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“All you can do is pay attention to the process, the practice, and see what it does to you, what it does to the people around you, what it does to your dear readers.” —Latif Askia Ba, author of The Choreic Period
“Poetry is our essential language, and it is as essential to me as breathing.” In this Library of Congress event, Arthur Sze accepts the 2024 Rebekah Bobbitt Johnson National Prize for Poetry for Lifetime Achievement, reads several poems from his career, and talks about his formal exploration of poetics in a conversation with Rob Casper.
“One must have a mind of winter,” begins Wallace Stevens’s 1921 poem “The Snow Man,” which moves from describing iconically icy and desolate imagery of winter—“the pine-trees crusted with snow,” “the junipers shagged with ice”—to pointing out the human beholder’s subjectivity as the agent who projects this wintry outlook. This week, write a poem that takes inspiration from Stevens’s first line and explore what it means to you to have “a mind of winter.” Does it entail nothingness, quietude, withholding, generosity, cheer, beauty, love? How does your selection of seasonal associations determine your poem’s tonal direction? You might even experiment with approaching this prompt more than once, when your mood about the season feels distinctively different.
In this 2024 Asian American Literature Festival event, hosts Cathy Song and Misty-Lynn Sanico introduce a reading from Bamboo Ridge Press authors Donald Carreira Ching, Scott Kikkawa, Wing Tek Lum, and Tamara Wong-Morrison.
In this Green Apple Books event, Kinsale Drake reads from her debut poetry collection, The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket (University of Georgia Press, 2024), and discusses how Indigenous heritage, nature, pop culture, and other influences shaped many of her poems.
Just last month, the bald eagle officially became the national bird of the United States, signed into law by President Biden. Though its official status is new, the bald eagle has long served as an emblem of the country, depicted on the Great Seal and on coins and bills for much of the twentieth century—a symbol of strength, courage, freedom, and independence. Many U.S. states use reptiles, amphibians, insects, fish, and even dinosaurs as their symbols. This week research and consider the various animal emblems and symbols in your midst and choose one to write a poem that draws a personal connection to the animal’s symbolic meaning, whether real or imagined. As you triangulate a relationship between yourself, an animal symbol, and a physical location in this way, explore any unexpected thematic directions within your poem.
“Your e-mails are daily writings. Your grocery lists; your text messages; your poetry magnets on the fridge; your annotations in the margins of your books.” —Kayleb Rae Candrilli, author of Winter of Worship
“Time can but make it easier to be wise / Though now it seems impossible, and so / All that you need is patience.” In this Poetry Hour series reading from the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation, actor Jeremy Irons reads “The Folly Of Being Comforted” by W. B. Yeats.
In her 2022 New York Times essay “The Shape of the Void: Toward a Definition of Poetry,” Elisa Gabbert writes about what makes language poetic. “I think poetry leaves something out,” she writes. “The missingness of poetry slows readers down, making them search for what can’t be found.” Write a poem that revolves around this idea of missingness and leaving something out. To facilitate a mindset of absence, you might choose a subject—a childhood memory, a relationship dynamic, a strange occurrence—that feels inherently cryptic, incoherent, or mysterious. Consider playing with line breaks, spacing, syntax, and diction, to make what’s absent hyper-present. How do the words on the page gesture toward the shape of what can’t be found?
Patrick Rosal reads Paul Genega’s poem “Aliens” in this short film directed by Williams Rossa Cole and produced by the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, in collaboration with the Academy of American Poets, for their Read By poetry film series.
