Watch Adam Gottlieb’s “Pedagogy of the Poets”:
Watch Adam Gottlieb perform “Poet Breathe Now” from Louder Than A Bomb:
I was so afraid. I couldn’t escape it. It was bigger than me and 3 horned. It dashed for me and missed and missed again. It leapt for me in my skirt. I was younger than it. It opened its parent mouth and I could die trying.
– Sarah Gambito, “Citizenship [I was so afraid.]”
Watch Sarah Gambito’s 2022 reading with Joseph Legaspi at the Chicago Poetry Center:
Sarah Gambito begins at 30:36 minutes.
How much our hands are God’s
to be running fingers over braille cities.
We are this hand pushed through our womb.
Weeping with each other’s blood in our eyes.
I dreamed that I slept with the light on.
– Sarah Gambito, “Yolanda: A Typhoon”
Watch Sarah Gambito read for the PAWA Arkipelago Reading Series:
Read Sarah Gambito’s interview with Porter House Review:
With Our Mouths Open: An Interview with Sarah Gambito on Food and Lyrical Sweetness
I feel like we’re in such tumultuous times right now, and we need to uphold the linked roles of artists and audience-so how do we activate each equally, right? I’m less interested in the how the artist performs, where there’s this sort of passivity in the audience-not that that’s not a lovely thing, it’s a lovely thing.
Hello, poet. I read your book again today,
and with Houston finally being
what I want it to be (windy
and piled with the bodies of pumpkins)
I have to say I felt
alone. Alone is a proud
and quiet feeling where I am everything
and everything is a cluster of four pumpkin-colored
leaves on a tree still green in October.
– Hannah Gamble, “Neighborhood Beautification”
Watch Hannah Gamble’s 2021 reading with Mayda Del Valle at the Chicago Poetry Center:
Hannah Gamble begins at 6:05 minutes.
Read Hannah Gamble’s Interview with Ghost City Press:
Hannah Gamble – Ghost City Press
Hannah Gamble, interviewed by Blake Wallin One of my favorite things about Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast is how conceptually rich the poems are yet how the reader is forced to find contexts for them at the same time. What were your influences while writing your first bo
Listen to Hannah Gamble, with Kenyatta Rodgers, read for the Poetry Center of Chicago’s Six Points Reading Series:
Hannah Gamble begins reading at 20:42 minutes.
A little ways above the hands
the mouths spoke together
but for two
different reasons,
like the music was behaving
but the orchestra was broken.
– Hannah Gamble, “It Was Alive, Though Differently”
Let’s get to the point, like water does, rushing to fill all the spaces: this is about liquidity. What fills the spaces isn’t whether or not I am your daughter but whether or not I can afford to be your daughter. There are costs involved. The empty spaces are what writing teachers call “place.” It is understood by the writing teachers that place is the bodies of water where you are from. It is understood that a father’s bottle of whiskey is itself a body of water.
– Camellia-Berry Grass, “Accountability”
Read Camellia-Berry Grass’s interview with Black Warrior Review.
I am a magician of jackets, I help my wife foster kittens, I’m a transsexual metalhead, and my backyard wrestling character from back in the day was called “Reaper.” But if asked in a physical social setting where I actually have to not scare someone, I say I’m an essayist. I say that I use they/them or she/her pronouns.
– Camellia-Berry Grass
Drink the water at regular intervals, if possible.
Drink them slowly. Adopt, for the time at least,
rational habits of eating, drinking and exercise.
This will encourage the healing.
– Camellia-Berry Grass, “True or False”
It’s easy to
fall in love
with the
grocery store boys—
the one with the
tiny coffee cup
sweatshirt, too-tight
pants & cotton shoes or
the impossibly pale
fish boy who smiles
when he says, I’m
from Alaska.
