Moose Jaw's poet laureates.
[Maxine "Maggie"] Jaffe's poetry explored political and social injustice, including the plight of Native Americans, Vietnam veterans and the incarcerated. In addition to her publications, her poetry was honored with awards and grants, including the California Arts Council Grant in 1998 and a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Grant in 2009, to which she applied for 30 years before winning.
pursuit of knowledge and of laughter --his own and others'. He succeeded in making people laugh up until the very end.
civilian honour, in 2010, Acharya Shastri is the author of many well-known stories, novels, plays, essays, ghazals, songs and biography in Hindi besides being a critic. His famous works include 'Roop Aaroop', 'Teer Tarang', 'Meghgeet', 'Pashani', 'Tamsa' and 'Iravati'. He had been conferred various awards like Rajendra Shikhar Samman, Bharat Bharati Award and Shivpujan Sahay Award.
was anchored at the University of Cape Town for most of his career. In his poetry, he was best known as a lyrical chronicler of the Cape's natural beauty, documenting the response of the soul when surrounded by it. His intertwinedness with the landscape spilled into his prose, too: he memorably wrote about his "love affair" with the city's mountains last year, in what might be cast as a follow-up essay to his landmark 1990 piece, "In These Mountains". Although poetry was Watson's chief metier, he distinguished himself as an essayist, writing on subjects near and far, as diverse as South African "black" poetry and Leonard Cohen.
and Syrian political activist. From his new home in the Netherlands, he kept up his work for a Syrian-Kurdish political party, a branch of the PKK: the Kurdistan Workers Party.
that only a small percentage of readers read? To which one can only reply: it's always been like this. Poetry has always been a minority interest, because it's difficult. It's not to be gulped down on a flight or devoured on the beach at Formentera. It's not to be consumed like a thriller or fantasy novel, or heard and dismissed in three minutes, like a song. It deals in specialised language which it takes time and patience to decipher, whether it's "On His Blindness" or "Kubla Khan" or "The Waste Land."
in state aid to the arts by 73%, Gov. Scott Walker will also pull back $2,000 from his office's support of the Wisconsin poet laureate. The program is otherwise self-supporting. 
he [Niran Okewole] added that many good American writers have had to leave America or create a fictitious world. [Austyn] Njoku begged to differ, asking, "Does a writer have to experience imprisonment or be in some form of deprivation before he is a good writer?" [Jumoke] Verissimo explained her position on the issue with the Christian belief that one receives Holy Spirit when totally broken. "There's that point of need that you get to, when you're totally broken, that you can receive the Holy Spirit," she explained, suggesting that the poet's experience during incarceration was responsible for his ability to write such poems of such depth and feeling.
became a global dogma, [Mahmoud] Darwish's incisive critique still holds true. "Such is the world, always: most admiring of collective killing and most critical of individual killing. The state has a right to kill its own people and those belonging to other nations, but the individual does not have a right to fight for the sake of freedom."
cultural institution in the western city of Hamedan, [Mostafa] Badkoobei said, "Take me to the depths of the underworld, you Arab god, provided that I don't find any Arabs there."
an alternative remedy to modern society's penchant for popping pills for their ills--the healing power of 19th century poet Emily Dickinson.
to balance work and family, to be good mothers and friends, to care for our children and our parents, poetry can help us accept our limitations, and inspire us to overcome them. In a world where language is too often used to manipulate, poems can help us find our authentic voice.
with her love poems, then endured all the worst horrors of 20th-century Russia--world wars, revolutions, Stalin. Like many other creative artists, her life was endangered by state scrutiny of her art.
it's one that trusts the shape of words to have an afterlife of their own.
to a lyricist to a filmmaker. Now, he is taking a U-turn. He has said goodbye to films, is concentrating on his poetry, his writing for children. And has just added a new leaf to his growing tree of accomplishments by turning a translator too! Gulzar is working on the poems of Pavan Verma and Sukrita Paul, two faithfuls he has stood by with greater diligence than is the norm in a constantly changing world.
James McIntyre was the cheesiest poet of all time. And not just because his verse is, shall we say, not among the most spectacular examples of the poetic form written during the 19th century. No, McIntyre's poetry was cheesy due to one of its frequent subjects: cheese. As the Ingersoll-based bard noted in the preface to the "Dairy and Cheese Odes" section of Poems of James McIntyre, "as cheese making first began in this county and it has already become the chief industry of many counties, it is no insignificant theme." Of the verses he dedicated to cheese, perhaps the best known, or most mocked, is an ode to a seven thousand pound wheel of pressed curd that Torontonians observed with amused awe during the Provincial Exhibition of 1866.
contain things such as "I love you" or "Pick up dog food". We find it hard even to grasp the mathematician's or engineer's view of information as something devoid of content. How does the empty message come to be so full of urgent meaning? "Everything," Gleick says, "can be expressed in bits, but to say that everything in the world is fungible because it's all about bits isn't to say we are merely bits, it is to raise a question: how did the interesting, large-scale things we care about arise?"
