discovers the pleasures of poetry and gives it a try. Here's a poem by a first grader, Andrew Jones of Ferndale, Washington, who, if we're lucky, will go on to write poems the rest of his life.
indeed women's work and how they excel.
By Kenneth Rosen
ocean, tiger, BIRD.
when I take your hand and lead you onto the dance floor, we cross the threshold from the routine world to the realm of music, art, and song. We enter the realm of rhythm, elegance, glamour, and poetry.
favored abstraction over particularity--from the beginning, she's written lines that are almost completely devoid of the kind of chatty reportage and pop cultural name-dropping that have been common in American poetry since the death of Frank O'Hara. A Glück poem is dreamlike, chilly, enigmatic. It is still. It is spare. It is almost aggressively concentrated. It revolves around words like "dark," "pond," "soul," "body" and "earth."
"Pentatina for Five Vowels," a poem by Campbell McGrath with an article, "Why You Won't Be the Person You Expect to Be" by John Tierney, and the related video, above.
ages 16 and above" conducted between October 15 and November 10 of last year, the Pew report assures us that, even in the digital age, libraries continue to serve a variety of functions, with nearly 60% of respondents having had some kind of interaction with a library in the last 12 months, and 91% saying that "public libraries are important to their communities."
are naturally inclined to linear, logical thinking. One thought leads to another not in the sense that the succeeding thought follows logically from the preceding one, but because the first thought brings to mind something perhaps quite different but related tangentially.
author of "My rice tastes like the lake," "In the Absent Everyday" and "Rules of the House" (all from Apogee Press). "My rice tastes like the lake" was a finalist for the Northern California Independent Bookseller's Book of the Year Award in 2012. Her non-fiction book on Tibet is forthcoming from Penguin, India in 2013. She recently moved to Santa Cruz where she is pursuing a doctorate in Literature at UC Santa Cruz.
Canis Gaudius
By Richard Blanco
Kujikenaide (Don't Lose Heart), was originally self-published in 2009 and won praise for its sense of humour and forward-looking attitude.
female American poet to win the TS Eliot Prize--with a collection about the end of her marriage.
for the president's ceremonial swearing-in on the steps of the Capitol on Jan. 21. (Mr. Obama will take the official oath at the White House on Jan. 20, as required by the Constitution.) Addie Whisenant, the inaugural committee's spokeswoman, said Mr. Obama picked Mr. Blanco because the poet's "deeply personal poems are rooted in the idea of what it means to be an American."
in Greece today, she did not mince words. "Darkness and chaos," she said, drawing on a cigarette.
his last letter asks his friend Charles Brown to contact his remaining brother and sister, and it manages in the process to feel heartbroken, efficient, winsome--as if the whole person, in all his complexity, were speaking from the page:
you can focus on [Sylvia] Plath's mastery of voice, her address, subjects and images, and on what we learn from her work not about individual psyches but the roles that words play in our constant repositioning of inner and outer, self and world. What poems like "Ariel" and "Elm" actually do (rather than what they reflect, or express)--their shape, beat and energy, their notions, short-circuits and folding mirrors--is to find new ways of putting absolute voice into absolute silence; of laying daredevil verbal shapes on the white space of a page.
[David] Ferry over lunch, before a reading we gave at the Harvard Advocate. Hummus, coffee, whiz-kid undergraduates. The table falls momentarily silent. Munching, sipping, the back of a spoon rocking on a wooden table. Ferry speaks up: "I actually died six weeks ago." All munching and sipping is suspended. What? "I was dead for a number of minutes. I don't remember it, because I wasn't there. So you see, I bring no messages from beyond the grave." For Ferry, "bewildered" to the end and even beyond the end, this, of course, is the message.
after his prizewinning work for the Exmoor Society was found to be an almost word-for-word copy of another writer's work, has confessed in an extraordinary statement sent to the Western Morning News.
