Archive by Author

Mueller, Lisel 1995; 1997; 2002

Wednesday, December 13, 1995
Monday, May 5, 1997
Thursday, April 18, 2002

From the province of spring everlasting
bring back a rose that remains half-open,
from the drydock of mute old men
bring back the miracle of a tear,
from the delta of good intentions
bring back the seed that will change a life.

– Lisel Mueller, “Spell For A Traveler”

Broadside of “Spell For A Traveler” by Lisel Mueller

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Listen to Lisel Mueller’s 1995 Poetry Center of Chicago reading:

Audio recording of the Poetry Center Reading Series featuring Billy Collins, Andrei Codrescu, Ron Padgett, Lucille Clifton, Mark Perlberg, Li-Young Lee, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Anne Waldman, Yusuf Komunyakaa, Lisel Mueller, Ted Kooser, Paul Carroll, Jorie Graham, and Paul Hoover.

Audio recording of the Poetry Center Reading Series featuring Billy Collins, Andrei Codrescu, Ron Padgett, Lucille Clifton, Mark Perlberg, Li-Young Lee, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Anne Waldman, Yusuf Komunyakaa, Lisel Mueller, Ted Kooser, Paul Carroll, Jorie Graham, and Paul Hoover.

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We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,

– Lisel Mueller, “Things”

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Read an interview with Lisel Mueller from Pirene’s Fountain:

http://www.pirenesfountain.com/archives/issue_04/showcase-interview.html

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Moss, Stanley 1979

Friday, March 16, 1979

When you said that you wanted to be useful
as the days of the week, I said, “God bless you.”
Then you said you would not trade our Mondays,
useful for two thousand years,
for the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.

– Stanley Moss, “An Argument”

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Watch Stanley Moss read some of his poetry:

Stanley Moss reads ‘Song of Alphabets’, ‘Paper Swallow’, and ‘Pslam’

American poet Stanley Moss reads three of his poems from his collection No Tear is Commonplace, published by Carcanet Press (2013). Available here http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781847772503 The poems collected in No Tear is Commonplace stage a passionate, curious, and often combative relationship with the world and the forces that shape human life and death.

Some of the self-containment of my old face
has been sandblasted away. The “yellow wind”
is blowing and my mouth and face burn
from the Gobi dust that scorches the city
after its historic passage over the Great Wall.
When I was young, I hosed the Atlantic salt
off my body, the salt was young too.

– Stanley Moss, “April, Beijing”

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Read an article on Stanley Moss:

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/22761/the-joke%E2%80%99s-on-god

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Morrissey, Judd 2012; 2013

Saturday, November 10, 2012
Saturday, April 13, 2013

Watch Judd Morrissey’s performance poem, “The Operature:”

THE OPERATURE by ATOM-r @PERFORMING HOUSE, YORK, UK OCT 2013

The Operature is a durational live performance, installation and augmented reality poem that engages histories of forensics and anatomical science and spectacle.

Read an interview with Judd Morrissey and Lori Talley:

http://thestudio.uiowa.edu/tirw/TIRW_Archive/tirweb/feature/morrissey_talley/interview.html

More info on Judd Morrissey⇒

Momaday, N. Scott 1993

Thursday, March 25, 1993

I am a feather on the bright sky
I am the blue horse that runs in the plain
I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water
I am the shadow that follows a child
I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows

– N. Scott Momaday, “The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee”

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Read this interview with N. Scott Momaday from History Net:

Interview: Author N. Scott Momaday

Kiowa Writer N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969 and now claims WWA’s Owen Wister Award.

Watch N. Scott Momaday read some of his work and discuss his life:

A Man Made of Words: N. Scott Momaday

N. Scott Momaday, a noted Native American author, reads his works and tells anecdotes about his life. [1/1997] [Show ID: 125] More from: Library Channel (https://www.uctv.tv/library-channel) Explore More Humanities on UCTV (https://www.uctv.tv/humanities) The humanities encourage us to think creatively and explore questions about our world.

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Mitchell, Roger 1995

February, 1995
with Lucien Stryk

When they found her prostrate in the garden,
talking to a beetle, they locked her in the loft.
There it was spiders. For them, she danced
and made strange noises in her throat.

– Roger Mitchell, “Cinderella”

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Read this interview with Roger Mitchell from How A Poem Happens:

Roger Mitchell

Roger Mitchell’s new and selected, Lemon Peeled the Moment Before , came out from Ausable Press in 2008. The author of ten books of poetry, …

A history of some sort, one that made us,
a war and what the war had meant, or since
meaning eludes war, what it did to the look
of the trees and the sides of the buildings,
most of which survived, only to be torn down
later to widen the street or put up a new
office complex. There it was on the shelf.

– Roger Mitchell, “A Book on a Shelf”

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Milosz, Czeslaw 1989

Sunday, November 12, 1989

In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori
baskets of olives and lemons,
cobbles spattered with wine
and the wreckage of flowers.
Vendors cover the trestles
with rose-pink fish;
armfuls of dark grapes
heaped on peach-down.