books of poetry: Polar, (Alice James Books, 2004) and Skirmish (Graywolf Press, 2009). He lives in Minneapolis. 
you go away goes something/Like what happens to shoes in a dead man's closet." Those left behind when the loved love leaves feel as if they were a pair of shoes belonging to a dead man, who left the shoes behind never to return.
periods of your life, but skip over college. Why is that?
by Cathy Smith Bowers
have been known to tell our students that there is no subject so common and ordinary that it can't be addressed in a poem, and this one, by Michael McFee, who lives in North Carolina, is a good example of that.
around the world, sparking condemnation from the French and German governments.
at weaving stories. He is the holy fool, the savant, Bob Dylan's "Mr Tambourine Man," forever dancing through the "jingle-jangle morning," spinning rhymes. He embodies the very qualities that Wordsworth and Coleridge strove for in their revolutionary collection "Lyrical Ballads," which in style and subject stretches from the homely to the heavenly.
powerfully candid view of Murray's struggles with depression--one that will speak even to readers unfamiliar with his work. "Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression" is an unusual book. One half is a prose memoir (first written as a 1997 lecture, with an afterword composed in 2009) about his long struggle with serious depression. The second half comprises what Murray calls the "Black Dog" poems (the phrase is Churchill's term for depression, and has a long history)--24 poems written over the course of his life that deal squarely either with his depression or with the subterranean anger that he believes led to it.
than C.D. Wright's One With Others. The collection attempts to capture events occurring in Wright's native Arkansas around the time of a protest march in 1969 led by a Memphis activist called Sweet Willie Wine; it also serves as a memorial to Wright's friend Margaret Kaelin McHugh, who is referred to by her nickname, "V." V, a white woman, apparently participated in the march and suffered the scorn of her community for it (as Wright puts it, "While she was in jail her husband bought airtime and denounced her. When she was released she was served with papers for divorce and custody").
Some writers need that much space to clear their throats; Dugan goes rapidly from plain American speech like "but it went by, it all/goes by, that is the thing/about the river" to the Battle of Granicus, the Lacedaemonians and that Alexander who is in many places called "the Great."
the air-filter, but his victory serves to bring in that angry gesture of "one last wrenching twist" and the sardonic observation about "the dust/and grime from better, more desirable places." It's tempting to read in the conclusion a suggestion that the air around this child and the others on the estate is clogged by the very existence of these more privileged places elsewhere--places which are richer, but no less a source of pollution.
"Packing the Car for Our Western Camping Trip" with a 2010 post from the Well blog, "Mourning the Death of a Pet."
of the Creative Writing Program at Bryn Mawr College. He's decided to attempt something unimaginable: translate Paul Verlaine's Poèmes saturniens into English while preserving the poems' original verse and rhyme schemes. Anyone who has tried to do such a thing knows how hard and unrewarding it can be.
is used as the title of a moving collection of short essays, talks, letters and expressions of gratitude of Gene Stoltzfus, a founder of Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) who died in March 2010.
or process of awareness. And yet, at such times, I feel intensely alive. Or maybe it is simply that life at such times seems more intensely real. Either way, my ordinary everyday me seems absent.
by Julia Stein
disparate sides and make transitions smooth, here becomes the opposite. The sight is a reminder of Celan's suicide (he jumped off a bridge to his death in the Seine), triggering an identity crisis, and finally, a rupture.
we feature the work of Deborah Brown who is an editor, with Maxine Kumin and Annie Finch, of "Lofty Dogmas: Poets on Poetics" (Univ. of Arkansas Press, 2005) as well as a translator of "The Last Voyage: The Poems of Giovanni Pascoli" (Red Hen Press, 2010). Her poems have appeared in Margie, Rattle, The Alaska Quarterly, Stand, the Mississippi Review and others.
by Jay Baron Nicorvo, April 2011
Harvest
Early
A word spoken in due season, how good it is.
as in Miles Davis smooth--poems [by Kit Robinson], coincidences, accidents, and chance encounters constitute the "before and after" of ordinary life, what is stitched by language into narrative, history, and memory. For example, in "November Ease," the narrator stumbles upon, for the first time, a piece of concrete "buried in the yard behind the house/[he's] inhabited for the past ten/or eleven years."
[by Kristen Tracy]
[Sophie] Hannah does test the assumed natural order of the afterlife. Her deceased speaker is lively, which is perhaps not surprising for a poet who consistently resists emotional expectations, and who insisted that, "The end of love should be a big event./It should involve the hiring of a hall./Why the hell not? It happens to us all." 
in 1950, and in 1998 he retired to devote himself his second passion, his son said. His work was published in poetry journals, including the American Poetry Newsletter, the Literary Forum Anthology, and the Blue Satellite. 
enjoyed time with her family, writing poetry, mentoring young people, and spending time with friends at the Oregon senior center.
Mott Lincoln High School, North Dakota in 1939 where she was voted class poet.