that is simple, ideological, and clear, [Anna] Akhmatova praises [Alexander] Pushkin's ability to produce difficult art that "invites various interpretations." At the same time, she searches for the cunningly hidden traces of Pushkin's life and personality in the poem. She's clearly reverse-engineering the traces to puzzle out how he shaped them, how he took the messy scraps and shards of his marital problems and built lasting art from them.
worked on the study with the university's magnetic resonance centre, said: 'Serious literature acts like a rocket-booster to the brain.
is not exactly glamorous. A dark, pungent-smelling underpass behind London's Waterloo Station leads to a warren of chill, dank tunnels. Yet it suits this staging of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: already, before you take your seat, your senses are pricked.
get done last year, or planning how we're going to do better this year, or simply going back to work with no thought of what's next, W. S. Merwin stops and notices the time-that-is-no-time, that slips in whether or not anyone notices. The tips of the top leaves pick up a bit of sunlight. A dove calls.
the publication of his third collection tonight at Open Book in Minneapolis at 7pm. Here's a sampling:
"Bleak Weather," a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox with "A Cool Glide Through Maine" by Eric Hansen.
gay poet Richard Blanco is set to become the first ever Hispanic or homosexual person to recite a poem at the US president's swearing-in ceremony.
of Spoon River appreciated that fact that he went about on "a crusade to purge the people of sin." He was instrumental in closing saloons and shutting down gambling. He snitched on Daisy Fraser's prostitution activity, causing her to be hauled up in from of Judge Arnett repeatedly.
"Bewilderment," Lucia Perillo's "On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths," Allan Peterson's "Fragile Acts," D.A. Powell's "Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys" and A.E. Stallings' "Olives."
by Dorianne Laux
is permitted, while handing an object across a public domain is not, the rabbis envision the kind of work the Levites did when transporting the boards for the mishkan. The Levites would transport the boards in wagons that traveled two abreast, and they would customarily hand the boards from one wagon to the next; but they would not throw the boards. On Shabbat, we refrain from doing what the Levites did, so we cannot hand things over; but we can throw, since that was not part of the original activity of the mishkan.among us, by Terri Kirby Erickson, who lives in North Carolina.By Patricia Ranzonithen we let mystery, surprise, and enchantment into our lives. That is the promise of this poem.in that bleakly simple ending, to anticipate its own decline, a decline that can be interpreted to include printed "bibles" of all kinds. Pastoral gains a contemporary "edge" in Dugdale's threnody, but the poem's roots surely extend beyond ecological or social critique into the live connection between the close-reading poet (also a professional translator) and her native Sussex countryside.filled a niche in the publishing landscape, rather than eating it alive. This echoes my own (admittedly anecdotal) experience, which is that I download what we might call secondary titles--in other words, books I don't necessarily intend to keep.
By Joshua Kalscheur
Inventing the Etymology of My Newest Country
Why I Am Happy
in the boys' own locales of his early verse stories or the writings of such as Kipling or Conrad--whose novels he used to read to Sylvia Plath each evening in Devon, while she worked ferociously on her rag-rug--but either in the "dark hole" of his head or in the equally "dark hole" of poverty-stricken, post-empire, postwar, utility England, where all, as Plath liked to point out, was the color of dinge. "England/Was so poor!" he recalls her exclaiming in a corrosive diatribe in "The Beach," included in Birthday Letters ; is everything black, she demands, because black paint is cheaper?
of Langston Hughes she [Jayne Cortez] was a jazz poet, performing her poetry with her own band the Firespitters, which also featured her son, Denardo Coleman on drums, Cortez' son from her first marriage to Ornette Coleman, considered one of the world's best jazz artists.
the late Mrs. [Valerie] Eliot, that TSE never wrote anything of the highest quality after he met her. That is probably true, though she didn't cause it. (He was 68 when they married, 38 years older than his secretary, the former Miss Fletcher. They had almost eight years of marital happiness together, before his death in 1965.) There was very little seriously consequential work for many years before they married. Anyway, romantic poets do their best work young. (Do I feel an argument brewing?)
