Have you noticed how when you see two people talking
anywhere in the world, one is almost always smiling?
Half of us are alive now; it’s hard to say
what we have least of. Children come into the world
by themselves. My family began with me.
– Alane Rollings, “When Single Rooms Can Spring to Life So Easily”
Srikanth Reddy reads “Fundamentals of Esperanto” at the Kelly Writers House on March 27, 2010 as part of the Whenever We Feel Like It Reading Series. Watch the complete event at http://media.sas.upenn.edu/watch/99995 To learn more, go to: http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/calendar/0310.php#27 Visit the Kelly Writers House at writing.upenn.edu/wh Srikanth Reddy’s first collection, Facts for Visitors, received the Asian American Literary Award for Poetry in 2005.
Listen to Gary Soto’s 2005 reading for the Poetry Center of Chicago:
Vintage poster of Gary Soto’s reading for the Poetry Center of Chicago.
First I forgot your voice, then the photo you gave me.
When a leaf fell I no longer
Thought of you, shy and wordless, in a raked yard.
I no longer saw you as
The dark girl among trees,
At the entrance to a story for which
The end was always marriage and a bright car.
Your voice never came back; at night
I was left to my nonsense and a typewriter
That couldn’t get things right.
poetry is neither swan nor owl
but worker, miner
digging each generation deeper
through the shit of its eaters
to the root – then up to the giant tomato
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.
On a rainy wednesday night in London, on April 18th 2012, one of the most remarkable poetry readings in recent memory saw Andrei Codrescu, Gunnar Harding, Anselm Hollo and Tom Raworth perform excerpts from their work at the Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury.
If I strip the flesh off my bones, like they stripped the clothes off my flesh in the slave market down near the battery in Charleston, this would be my skeleton: childhood on a cotton farm; a time of shawl-fetch slavery away in Charleston; a bare-breasted hour on an auction block…
She tries on her voice, which sounds like cigarettes,
pubic sweat, brown spittle lining a sax bell
the broken heel on a drag queen’s scarlet slings.
Your kind of singing.
– Patricia Smith, “Prologue — And Then She Owns You”
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.
It wasn’t the kind either that would retreat after a tall glass of water, two aspirins or even a mug full of busy tea steamed for several hours. It was like the devil from hell inside him want to come out, but the walls of his throat it seems, were just too narrow.
Click for larger view View full resolution The following dialogue took place on paper in March, 1996: Faith Smith gave a list of questions to Patricia Powell, and she wrote her responses and sent them to the editor of Callaloo.
They want to hear something heroic and poetic, and I tell them that I was just another high school kid who wrote poems in order to impress girls, but with no ambition beyond that.
Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, on May 9, 1938. His early childhood was, inevitably, dominated by the Nazi invasion, and some of his most powerful poems derive from memories of this period. In “Two Dogs,” for instance, he recalls watching the Germans march past hi…
Why the young Brothers so big, what they eatin’,
why they blow up like that, gotta wear big white tees, gotta wear white-
skin sheets, like maggots, like lard, the domestic oil of death and klan
sweat, who blew them up doctored, who pickin’ them off like dark
cotton, make them themselves a fashion of profitable, soft
muscular bales, somebody got to clean this shit up.
You’ll need a talk, an oral walk,
Something natural and recognizable by your folk,
Something of music something of meaning,
A style capable of running-off at-the-mouth,
When Massa AmEuroBrit Lit irks you most,
A little something-something of ancestry
And the courage not to accept any award
– Thomas Sayers Ellis, “Ways to be Black in a Poem”
Broadside of Thomas Sayers Ellis’ poem, “Ways to be Black in a Poem.”