– Jan-Henry Gray, “Crush, Supermarket, California”
The young mother born with the wrong name boards a plane. Flanked by her second and third child, she squeezes the last of the honey from the plastic packet and stirs her tea not with the flimsy stick handed to her by the pink stewardess but with her own stubborn finger ignorant of etiquette or the gossip gathering in the rows behind her.
– Jan-Henry Gray, “April 1984”
Another time after she left
I saw a headless woman
hurrying after her like a jaguar.
– Rachel Eliza Griffiths, “Discrepancies Regarding My Mother’s Departure”
Read this interview with Rachel Eliza Griffiths from The Rumpus:
The Rumpus Interview with Rachel Eliza Griffiths
The Rumpus Interview with Rachel Eliza Griffiths Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s is one of the most affecting books of poetry I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. Each poem works in conversation with an important work of black literature but each poem is also evocative enough to stand on its own.
I pick you up
& you are a child made of longing
clasped to my neck. Iridescent,
lovely, your inestimable tantrums,
I carry you back & forth
from the famine in your mind.
– Rachel Eliza Griffiths, “Dear America”
Watch Rachel Eliza Griffiths read some of her work:
A Four Way Books Salon: Rachel Eliza Griffiths
No Description
Amazon of song
valkyrie riding astride blue horses
of chanted mystery
you who assassinate
the killer of your
children’s dreams
– Regie Gibson, “Poet Woman”
Broadside of “Poet Woman” by Regie Gibson.
Buy this broadside in the Mixed Bag Series⇒
You came through a fissure in the night Federico
framed in a coat of thorns Federico
Your frail body a tilde of light
Your body thin as a bull’s horn
– Regie Gibson, “Federico”
Listen to this interview with Regie Gibson from Radio Boston:
The Poetry Of Regie Gibson Meets The Saxophone Of Stan Strickland
Boston-based slam poet Regie Gibson performs with saxophonist Stan Strickland.
Watch Regie Gibson perform at TEDxBoston:
Cry havoc | Regie Gibson | TEDxBoston
This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. To Thine Own Self Be Hip: a response from Hamlet to young men who have contemplated suicide Former National Poetry Slam Champion Regie Gibson has lectured and performed widely in the U.S., Cuba and Europe and is a recipient of the Absolute Poetry Award.
He hated the way his mother piled the laundry. The way she held the clothes, as if it didn’t matter. And he knew what she would say if he said anything, though he would never say it.
– Mary Gordon, “Temporary Shelter”
Continue reading this short story⇒
Read Mary Gordon’s short story, “The Deacon,” in The Atlantic Magazine:
The Deacon
(The online version of this story appears in three parts. Click here to go to part two. Click here to go to part three. ) NO romance had been attached to Joan Fitzgerald’s entering the convent. She wasn’t that sort of person, and she hadn’t expected it.
Listen to Mary Gordon read from “Circling My Mother” on NPR:
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
This poetry reading is part of the Lackawanna Valley Digital Archives: http://content.lackawannadigitalarchives.org/cdm/ref/collection/fospl/id/0
I thought I was so tough,
But gentled at your hands,
Cannot be quick enough
To fly for you and show
That when I go I go
At your commands.
– Thom Gunn, “Tamer and Hawk”
Listen to Thom Gunn’s Poetry Center of Chicago reading:
Read an interview with Thom Gunn from the Paris Review:
Paris Review – The Art of Poetry No. 72, Thom Gunn
The Paris Review is a literary magazine featuring original writing, art, and in-depth interviews with famous writers.
One by one they appear in
the darkness: a few friends, and
a few with historical
names. How late they start to shine!
– Thom Gunn, “My Sad Captains”
Listen to Thom Gunn read two of his poems:
Thom Gunn reads his poems “Jamesian” and “The Home”
“Listen to this poetry reading to hear the poet Thom Gunn read his poems “”Jamesian”” and “”The Home.”” Gunn (1929–2004) wrote poems about nature, friendship, literature, love, and death, set against the ever-changing backdrop of San Francisco-the druggy, politically charged sixties and the plague years of AIDS in the eighties.
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