Watch Del Marie’s music video for her song “Black Wallstreet”:
Read this interview with Del Marie:
Del Marie: locked down, but not out – Chicago Reader
The rapper-dancer-performance poet rolls with the pandemic punches.
Watch Del Marie perform “Nobody Said, A Dedication to Black Boys in the Rough”:
The holiest thing a mother does is know
your name long after her skin
disintegrates. I stand in a dark room imagining
my birth in 1917, so I can reverse
each injury her body takes.
– Sarah Rose Nordgren, “1917”
Read this interview with Sarah Rose Nordgren from Adroit Journal:
Conversations with Contributors: Sarah Rose Nordgren (Poetry, Issue 11) – The Adroit Journal
Issue Eleven is out, and Conversations with Contributors is back! First up in this sequence of interviews is Sarah Rose Nordgren, whose poem “Kindling” rocks the new issue. Amanda Silberling, Blog Editor: Your poetry collection Best Bones, which the Adroit blog reviewed, came out last fall.
The outer crust of my life peeled away
and under it I am left with a white
and trembling egg, round as the moon.
– Sarah Rose Nordgren, “The Outer Crust”
Watch Sarah Rose Nordgren read for the Chicago Poetry Center, with Jenny Molberg and Erin Adair-Hodges:
Sarah Rose Nordgren starts reading at 34:12.
You could even sleep out
under the glorious stars where
a snake the exact diameter
of your throat would find you,
crawl in through your mouth
and devour every system.
– Sarah Rose Nordgren, “Electromagnetic”
Watch some of Sarah’s interdisciplinary work here:
Smart Snow 2016-2017 from Kathleen Kelley on Vimeo.
Angel, 102-degree fever.
Angel, long-gone lavender in a dirty-water vase.
Angel don’t touch me here or there or there.
Can you smell me?
– Angel Nafis, “Angel Nafis”
Read this interview with Angel Nafis from Entropy Magazine:
https://entropymag.org/dinnerview-angel-nafis/
If you miss your stop. Or lose love. If even the medicine hurts too.
Even when your side-eye, your face stank, still, your heart moans bride.
Fuck the fog back off the mirror. Trust the road in your name. Ride
Your moon hide through the pitch black. Gotsta be your own bride.
– Angel Nafis, “Ghazal for Becoming Your Own Country”
Watch Angel Nafis read “Conspiracy: a Suite” at WordXWord Festival:
Language is the subject. It is the written form with which I’ve managed to keep the wolf away from the door and, in diaries, to keep my sanity. In spite of this, I consider the written word inferior to the spoken, and much of the frustration experienced by novelists is the awareness that whatever we manage to capture in even the most transcendent passages falls far short of the richness of life. Dialogue achieves its power in the dynamics of a fleeting moment of sight, sound, smell, and touch.
– Gloria Naylor, “The Meanings of a Word”
Listen to an interview with Gloria Naylor on NPR:
My grandmother’s hands recognize grapes,
the damp shine of a goat’s new skin.
When I was sick they followed me,
I woke from the long fever to find them
covering my head like cool prayers.
– Naomi Shihab Nye, “The Words Under the Words”
Read this interview with Naomi Shihab Nye from Sukoon Magazine:
Interview with Naomi Shihab Nye
“Poetry flourishes in the margins” Interview with Naomi Shihab Nye BY REWA ZEINATI In the world of poetry and writing, the name needs no introduction. In the world of art and photography, Nye has been an active participant, offering image after image, using the tools she uses best: words.
Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.
– Naomi Shihab Nye, “Burning the Old Year”
Watch Naomi Shihab Nye discuss the art of teaching poetry:
No Title
Recorded at the 2013 Poets Forums as part of the Chancellors Discussions-a series of intimate talks in which some of the most renowned poets of our time examine issues central to poetry today. In this video, Naomi Shihab Nye speaks on the discussion topic: The Art of Teaching Poetry.
What I lose you let me, accusation
always gets one in. But I want to talk like the dead
remember that town where we went or
how do I know when I’m just a soul – not
when I’m leading?
– Alice Notely, “My Sea”
Watch a Alice Notley read her work at the University of Chicago:
No Title
The Renaissance Society and Poem Present co-presented this reading by Alice Notley on November 17, 2011. Notley has published over 25 books of poetry, including Grave of Light: New and Selected Poems 1970-2005 (2006), awarded the Lenore Marhsall Poetry Prize; Disobedience (2001), awarded the Griffin International Poetry Prize; Mysteries of a Small House (1998); The Descent of Alette (1996); Close to me & Closer .
An old woman of indeterminate race, in white hat
and scarf, no teeth staring back at me.
He sounded brittle and superior last night, do the
dead do that; Grandma had a plethora of tones of voice
compared to anyone in this anthology…
– Alice Notley, “The Anthology”
Read an interview with Alice Notely from the Boston Review:
“At the Mercy of My Poetic Voice”: An Interview with Alice Notley – Boston Review
Collaged fan. Image provided by Alice Notley. Talking with Alice Notley, I was equally struck by her ferocious integrity-her insistence, for
Glossies of Eden? The slim beached curled
Between rocks and the frill of foam–that’s when
There’s thunder of tunnels and the underworld.
– John Frederick Nims, “from the rapido: la spezia-genova”
Broadside of “from the rapido: la spezia-genova” by John Frederick Nims
Buy this broadside in a series with Debra Bruce, Annie Finch, Paulette Roeske, and Cin Salach⇒
My gun, the color of winter rain and thunder,
Is algebra, poetics, and love’s image.
All which a tired soul would and cannot, this is.
– John Frederick Nims, “Colt Automatic”
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