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“Great blue mountain! Ghost. / I look at you / from the porch of the farmhouse / where I watched you all summer / as a boy,” reads the late Donald Hall from his poem “Mount Kearsarge” in this 2018 PBS NewsHour video commemorating his death at the age of eighty-nine. For more Hall, read “Fleeting: In Memory of Donald Hall” by Christopher Locke.
“Is it the timbre of the voice, the poetry of the words?” writes Alessandra Lynch about becoming transfixed while watching Samuel Beckett’s play “That Time” in a piece for Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books. In the lyric essay, Lynch tracks the emotional experiences of reading the works of her favorite writers aloud, quoting and discussing passages from the texts. This week, list writers whose works make you want to read them out loud and reflect on what emotions their words bring up for you. Construct an essay inspired by their works and consider how their words “gather and hold” you.
In this CBS Sunday Morning video, Washington Post book critic Ron Charles gives his book report on new recommendations for the summer, including Sanjena Sathian’s debut novel, Gold Diggers (Penguin Press, 2021), Great Circle (Knopf, 2021) by Maggie Shipstead, and The Man Who Lived Underground (Library of America, 2021) by the late Richard Wright, which is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
The Motown Mic spoken word competition came to an exciting conclusion with a grand finale virtual event on April 29 featuring five poets: Arrie Lane, Dizmantle, Keebie Mitchell, Kyle Mack, and Vizo. This annual poetry slam hosted by the Motown Museum in Detroit was open for submissions earlier this spring asking for pieces from poets that helped celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Motown legend Marvin Gaye’s record “What’s Going On.”
Interviews with all five poets can be found on their Instagram page, @motownmuseum. Each poet had the unique opportunity to work with performance coaches in the Motown Museum studio to record video and audio of their poetry performances to be aired for the grand finale. Former Motown Mic winner Mikhaella Norwood hosted a beautifully curated airing of the short films and performances from each poet of their submitted piece. At the end of the event, viewers were able to use a unique link to vote for their favorite poet.
On April 30, the 2021 Motown Mic spoken word artist of the year was announced via Instagram Live: Kyle Mack! Mack is a musician and rapper and his poem “Young America” is the first spoken word poem he’s ever written. The rhythmic piece reflects on what the city of Detroit means to him. In my next blog post, I’ll be interviewing Mack about his inspirations and what this victory means to him. Looking forward to it!
You can watch the grand finale event with an introduction from Smokey Robinson here:
Justin Rogers is the literary outreach coordinator for Poets & Writers in Detroit. Contact him at [email protected] or on Twitter, @Detroitpworg.In an article for the Guardian featuring six poets and their reflections on the past year, Kae Tempest writes about the process for their short, four-line poem “2020.” Tempest mentions that the poem was longer, and then they realized the poem only needed four lines: “Sometimes it takes writing the thing to know what it is you are trying to write.” Inspired by Tempest’s process, choose an abandoned draft of a story and rewrite it as a concentrated version of itself. Does this exercise help you get closer to what’s essential about the narrative?
“At some level, I’m never quite sure how the poem is going to resolve itself and that I'm always in some way surprised—I make a discovery in the poem as I write it,” says former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove in this 2009 interview for Big Think, in which she answers questions about poetry and her writing process.
“The only way to know tenderness is to dismantle it,” writes Diane Seuss in “White violet, not so much an image” from her 2015 poetry collection Four-Legged Girl about how the flower is “not so much an image of tenderness as an image of a memory of tenderness.” In the poem, she dissects the flower petal-by-petal, trying to capture its fragility, and associating between the metaphors and memories this act conjures. This week, write a poem about the memories a particular flower conjures for you. Like Seuss, let yourself associate as freely as possible considering all the senses and try to go beyond the traditional portrait of a flower.
Nine Perfect Strangers is a television adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s novel of the same name starring Bobby Cannavale, Luke Evans, Regina Hall, Nicole Kidman, Melissa McCarthy, and Michael Shannon. The Hulu miniseries follows nine strangers who attend a wellness retreat at a place called the Tranquillum House run by a mysterious woman.
“It’s in your hands: the weight of the slats. All slightly bent to one side. As someone that bends with their ear towards the other trying to hear more: what?” Silvina López Medin reads her poem “The Sound of Blinds Being Pulled Up Is the First Sound” from her book Poem That Never Ends (Essay Press, 2021) in this video for Poetry Daily.
Author, poet, and translator Rajiv Mohabir and scholar Kadji Amin speak on the topics of queer theory and scholarship, the process of writing creative nonfiction and poetry, and the term “Asian American” in this virtual conversation for the Radical Thinkers series hosted by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
