I come
from a family
that twice names
its own.
One name
for the world.
– Traci Dant, “A Twice Named Family”
Read this post about Traci Dant on The Brown Bookshelf:
Day 20: Traci Dant
The 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of those thoughts could fit on a T-shirt.
– P.J. O’Rourke, “The Baby Boom”
Watch P.J. O’Rourke discuss his books and lifetime:
Author P.J. O’Rourke reflects on life in the sixties to today with nostalgia and humor
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December, nightfall at three-thirty.
I climb Mill Hill
past hawthorne and wild cherry,
mist in the hedgerows.
Smoke blows
from the orange edges of fire
working the wheat
stubble. “Putting
the goodness back,
into the soil.”
– Donald Hall, “Swan”
Read this interview with Donald Hall from the Paris Review:
The Art of Poetry No. 43
Donald Hall was born in New Haven and raised in Hamden, Connecticut, but spent summers, holidays, and school vacations on a farm owned by his maternal grandparents in Wilmot, New Hampshire. He took his bachelor’s degree at Harvard, then studied at Oxford for two years, earning an add…
She was all around me
like a rainy day,
and though I walked bareheaded
I was not wet. I walked
on a bare path
singing light songs
about women.
– Donald Hall, “The Blue Wing”
Watch Donald Hall discuss and read from his work:
Former National Poet Laureate Donald Hall recites his poetry, talks of his life
Former poet laureate Donald Hall talks with fellow poet Elizabeth Spires about what sparked his writing as a young man (movies like “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein”), his wild times with poets like Robert Bly at Harvard, and his return to his grandparents’ farm with wife and poet Jane Kenyon.
she wants to reclaim her body
change it back to its original shape
like when she danced, you know she use
to dance, in the middle of a drum circle
– Marvin Tate, “Blue eggs for a blue poet”
Broadside of “Blue eggs for a blue poet” by Marvin Tate
Buy this broadside in the Mixed Bag series⇒
Read this article about Marvin Tate from the Chicago Tribune:
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I am the dark and ominous tower
your greenless, infertile backyard
the unsightly vista that you view
each morning, from your high rise
curtainless, kitchenette windows.
– Marvin Tate, “A Bruised Mood Over the Cabrini Green Projects”
Watch Marvin Tate recite his poem, “My Life to the Present,” on Def Jam Poetry:
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In the republic of poetry,
a train full of poets
rolls south in the rain
as plum trees rock
and horses kick the air,
and village bands
parade down the aisle
with trumpets, with bowler hats,
followed by the president
of the republic,
shaking every hand.
– Martin Espada, “The Republic of Poetry”
Read this interview with Martin Espada from Poetry Daily:
Features
Check out our latest features, including our Book Features, What Sparks Poetry and Hot Off the Presses.
Forty years ago, I bled in this hallway.
Half-light dimmed the brick
like the angel of public housing.
That night I called and listened at every door:
in 1966, there was a war on television.
– Martin Espada, “Return”
Continue to reading this poem⇒
Watch Martin Espada discuss poetry and activism:
Martín Espada discusses poetry and activism
In this edition of HoCoPoLitSo’s The Writing Life, poet and activist Naomi Ayala interviews poet, translator, essayist and activist Martín Espada. The deaths of five good friends sparked Espada’s newest book, The Trouble Ball. “I had to find a way to grapple with the deaths of these dear people, but I didn’t want these to be the normal elegies,” Espada explains.
How my roots fandango,
shag down
dark as anchovy fillets
gibbet-curing
in the sun
or, wind-spurred,
dicker, dodder, swoop and dodge.
– Diane Ackerman, “Lament of the Banyan Tree”
Read this interview with Diane Ackerman from January Magazine:
Interview | Diane Ackerman
Buy it on Amazon Books by Diane Ackerman Deep Play I Praise My Destroyer The Rarest of the Rare A Natural History of the Senses The Moon by Whale Light Jaguar of Sweet Laughter Reverse Thunder On Extended Wings Lady Faustus Twilight of the Tenderfoot Wife of Light The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral For Children: Monk Seal Hideaway Bats: Shadows in the Night Anthology: The Book of Love (with Jeanne Mackin) If I had my druthers every prose book I wrote would be like inhaling jungle.
The old moon lying in the young moon’s arms
lives in the shadow of her crescent light
and yet he rounds her out, shields her from harm
as she ripens in the star-encrusted night.
