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This video from a Revolutionary Poets Brigade event features devorah major reading selections from poems such as “emergency room visitation,” “outcry,” “neighborhood boy,” and “a poet learns sarajevo.” major’s fifth poetry collection, and then we became (City Lights Publishers, 2016), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“I hope, Maxes, some good in you is of me.” The late Max Ritvo reads “Poem to My Litter” in a short video animated by Nate Milton for WNYC’s Only Human podcast. Ritvo’s debut poetry collection, Four Reincarnations (Milkweed Editions, 2016), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Cynthia Nixon plays the role of Emily Dickinson in Terence Davies’s biopic A Quiet Passion, which explores the nineteenth-century poet’s relationships and writing life. The film, also starring Keith Carradine and Jennifer Ehle, premiered at the 2016 Berlin Film Festival.
With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One highlights the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Zadie Smith’s Swing Time and Fanny Howe’s The Needle’s Eye, offering a glimpse into the worlds of these new and noteworthy titles.
Read excerpts of the debut books by 2016’s 5 Over 50: Desiree Cooper, Sawnie Morris, Paul Vidich, Paula Whyman, and Paul Hertneky.
This short film created by Sawako Nakayasu features the poet and translator reading “6.3.2003” from her poetry collection Texture Notes (Letter Machine Editions, 2010). Nakayasu’s translation from the Japanese of The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Canarium Books, 2015) by Chika Sagawa was awarded the 2016 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize.
“I feel like I must muzzle myself, / I told my psychiatrist. / ‘So you feel dangerous?’ she said. / Yes. / ‘So you feel like a threat?’ / Yes. / Why was I so surprised to hear it?” At the Asian American Writers' Workshop, Solmaz Sharif reads from her debut poetry collection, Look (Graywolf Press, 2016), which is longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award in poetry. Sharif is joined by poets Rickey Laurentiis, Mariam Ghani, and Cathy Park Hong, who they read her work and their own, and join in a discussion.
“Here go a paycheck with your / name spelled right. Here go trees that applaud. Here go / what your whole body remember.” In this video, Angel Nafis reads a poem for the WordXWord Festival's Tuesday Project. Nafis is the author of BlackGirl Mansion, which was published by Red Beard Press/New School Poetics in 2012.
Craig Czury has spent three decades conducting poetry, life-writing, and writing as healing workshops in schools, universities, community centers, juvenile detention centers, homeless shelters, and mental hospitals. Czury is a lecturer at Albright University, an editor, publisher, tireless arts advocate, and the author of over twenty books of poetry, most recently, Thumb Notes Almanac: Hitchhiking the Marcellus Shale (FootHills Publishing, 2016), a poetry documentary woven from his hitchhiking interviews and observations taken while hitchhiking through the heart of "fracking" in his home region of Northeastern Pennsylvania. He is the cohost and artistic director of the Old School Poetry Series at the Springville Schoolhouse Art Studios, where he lives, works, and plays bocce.
ROAD DOG FOR POETRY
By Craig Czury
BECAUSE
Because I will never know where it is you find
your courage to speak without fear of punishment
fear of ridicule or invasion
Because I am always a stranger new in town
new in school new among best friends
But when we speak to each other from that place
inside ourselves where we're not afraid
even if it's the kitchen where we don't sleep at night
our words don't turn back on us like a cracked mirror
in the world that wears masks
Because
Because when your voice sifts through me
I need to talk with you from a familiar table
table set by the silenced not allowed voices
so we can sit talk and find out where we are
I’ve been a road dog for poetry ever since I was awarded the First Book Award from the Montana Arts Council in 1980. Invitations to conduct poetry writing workshops in schools began coming in and I found out that I was really good at stepping into a classroom and exciting students with language, getting them to write their own poems. For the next twenty-five years I made my living as an itinerant poet in schools, prisons, homeless shelters, mental hospitals, and community centers through various state arts councils and arts foundations, until No Child Left Behind knocked us all out of the water. In 2005 I went back to school to get an MFA in creative writing at Wilkes University and began teaching as an adjunct professor at Albright College, a small private school in Pennsylvania—not at all the same game as stepping into a room, making it spontaneously combust with poetry, and driving off to my next unknown excitement.
With the publication of my new book, Thumb Notes Almanac: Hitchhiking the Marcelus Shale, I took a leave of absence from my college teaching, bought a ’99 Volvo station wagon to bunk in, and, thanks to my publisher Michael Czarnecki of FootHills Publishing for introducing me to Poets & Writers, and my agent Kimberly Crafton, I set up a reading series throughout upstate New York. Within six months, I rolled into Cuba, Peru, Rome, Macedon, Utica, Bath, Endicott—global names of towns fitting the global consciousness of poetry. The salary I earned from my P&W–sponsored workshops and readings, afforded me airfare to Italy for a reading tour in May and June, where Thumb Notes Almanac had been translated and published into Italian. And when I returned, P&W kept me afloat to not only work on my next book of poems, but to encourage others, in out-of-the-way communities, to explore and take more seriously their own writing.
In the words of poet Carol Elaine Deys at Books Etc. in Macedon:
Expansive, eternal and occasionally soundless
in the world of choice - the every day world -
the world which requires us to sustain.
We write.
We determine as whole and well on Planet Earth.
We sustain, because we must.
The Voice of the Poet remains intact despite all
rumors to the contrary -
and we shall be blessed because of it.
Photos: Craig Czury. Photo credit: Kimberly Glemboski
Support for the Readings & Workshops Program in New York is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with additional support from Friends of Poets & Writers.
Taking inspiration from the “Dear President” feature in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, in which fifty American poets and writers were asked to write several sentences addressing the next president, write a short poem of address that starts with the words, “Dear President.” Touch upon one or two of the most important issues to you about contemporary society and/or government. Share any advice, wisdom, wishes, or requests.
