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“There are days we live / as if death were nowhere / in the background from joy / to joy to joy, from wing to wing,” reads Li-Young Lee from his poem “From Blossoms,” included in his debut collection, Rose (BOA Editions, 1986), for this installment of Poetry Breaks, a series created by Leita Luchetti in the 1980s and 1990s presented in partnership with the Academy of American Poets.
In John Keene’s poem “Phone Book,” from his poetry collection Punks: New and Selected Poems (Song Cave, 2021) and published on Literary Hub, the speaker flips alphabetically through a Rolodex remembering the lives of each person listed: “Yamil bending / ear to lips to read the laments, with care, tells me that Zachary, the Rolodex / Z, now gone, no longer fears those dark days. In any light, trust, the dead can see.” Mixing rhythm and narrative, Keene seamlessly threads together the names of contacts with their respective stories, never losing the threads of their often fleeting lives. This week, make a list of names from A-Z of people from your past and then weave them together in a loose abecedarian poem that tells their stories.
“A lot of my life has been unconventional, but it has led to this point and I wouldn’t have reached this point if I’d given up.” In this Penguin Books UK video, Booker Prize–winning author Bernardine Evaristo speaks with her longtime editor Simon Prosser about her writing career and books, including her new memoir, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up (Grove Press, 2022).
“I had a body and it was good / until you gave it meaning,” reads Ari Banias, author of A Symmetry (Norton, 2021), from his poem “Tautology” in this Poetry Project reading with Silvina López Medin, author of Poem That Never Ends (Essay Press, 2021).
“i am running into a new year / and the old years blow back / like a wind,” writes Lucille Clifton in her poem “i am running into a new year,” which is included in The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 edited by Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser (BOA Editions, 2015). In this popular poem, Clifton writes about encountering her past as she moves into the future: “it will be hard to let go / of what i said to myself / about myself / when i was sixteen and / twenty-six and thirty-six.” Write a poem about the feeling you get when entering a new year. What are you taking with you, and what are you leaving behind? For further inspiration, read this Washington Post article by Stephanie Burt about the tradition of greeting a new year with poetry.
“All street life to a certain extent starts fair // Sometimes with a spiritual memory even,” reads Tongo Eisen-Martin from his poem “Kick Drum Only” in this virtual reading with poet, activist, and icon Sonia Sanchez celebrating the ninetieth anniversary of the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard University.
“To think I’ve gone / to all this trouble / just to lose / my looks & mind.” In this Poetry Society of America video, Devon Walker-Figueroa reads her poem “Noise Cancelling,” which was selected by Amit Majmudar as the winner of the 2021 Lucille Medwick Memorial Award. Walker-Figueroa speaks about her debut collection, Philomath (Milkweed Editions, 2021), in “A Freeing Space: Our Seventeenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“You are a hundred wild centuries // And fifteen, bringing with you / In every breath and in every step // Everyone who has come before you,” writes Alberto Ríos in his poem “A House Called Tomorrow,” in which he challenges readers to consider their place in building a better world. In the poem, fitting for the new year, Ríos writes about the weight of the past, then sounds a hopeful note: “Look back only for as long as you must, / Then go forward into the history you will make.” Write a poem about your relationship to the past—your connection to the “wild centuries” of history as well as your own personal past, from early childhood to recent years marked by the private and public transformations of time. Try to include your own revelations along with the inspiration that propels you forward into a new tomorrow.
“I lost the prejudice of paradise / And wound up caring for the babies of these guys,” reads Bernadette Mayer from her poem “Eve of Easter” in this 1978 episode of Public Access Poetry with Lewis Warsh at the Poetry Project in New York.
“I once thought I was / my own geometry, / my own geocentric planet,” writes Paul Tran in their poem “Copernicus,” one in a series of poems titled after inventors and scientific concepts. In many of the poems, the theory or invention is used as a metaphor for a given speaker’s emotional struggle, such as in “Hypothesis,” in which Tran writes: “I could survive knowing / that not everything has a reason” and in the first lines of “Galileo”: “I thought I could stop / time by taking apart / the clock.” This week, write a poem named after an inventor or theory. How can you personalize a scientific subject and cast it through a lyrical light?
