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"I saw some shit that needed to be spoken, so I just said it." This and other priceless quotes are featured in this moving collage for an event by the Guild Literary Complex and the University of Chicago celebrating the life and work of pioneering poet Gil Scott-Heron, who passed away last May.
In her essay “The Art of Finding” originally published in American Poet in 2006, Linda Gregg advises poets to be more attuned to the physical world and to find concrete images that possess a special vibrancy. Gregg writes about how she asks her students to keep “a journal in which they must write, very briefly, six things they have seen each day—not beautiful or remarkable things, just things.” Try this exercise for one week, and at the end of the week, use two images from your journal in a poem.
Luke Frazier talks to some local poets in Kent, Ohio, about Traveling Stanzas, a collaboration between the Wick Poetry Center's outreach program and the Glyphix design studio at Kent State University.
Write a poem that begins with a description of a photograph you have in your possession. Delve into the memories evoked by the photograph, or reveal what personal significance the photograph has for you. For inspiration, read Natasha Trethewey’s “History Lesson.”
In this issue we offer a look at a new, illustrated translation of the Antigone of Sophocles. Antigonick, a collaboration between poet Anne Carson and poet and artist Bianca Stone, was released by New Directions in May.
For the month of July, P&W–supported poet and director of literary events, Randall Horton, blogs about his work with various organizations and events throughout the northeast. Horton is the recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Award, and the National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature. A Cave Canem Fellow and member of Affrilachian Poets, Horton's lastest poetry collection Pitch Dark Anarchy will be published by Northwestern University Press in Spring 2013.
In April 2
011, during National Poetry Month, Poets & Writers funded Aquarius Press/ Willow Books to sponsor a workshop in Detroit, Michigan, at the Virgil Carr Cultural Center. The workshop participants included poets Victor Billione, Nadia Ibrashi, and Felecia Studstill, and began as an organic conversation on craft. We read from a wide range of poets, from Rachel Eliza Griffiths to Stephen Jonas to Evie Shockley. We looked at parallelisms in poems (cosmic nature versus the material world), the idea of “the definition” as a form poem, and the art of the line break, which we all concluded to be critical when fine-tuning the lyric qualities in the poem, and the poem as political mouthpiece.
I wanted to tailor each poet’s experience to suite his or her aesthetic intentions. For example:
Victor’s exercise asked: In what ways do you feel oppressed? Choose an object you own that seems to embody that oppression and/or privilege, and write a poem about it.
Nadia’s exercise asked: What communities of people do you identify with and feel you belong to? Write a poem from the voice of this collective “we,” talking about your troubles, your failings, celebrating your strengths…
…and Felecia’s exercise asked: Imagine someone who lives in another part of the world under very different economic and political circumstance. Have that person talk to you about your life in America from his or her perspective. You can also do this exercise by imagining someone else in America, but of a different class, race, and so forth.
Then they wrote. Here are excerpts from the poems created and used with their permission:
Victor: “I sleep well knowing these references are/Framed in revolution/Evolving into stories time has forgotten.”
Nadia: “Finally, we see the words,/the shape of mornings,/the secret place.”
Felecia: “Your anger is fear/you know. You know./You are as worthy of my life/As I am of yours.”
The idea of the workshop was to take writing samples from the participants and tailor each participant’s experience based on writing tendencies, likes, dislikes, and aesthetic intentions. This helped to create a multi-voiced workshop that paid close attention to the writer and ultimately asked the writer to expand beyond his or her imagination.
Photo: Randall Horton. Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Support for Readings/Workshops events in Detroit is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.
We thought we'd inject a little energy into our Wednesday with this music video by Julian Smith. Don't you ever interrupt me when I'm reading a book!
Founded in 1975, A Room of One’s Own is a feminist bookstore in downtown Madison, Wisconsin. The store specializes in women’s literature and offers a wide selection of fiction, nonfiction, periodicals, music, posters, and T-shirts for and by women. A Room of One’s Own also maintains a non-sexist children's section and stocks up-to-date titles in lesbian and gay studies, bisexual and transgender books, gender studies, as well as lesbian and gay male fiction. The store hosts several author events throughout the year.
The NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown recently spent some time with poet Natalie Diaz, author of the collection When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), who is working to preserve the rapidly disappearing Mojave language.
In a 2008 Paris Review interview with Kay Ryan, she explains her neologism “recombinant rhyme”—a craft technique of stashing “rhymes at the wrong ends of lines and in the middle.” According to Ryan, “snipping up pieces of sound and redistributing them throughout a poem” allows her to “get the poem to go a little bit luminescent.” Take a poem of yours that could use more musicality, and revise it to include recombinant rhyme.
