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In this excerpt from an interview with NBC Chicago, the late Andrea Gibson reads their poem “Love Letter From the Afterlife” to their wife Megan Falley. Gibson died at the age of forty-nine on July 14, 2025.
“Autism wants to be understood, researched, and recognized as a disability, not a disease.” In this Button Poetry video, Kay Kassirer reads their poem “Autism Speaks (after Arvind Nandakumar).”
In this episode of The Seeds podcast with Alana Hadid, poet aja monet reads from her second collection, Florida Water (Haymarket Books, 2025), and reflects on the role of faith in her artistry and activism, and the current state of movement organizing for Palestine. Florida Water is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In a recent interview for the Paris Review’s Art of Poetry series by Chloe Garcia Roberts, the late Fanny Howe, who passed away on July 9, spoke of a revelatory experience writing “with the environment” at Annaghmakerrig, an artists’ retreat where she wrote her 1995 collection, O’Clock. “It was complete solitude, and an actual attempt to write, for the first time, with the environment,” says Howe. “Instead of sitting and looking out of the window, I just sank into the weather and the trees, dancing around in the environment of Ireland, which I know by its smell.” This week, find a spot outside as close to nature as possible, perhaps simply a location with trees, and try to sink into the landscape. Write a poem that captures the feelings of your surroundings, meditating on minute sensory details and the emotions that the environment evokes.
The 2025 Ruth Stone House Poetry Retreat will be held from August 24 to August 30 at poet Ruth Stone’s historic rural farmhouse in the Green Mountain National Forest in Goshen, Vermont. Programming includes daily workshops, craft seminars, readings, and designated writing time for poets. The 2025 theme is “The Poetics of Nothing.” The faculty includes poets Bianca Stone and Mathias Svalina. The cost of the conference, which includes meals, is $1,500.
Ruth Stone House Poetry Retreat, 788 Hathaway Road, Goshen, VT 05733.
“You might think I am just old but I have finally decided to make the decision to never grow up, and remain under my hood.” In this video, Fanny Howe reads from her poetry collection Second Childhood (Graywolf Press, 2014) at the 2014 National Book Awards ceremony. Howe died at the age of eighty-four on July 9, 2025.
In a 4Columns review of After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960–2025 (Granary Books, 2025) edited by Steve Clay and M. C. Kinniburgh, a catalog for the exhibition of the same name at the Grolier Club in New York, Albert Mobilio lists a few of the unconventional poetry forms from the show: “A cardboard box stuffed with crumpled slips of paper; a book in which each line of text appears on its own sliver of a page; a series of poems printed on what look like business cards; knotted lengths of wool stenciled with verse.” This week think beyond words on a page and conceptualize a new poetry project that makes use of different pictorial and material elements. How might you split up words, lines, or stanzas on a variety of surfaces?
For this recording of the Academy of American Poets’ 2025 Blaney Lecture, Kaveh Akbar reminisces on his childhood spent studying and reciting prayers in Arabic and discusses how sacred poetics and language allow us to sit in complexity and remain in awareness. “Such poetry is a potent antidote against a late capitalist empire that would use empty, vapid language to cudgel us into inaction,” Akbar says.
In this Live From NYPL event, Stephanie Burt discusses the work of editing Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry After Stonewall (Belknap Press, 2025), an anthology of fifty-one poems with essays by Burt, in a conversation with David Groff, along with poets Marisa Crawford, Mark Doty, Marilyn Hacker, and Jee Leong Koh reading and discussing their poems. The anthology is featured in “The LGBTQ+ Literary Resistance” in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Summer is often a season of extremes with scorching pavement and icy drinks, painful sunburns and soothing shade, chaotic activities and calming stillness. Write a poem that explores the tension or intimacy between extremes. Consider a specific, concrete pairing, such as a cold popsicle melting down your wrist in 100-degree heat or the boisterous laughter at a backyard barbecue countered by the silence of an abandoned porch swing. Focus on how contrast sharpens a sensation and can uncover deeper emotional truths. Try to avoid naming the opposites directly, instead, evoke them through details like textures, temperature, tone, and movement. You might also experiment with form to reflect duality by including couplets or mirrored stanzas.
