Taylor, Clifford, Anderson and Beaudin

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"God Breaketh Not All Men's Hearts Alike: New and & Later Collected Poems" will be out in just a few months, and we'll be sure to discuss its publication in the Forward. In the meantime, we're bringing to you a time-appropriate sampling from the forthcoming collection. This poem exhibits Moss's tendency to gravitate towards an expansive, cosmopolitan spirituality, which is not limited to the three religions mentioned in the poem. Rather, it can also be found in nature and in the whole pantheon of sensuous literary and historical free associations, which in this work, as in many others, Moss treats with a connoisseur's palate and the fervor of a true initiate.

from Forward: The Arty Semite: National Poetry Month: Passover and Easter

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By Gabriel Okara

from Next: Poem: The Little Bird
then Next: Poem: Ninety cheers for the poet of the delta

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My mother calls it

from PBS: Newshour: Weekly Poem: 'Miracle Blanket'

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Plump red nubs

from Post-Bulletin: Poem: Rhubarb

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By Leslie McGrath

from Slate: "The Mouth of the Mind"--By Leslie McGrath

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Earth, sea, sky rejoice

from West Sussex Gazette: Poem of the Week: Easter

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to senior politician, a noted poet, writer and environmentalist, Sadiq Ali on his congregational Fateha.

from Greater Kashmir: Sadiq Ali remembered on Fateha

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loved writing and making art, and illustrated many of her poems and essays published in "THE CRISP" while at Caesar Rodney. She wrote numerous short stories and drew illustrations for her favorite poems notebook while at Wicomico High School.

from The Journal: Anita D. Brown

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second prize in a poetry contest for Houston youth sponsored by the PBS television show "Reading Rainbow." In one of his poem, he wrote, "If I were the moon, shimmering in the night, I would shine through your window at night, so you wouldn't be alone in the dark."

When his family moved back to Kalamazoo in 2002, Chaivre, a natural performer, participated in theater at Hackett.

from Kalamazoo Gazette: Kurtis Chaivre, 24, was 'just everything to everybody,' his mother says

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in January of 1985. She enjoyed writing poetry, book reviews, humor pieces and children's stories. Helen was an active member and office holder in the Wisconsin Regional Writers Association and was the recipient of many awards including the Jade Ring award in 1968 for her story "A Pet for the Princess." Her real love was poetry and this resulted in three soft-bound chapbooks: "No One Rides the Carousel," "A Thousand Journeys" and "In The Garden." Her poetry and stories were published in anthologies, journals, Wisconsin Poet's Calendar, magazines and newspapers, both locally and regionally. She also taught a Fall writing course at Tomahawk's Elderhostel for several years.

from Appleton Post Crescent: Fahrbach, Helen I.

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her poems, in which she slammed the ruling regime and Bahraini Prime Minister Khalifah Ibn Salman al-Khalifah, during protests in Pearl Square in the capital city, Manama, Fardanews reported.

Shortly afterwards, Ghermezi received an influx of insulting and intimidating letters and emails, but when she referred to the police to report the threats, she was insulted and mocked by officers, her family says.

In late March, security forces raided Ghermezi's home twice, threatening her family to reveal Ayat's whereabouts, otherwise they would "destroy the house over your heads, by the order of high-ranking officials."

from Press TV: Bahraini forces rape, kill female poet

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twice, in Pwllheli in 1955 and 1960 in Cardiff.

Mr Gruffydd was one of the Ffair Rhos bards--a Ceredigion village well known for poets.

from BBC News: Poet W.J. Gruffydd dies, aged 94, after a long illness

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several literary magazines and wrote a number of short stories in her career, gaining national attention in literary circles, friends and colleagues said Tuesday afternoon.

In 2000, according to her LSU biography, Leiby won the Poets and Writers Writer Exchange competition, a national program promoting professional advancement.

from The Baton Rouge Advocate: LSU professor, poet Leiby dies in wreck

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in his career, including the University of Louisville's Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition for Neruda Songs, his setting of Pablo Neruda's sonnets, which he wrote for his late wife, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, before her untimely passing in 2006. The mezzo-soprano was posthumously awarded the Grammy Award for the Nonesuch recording of the piece with James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2007.

"I discovered the love poems of Pablo Neruda by chance in the Albuquerque airport," the composer said. "The book had a pink cover and drew me in. As I glanced through the poems I immediately thought that I must set some of these for Lorraine . . . I am so grateful for Neruda's beautiful poetry, for although these poems were written to another, when I set them I was speaking directly to my own beloved, Lorraine."

from Nonesuch Records: Composer Peter Lieberson Dies at 64

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of poetry in Kurdish and Arabic, and was busy with his writing in the Netherlands.

"His injures never healed. He had to be treated continually," said a close friend of Nadim who wished to remain anonymous. "The Ba'athists didn't let him live and killed him."

Nadim's friend added that, immediately following his death there was a lot of speculation about the murder among the Kurdish community in the Netherland.

from Rudaw. The Happening: Kurdish Poet Murdered In Netherlands

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family member's statement Yash had planned to go Singapore for further studies. But the university he had chosen had eligibility criteria of 95 per cent marks in class XII. Yash was worried as he could not do well in one of his exams. He was worried about it and this could be the reason behind his suicide.

Police officials said that a suicide note in the form of a poem was found. "He has expressed his grief in a 15-line poem. It's like the song from the Bollywood movie 3 Idiots: "Give me some Sunshine". We have recovered it from the rear pocket of his trousers," said a senior police official.

from Mid-Day: Class XII student commits suicide

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*posted by Rus Bowden at 2:06 PM* 0 comments links to this post

Latin American writers, won numerous literary awards in his time, including the 2003 Cervantes Prize--the top literary award for Spanish-language literature--the Chilean National Prize for Literature, the Queen Sofia Prize of Iberian American Poetry (awarded by the King of Spain), Mexico's Octavio Paz prize and the Jose Hernandez Prize of Argentina.

from AFP: Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas dead at 93: family
then Digital Journal: Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas died today at the age of 93

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*posted by Rus Bowden at 2:06 PM* 0 comments links to this post

singing style.

"I finally said, 'I can't play these guitar lines but maybe I can sing them.' I tried to sing the way a guitar sounds and the way a saxophone sounds too."

Her poetry became the basis of her lyrics, and she started playing at New York clubs. She signed with Shelter Records in 1974.

from Los Angeles Times: Phoebe Snow, singer of 1970s hit 'Poetry Man,' dies at 60
then Associated Press: Phoebe Snow, 'Poetry Man' singer, dies at 60

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