– Diane Ackerman, “Natural Wonders”
Watch Diane Ackerman discuss her passion for nature writing from Kirkus TV:
Kirkus TV Interview with Best-Selling Author Diane Ackerman
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Poet, essayist, and naturalist, Diane Ackerman is the author of two dozen highly acclaimed works of nonfiction and poetry. She has received a P.E.N. Henry David Thoreau Award for Nature Writing, Orion Book Award, John Burroughs Nature Award, Visionary Artist Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, Lavan Poetry Prize, honorary doctorate from Kenyon College, among others, and has been lionized as a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library. Several of her books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Circle Critics Award finalists. In 2016, Ackerman was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
I have had to write this down
in my absence and yours. These
things happen. Thinking
of a voice added
I imagine a sympathy outside us
that protects the message
from what can’t help,
being said.
– Tess Gallagher, “Love Poem to Be Read to an Illiterate Friend”
Read this interview with Tess Gallagher from Poets&Writers:
An Interview With Tess Gallagher
At the time of this interview, Tess Gallagher had just published Amplitude: New and Selected Poems, which gathered poems from her first three collections, with Graywolf Press. Her most recent book, The Man From Kinvara: Selected Stories, also was published by Graywolf in September 2009. Entire Trees-Douglas Firs, Alders, hemlocks-have washed up onshore.
The sleep of this night deepens
because I have walked coatless from the house
carrying the white envelope.
All night it will say one name
in its little tin house by the roadside.
– Tess Gallagher, “Under Stars”
Watch Tess Gallagher read her poetry at the Pennsylvania Scranton Public Library in October, 1980:
Friends of the Scranton Public Library Poery Series:Tess Gallagher Part One
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They slept and ate like us.
Feral they were not.
The intricacy of their handiwork
bespoke a fineness we’d be taught.
– Michael Ryan, “The Others”
Read an interview with Michael Ryan from How A Poem Happens:
Michael Ryan
Michael Ryan’s Threats Instead of Trees won the 1973 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award; In …
Wanting leads to worse than oddity.
The bones creak like bamboo in wind,
and strain toward a better life outside the body,
the life anything has that isn’t human.
– Michael Ryan, “Where I’ll Be Good”
Watch Michael Ryan read his work at Poetry@Tech:
Poetry@Tech: Michael Ryan – Part 1
Poetry@Tech presents: Michael Ryan Fourth Annual Bourne Poetry Reading October 26, 2005 http://www.poetry.gatech.edu/index.php
Ashes, the dissonance of unicorns: the edges
of my written name begin to curl, the ink
still visible through the fire. In absence of stars,
my natality card remains safely in Washington.
– Stephen Dobyns, “Name-Burning”
Read this interview with Stephen Dobyns from The New Yorker:
Poetry Questions: Stephen Dobyns
This week, the magazine features “Determination,” by Stephen Dobyns. I had the chance to ask the author about the kindling and spark that fed this …
Groggy, sure, and in the midst of bad dreams,
it must have been a dispirited awakening–
expecting everything settled, the long night
without interruption suddenly interrupted,
– Stephen Dobyns, “The Mercy of Lazarus”
Watch Stephen Dobyns read his work at Poetry@Tech:
Poetry@Tech: Stephen Dobyns
Stephen Dobyns October 27, 2011 http://www.poetry.gatech.edu/index.php Produced by the Georgia Tech Cable Network
Interesting that I have to live with my skeleton.
It stands, prepared to emerge, and I carry it
with me–this other thing I will become at death,
and yet it keeps me erect and limber in my walk,
my rival.
– David Ignatow, “My skeleton, my rival”
Read this interview with David Ignatow from the Paris Review:
The Art of Poetry No. 23
Photograph by LaVerne Harrell Clark 02/17/1971 David Ignatow keeps an apartment in Queens close to York College where he teaches-four small rooms with bare walls. The windows of the living-room look out on a quaint cemetery dating back to the late 1700s. On its far side runs the BMT J…
I carry my keys like a weapon,
their points bunched together
and held outwards in the palm
for a step too close behind me
as I approach the subway through the
dark.
– David Ignatow, “To Nowhere”
Listen to David Ignatow read his poem, “What about dying:”
David Ignatow reads What about dying
David Ignatow reads his poem What about dying.
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