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Michael McClure, whose poetry Allen Ginsberg described as "a blob of protoplasmic energy," performs one of his poems as well as one by Emily Dickinson in this clip from 2007. McClure's Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems, which includes an introduction by the late Leslie Scalapino, is out this month from the University of California Press.
The keepers of Robert Frost's family farm in Derry, New Hampshire, where the poet lived from 1900 to 1911, have opened their inaugural formal poetry contest. Sponsored by the trustees of the Robert Frost Farm and the Hyla Brook Poets, a workshop group that holds a reading series at the historic site, the competition is calling for poems written in meter—any metrical form is welcome.
One winner will receive one thousand dollars and an invitation to read in the Hyla Brook series at the Frost Farm, a program that has hosted poets such as Maxine Kumin, Rhina Espaillat, and Wesley McNair. Serving as judge will be William Baer, former editor of the no-longer-published poetry journal the Formalist.
The entry fee is five dollars a poem, and writers may submit as many works as they like—via snail mail—by April 1. Complete guidelines are posted on the Robert Frost Farm Web site.
In the video below, a short film by Doug Williams interprets Frost's poem "Into My Own," originally published as "Into Mine Own" in New England Magazine during the time Frost lived at the Derry farm, in 1909.
The folks at McSweeney's Quarterly Concern put together this audio-visual preview of their thirty-sixth issue, which was published last month and features more than five hundred pages of stories and artwork contained in a box more or less the size of a human head.
Two history teachers from Honolulu, Hawaii, have spent the past year or so creating a series of videos that use tailored versions of popular songs to deliver history lessons. Here is a bit about The Canterbury Tales set to "California Dreamin'" by the Mamas and the Papas. Check out the historyteachers channel on YouTube for dozens more.
Write an erasure poem: Rip out one or two pages from a magazine or newspaper. Read through them, underlining words and phrases that appeal to you and that relate to each other. Using a marker or Wite-Out, begin to delete the words around those you underlined, leaving words and phrases that you might want to use. Keep deleting the extra language, working to construct poetic lines with the words you’ve chosen to keep.
The folks at the independent Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, put together this tongue-in-cheek video to introduce the fictional television station HBTV—the store's new YouTube channel featuring clips of staff members recommending books.
Author Kwame Dawes recently appeared on the PBS NewsHour to discuss his experience in Haiti, where he has traveled over the past year to report on and write poems about life after the earthquake last January. After you watch the clip, check out Kevin Nance's article "Haiti Noir, Haiti Light" in the new issue.
This short film, directed by Alex Markman, starring Tom Shillue, and produced by Electric Literature, takes a look at how well the big books of 2010 would protect you in the event of a shooting.
Choose a favorite poem written by somebody else, type a copy of it, delete every other line from the poem, and write your own lines to replace those you’ve deleted. Next, delete the remaining lines from the old poem so that only your lines remain. Read what you have, and revise it, adding new lines to fill in the gaps.
Bob Holman reads "Happy New Year Poem" at the 37th annual New Year's Day marathon reading at the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York City.
