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Take a cue from Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, which tells a single narrative in ninety-nine ways, and write a poem based on what happened just after you got up this morning. Then use one or more of these filters to revise the poem: onomatopoeia (integrating the sounds of your morning into the language of its telling), litotes (a supremely understated start to the day), overstatement (embellishing every detail), olfactory (emphasizing the morning's smells), tactile (emphasizing the morning's physical feel), gustatory (emphasizing the morning's particular taste).
Last week the National Book Foundation presented the panel discussion "Lineage: American Poetry Since 1950," moderated by Katie Peterson and featuring Elizabeth Alexander, Stephen Burt, Tony Hoagland, James Longenbach, Maureen McLane, and Susan Stewart. The aim of the discussion was "to use the National Book Awards as a point of departure to assess post-War poetry trends and achievements."
The movie Poetry, which was written and directed by South Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-Dong, recently won the Regard d'Or Award at the Fribourg International Film Festival in Switzerland. The movie, about a woman in her sixties who decides to take a poetry class at an adult-education center, also took honors for best screenplay at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.
Spend a few moments examining an old photograph—a found image, a photo from childhood, an iconic shot from history—and give it a title. Then put the photo aside and write a poem using this title.
In this clip Daniel Pogue adds stop-motion sewing animation to section 22 of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "A Coney Island of the Mind." Ferlinghetti turned ninety-two on Thursday.
The Vilcek Foundation has selected poet Charles Simic and fiction writer Dinaw Mengestu as recipients of the sixth annual Vilcek Prizes honoring foreign-born writers, artists, and scientists now living in the United States. Former U.S. poet laureate and recent Robert Frost Medal–winner Simic, born in the former Yugoslavia, received the one-hundred-thousand-dollar prize for lifetime achievement, and Mengestu, born in Ethiopia, won the twenty-five-thousand-dollar prize for creative promise.
Author of twenty poetry collections, Simic's most recent work is Master of Disguises (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). Mengestu is the author of the novels How to Read the Air (Riverhead Books, 2010) and the widely praised The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead Books, 2007), which won the Guardian First Book Award.
The finalists for the prize for emerging writers, each receiving five thousand dollars, are poet Ilya Kaminsky (born in the former Soviet Union) and fiction writers Simon Van Booy (born in England), Téa Obreht (born in Croatia), and Vu Tran (born in Vietnam).
The literature honorees will participate in a panel, The New Vernacular: Immigrant Authors in American Literature, at New York City's Housing Works Bookstore Café on April 5. The event is free and open to the public, but RSVPs are appreciated.
In the video below, Mengestu discusses his latest novel.
Last December Ivan Tresoldi, a street poetry artist from Milano, Italy, led a workshop for young Kosovo Serbian poets and artists sponsored by forumZFD, a bipartisan organization with a mission to push for "the realization of the idea of a Civilian Peace Service." The aim of the workshop was to help participants deal with the past and create poetry and art along the topic of memories and identities. For more information about Kosovo, visit the State Department's Web site.
Kansas-born poet Ben Lerner, author of Mean Free Path (2010), Angle of Yaw (2006), and The Lichtenberg Figures (2004), has become the first American poet to win the Preis für International Poesie der Stadt Münster, a poetry translation award given biennially by the city of Münster, Germany. Lerner, whose books are all published by Copper Canyon Press, won for his debut collection, translated into German by Steffen Popp as Die Lichtenbergfiguren and published by Germany’s Luxbooks.
Past winners of the prize, given since 1993, include Tomaž Šalamun, Hugo Claus, Zbigniew Herbert, and Inger Christensen. Lerner was selected for the tenth award by judges Urs Allemann, Michael Braun, Cornelia Jentzsch, Johan P. Tammen, Wendela Beate Vilhjalmsson, and Norbert Wehr.
In the video below, Lerner reads from The Lichtenberg Figures at the College of New Jersey.
Write a poem on a page of today's newspaper, allowing your eye to wander slightly and take in the language on the page, and for your text to overlay the text on the page. If you fix your eye on a specific word or phrase, incorporate it into the composition.
Linda Gray Sexton's memoir Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton, originally published in 1994 by Little, Brown, was just rereleased in paperback by Counterpoint Press. Anne Sexton herself wrote a play titled Mercy Street, and a posthumous book of poetry, 45 Mercy Street, was published in 1976, two years after she committed suicide. In 1986, Peter Gabriel released his fifth album, So, which includes the song "Mercy Street," dedicated to the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.
![Poetry - Official Trailer [HD]](https://www.pw.org/files/styles/video_thumb_medium/public/media-oembed/i.ytimg.com/vi/fo2dfY317-k/hqdefault.jpg?itok=s8Xna4zi)
