Archive by Author

Bellow, Saul 1976

Friday, February 6, 1976
Francis Parker School
Vintage poster of Saul Bellow's reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Vintage poster of Saul Bellow’s reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

I am an American, Chicago born–Chicago, that somber city–and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.

– Saul Bellow, “The Adventures of Augie March”

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Read this interview with Saul Bellow from the Paris Review:

The Art of Fiction No. 37

Drawing by Rosalie Seidler. The interview “took place” over a period of several weeks. Beginning with some exploratory discussions during May of 1965, it was shelved during the summer, and actually accomplished during September and October. Two recording sessions were held, tota…

Listen to Saul Bellow read from “Humboldt’s Gift:”

Saul Bellow Reads from “Humboldt’s Gift” and “Henderson the Rain King,” October 10, 1988 by The Paris Review

Bellow reads from “Humboldt” and then “Henderson,” with audience Q/A starting at about 50:55.

More info on Saul Bellow⇒

Beachy-Quick, Dan 2004

Monday, February 2, 2004
with Peter Streckfus and Arielle Greenberg

Must I anger and must my anger pearl,
My anger pearl, must I pearl, must I polish
Madness daily, rub nacre into a world
Perfect, round, what in my hand should finish

-Dan Beachy-Quick, “Sonnet”

Broadside of "Sonnet" by Dan Beachy-Quick

Buy the broadside of “Sonnet” by Dan Beachy-Quick⇒

…Or buy the series broadsides of Dan Beachy-Quick, Peter Streckfus, and Arielle Greenberg⇒

Read this interview with Dan Beachy-Quick from the Kenyon Review:

A metaphysic of the page, a mode of inquiry called wonder: an interview with Dan Beachy-Quick ” Kenyon Review Blog

B. K. Fischer, writing about two of Dan Beachy-Quick’s books for the Boston Review, locates what she sees as a struggle for him and his contemporaries-or for any poet born […]

Record no oiled tongue, diary–
Note my lantern bruises the low
Clouds with light the evening
We talked. Almonds in a bowl;
She ate none. I did
Not bid her remove her dark
Gloves as sometime before she had done.

– Dan Beachy-Quick, “[Record no oiled tongue, diary]

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Watch Dan Beachy-Quick discuss his work on The American Literary Review’s A Literary Thought Bubble series:

A Literary Thought Bubble — Dan Beachy Quick

Karl Zuehlke interviews Dan Beachy-Quick for A Literary Thought Bubble, created by The American Literary Review.

More info on Dan Beachy-Quick⇒

Baraka, Amiri 1982

Friday, November 19, 1982
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Vintage poster of Amiri Baraka's reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Vintage poster of Amiri Baraka’s reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

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The gaunt thing
with no organs
creeps along the streets
of Europe, she will
commute, in her feathered bat stomach-gown
with no organs
with sores on her insides…

– Amiri Baraka, “Babylon Revisted” 

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Vintage poster of Poetry in Motion: a film by Ron Mann with Amiri Baraka, Ted Berrigan, Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, John Cage, Robert Creeley, Diane Di Prima, Kenward Elmslie, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Ed Sanders, Gary Snyder, Tom Waits, Anne Waldman at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Vintage poster of Poetry in Motion: a film by Ron Mann with Amiri Baraka, Ted Berrigan, Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, John Cage, Robert Creeley, Diane Di Prima, Kenward Elmslie, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Ed Sanders, Gary Snyder, Tom Waits, Anne Waldman at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

What I thought was love
in me, I find a thousand instances
as fear. (Of the tree’s shadow
winding around the chair, a distant music
of frozen birds rattling
in the cold.

– Amiri Baraka, “The Liar”

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Watch Amiri Baraka read his work with Rob Brown on saxophone accompaniment:

Amiri Baraka “Somebody Blew Up America”

“Somebody Blew Up America” by Amiri Baraka with Rob Brown-saxophone, recorded live on February 21, 2009 at The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy NY.

More info on Amiri Baraka⇒

Ashbery, John 1977

Friday, April 15, 1977
The Poetry Center at the Museum of Contemporary Art
Vintage poster of John Ashbery's reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Vintage poster of John Ashbery’s reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

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Never mind, dears, the afternoon
will fold you up, along with preoccupations
that now seem so important, until only a child
running around on a unicycle occupies center stage. 

– John Ashbery, “Like A Sentence”
Read this interview with John Ashbery from the Paris Review:

Ahead, starting from the far north, it wanders.
Its radish-strong gasoline fumes have probably been
Locked into your sinuses while you were away.
You will have to deliver it.
The flowers exist on the edge of breath, loose,
Having been laid there.
One gives pause to the other,
Or there will be a symmetry about their movements
Through which each is also an individual.

– John Ashbery, “Flowering Death”
Watch John Ashbery discuss poetry with TIME Magazine:

Andrews, Tom 1997

Wednesday, October 15, 1997
with Margaret Gibson

October dusk.
Pink scraps of clouds, a plum-colored sky.
The sycamore tree spills a few leaves.
The cold focuses like a lens. . .