– Czeslaw Milosz, “Campo dei Fiori”

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Listen to Czeslaw Milosz’s 1989 reading for the Poetry Center of Chicago:

Audio recording of the Poetry Center Reading Series featuring Tom Raworth, Diane di Prima, Kimiko Hahn, Eugene Gloria, Patricia Smith, Luis Rodriguez, Robert Bly, Brian Turner, Bruce Weigl, Tyehimba Jess, A. Van Jordan, Arielle Greenberg, Billy Corgan, Franz Wright, Czeslaw Milosz, Louise Glück, and Alicia Ostriker.

Audio recording of the Poetry Center Reading Series featuring Tom Raworth, Diane di Prima, Kimiko Hahn, Eugene Gloria, Patricia Smith, Luis Rodriguez, Robert Bly, Brian Turner, Bruce Weigl, Tyehimba Jess, A. Van Jordan, Arielle Greenberg, Billy Corgan, Franz Wright, Czeslaw Milosz, Louise Glück, and Alicia Ostriker.

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On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

– Czeslaw Milosz, “A Song on the End of the World”

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Read this interview with Czeslaw Milosz from the Paris Review:

The Art of Poetry No. 70

A loss of harmony with the surrounding space, the inability to feel at home in the world, so oppressive to an expatriate, a refugee, an immigrant, paradoxically integrates him in contemporary society and makes him, if he is an artist, understood by all. Even more, to express the existent…

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Mills, Tyler 2014

Thursday, December 11, 2014
with Larry Sawyer and Lina Ramona Vitkauskas
Chicago Cultural Center

I sense the trees’ light filtering the room–
knowing nothing about the tulip tree
canoe flipped so its stomach slopes up,
scuffed by quartz tumbled in the shallow drag.
I’ve walked here in the wetness holding rain,
endangered lady slippers dipping petal shoes,
dashes of pink in mud–and you’re not here.

– Tyler Mills, “Blue Mountain Lake”

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Listen to Tyler Mills read for the Poetry Center of Chicago’s Six Points Reading Series, with Larry Sawyer and Lina Ramona Vitkauskas:

Tyler Mills begins at 2:27 minutes.

You look like a monster, one woman said to another.
The woman was on fire. This is the first of two screws
twisted into a wall. One bus is sent on its route minutes before
the other. This is the first. Thousands of soldiers were lowering
their faces to the grass, as though an exercise
can will an effect.

– Tyler Mills, “First Thing”

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Read an interview with Tyler Mills from The American Literary Review:

An Interview With Tyler Mills

An Interview with Tyler Mills Interview conducted by Karl Zuehlke Karl Zuehlke (KZ): When I read your poems in Tongue Lyre, I find myself constantly intrigued in the most enjoyable way by how you negotiate your subject matter. Greek myth, classical music, writers and visual artists often offer you the opportunity to write from a persona or…

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Merrill, James 1985

Wednesday, April 17, 1985

Vintage poster of James Merrill's reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Vintage poster of James Merrill’s reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

The hand with a seagull purpose falls upon
Sand where the beach is barren: through clean light
From eye’s blue zenith, past seascapes of blue,
Falls on grey sand; yet stenciled in its fall

– James Merrill, “Accumulations of the Sea”

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Listen to James Merrill read some of his poetry at the 1969 Glascock Poetry Contest:

The boatman rowed into
That often-sung impasse.
Each visitor foreknew
A floor of lilting glass,
A vault of stone, lit blue.

– James Merrill, “The Blue Grotto”

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Read an interview with James Merrill from the Paris Review:

The Art of Poetry No. 31

Courtesy Rollie Mckenna Collection. My first glimpse of James Merrill, a dozen years ago, was in black and white. It was a photograph of him, in the Brinnin and Read anthology called The Modern Poets. He had just turned toward the camera-his mouth slightly open, as if not expecti…

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Merwin, W. S. 1998

Tuesday, September 22, 1998

Save these words for a while because
of something they remind you of
although you cannot remember
what that is a sense that is part
dust and part the light of morning

– W. S. Merwin, “Memorandum”

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Listen to W. S. Merwin’s 1998 reading for the Poetry Center of Chicago:

When I was small and stayed quiet
some animals came
new ones each time
and waited there near me
and all night they were eating the black

– W. S. Merwin, “Animals From Mountains”

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Watch a video interview with W. S. Merwin:

Merwin’s Passion for Poetry and the Natural World… | Poetry Foundation

W.S. Merwin reads several of his poems and talks with Jeffrey Brown about memory, language, and his life as a poet and horticulturist.

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Meltzer, David 2009

Thursday, November 19, 2009

In the hole he counted heartbeats
but got scared they’d stop
listened to broken pipes
under the shit-hole in the floor
finally read the Bible they give you
but his religion wasn’t in a book

– David Meltzer, “The Art/The Veil”

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Read an interview with David Meltzer:

Interview with poet David Meltzer

Interview with poet David Meltzer

Watch David Meltzer read some of his work here:

When I Was A Poet by David Meltzer

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More info on David Meltzer⇒