– Tom Andrews, “At Burt Lake”

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Listen to Tom Andrews’s Poetry Center reading with Margaret Gibson:

Read Tom Andrews’s poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Strangled Moose:”

Tom Andrews Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Strangled Moose

Seven men, a pale woman and a dog Circle the indoor, rubberized track Like strangled moose. Orpheus rolled through his sleep. Eurydice read a popular novel, a period piece Involving a ménage a trois And the strangling of a moose. Dear Mr. Farnsworth, I’m sorry. I swear the black elk looked Like a black moose.

There is a sleep like the long dissolve
of bone into brown dirt. The nurse carries
a paper cup, a syringe of that sleep…

– Tom Andrews, “Codeine Diary”

Continue reading this poem in Tom Andrews’s book, The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle⇒

More info on Tom Andrews⇒

Anania, Michael 2003

Tuesday, October 21, 2003
with Haki Madhubuti

Clear vials of cloudy
sputum on a windowsill,
the hand they said I saw
waving from a balcony,
that bony face of his
bouyed up in tufted satin.

–Michael Anania, “Materials of June”

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Listen to Michael Anania’s 2003 reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago:

settle it, then,
the syllable snapped
between your finger

– Michael Anania, “Rain Dancing”

Broadside of “Rain Dancing” by Michael Anania

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More info on Michael Anania⇒

Michael Anania is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer who also boasts a distinguished editorial career. He has published twelve collections of poems and his essays have been collected in 1991’s In Plain Sight: Obsessions, Morals and Domestic Laughter. A committed modernist, Anania’s work reflects a wide range of beliefs, settings, and styles.

Amichai, Yehuda 1983

Friday, December 2, 1983
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Vintage poster of Yehuda Amichai's reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Vintage poster of Yehuda Amichai’s reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

You too belong to another summer
the land’s soft underbelly is you too,
dry grass in the hair,
chaff stuck to a warm thigh,
oil of stillness on the forehead
and the smell of thirsty earth
in the hollow of your eyes.

– Yehuda Amichai, “Rain in a Foreign Land”

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Read this interview with Yehuda Amichai from the Paris Review:

The Art of Poetry No. 44

Photograph by Hana Amichai Born in Würzburg, Germany in 1924, Yehuda Amichai emigrated to Palestine with his Orthodox Jewish family in 1936. During World War II he fought with the Palestinian brigade of the British army in the Middle East, and he served as a commando in the Haganah und…

My father fought their war four years or so,
And did not hate or love his enemies.
Already he was forming me, I know,
Daily, out of his tranquilities;

– Yehuda Amichai, “Sonnet”

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Read this NPR segment on Yehuda Amichai:

Love, War and History: Israel’s Yehuda Amichai

Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai talks to Henry Lyman, in an excerpt from Lyman’s long-running public-radio series Poems to the Listener.

More info on Yehuda Amichai⇒

Called “the most widely translated Hebrew poet since King David,” Yehuda Amichai was born in Germany in 1924 to an Orthodox Jewish family. They immigrated to Jerusalem in 1936, where Amichai would eventually study Hebrew literature at the University of Jerusalem. He published his first book of poetry, Now and in Other Days, in 1955. One of the first poets to write in colloquial Hebrew, he would go on to win multiple international poetry prizes for his work, translated into forty languages. Amichai died in 2000 at age 76.

Allende, Isabel 1994

Tuesday, November 1, 1994
bw+elbow

Language is essential to a writer, and language is as personal as blood. I live in California—in English—but I can only write in Spanish. In fact, all the fundamental things in my life happen in Spanish, like scolding my grandchildren, cooking, or making love.

– Isabel Allende, “How I Became A Writer”

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Read this interview with Isabel Allende:

Isabel Allende – Interview

I allow the characters to live their own lives in the book. Often I have the feeling that I don’t control them. The story goes in unexpected directions and my job is to write it down, not to force it into my previous ideas.

Watch Isabel Allende give a TED Talk called “Tales of passion:”

More info on Isabel Allende⇒

Isabel Allende is one of the most widely-read authors in the world, having sold more than 74 million books. Born in Peru and raised in Chile, her work, both in English and in Spanish, has been translated into more than forty-two languages. She is the recipient of fifteen honorary doctorates, including one from Harvard University, the PEN Center Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Atwood, Margaret 1976

Friday, January 16, 1976
The Poetry Center at the Museum of Contemporary Art

Vintage poster of Margaret Atwood's reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Vintage poster of Margaret Atwood’s reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.

Buy this poster⇒

Made with blood, with coloured
dirt, with smoke, not meant
to be seen but to remain
there hidden, potent
in the dark…

– Margaret Atwood, “For Archeologists”

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Read this interview with Margaret Atwood from the Paris Review:

The Art of Fiction No. 121

The manuscript of “Frogless,” a poem that appears in this issue, by Margaret Atwood. Ms. Atwood wrote the poem on an SAS Hotel’s bedside notepad while she was in Gothenburg, Sweden last September for the Nordic Book Fair. “I’ve written quite a lot under those…

In the burned house I am eating breakfast.
You understand: there is no house, there is no breakfast,
yet here I am.

– Margaret Atwood, “Morning in the Burned House”

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Watch Margaret Atwood discuss writing for PEN America:

Dialogue Series: Margaret Atwood on the Writers’ Mind and the Digital Otherworld

With Margaret Atwood and Amy Grace Loyd What does it mean to write with the Web? How does our constant access to information and ideas affect the landscape of imagination? What are the ramifications on the craft?

More info on Margaret Atwood⇒

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