Be glad your nose is on your face,
not pasted on some other place,
for if it were where it is not,
you might dislike your nose a lot.
– Jack Prelutsky, “Be Glad Your Nose Is on Your Face”
Watch an interview with Jack Prelutsky:
Peer pressure
During junior high, Jack Prelutsky believed that poetry was hazardous to his health. Watch this video clip to find out why.
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.
– Patricia Powell, “A Small Gathering of Bones”
Continue reading this novel excerpt⇒
Listen to Patricia Powell’s 2001 reading for the Poetry Center of Chicago:
Read this interview with Patricia Powell from Project Muse:
Project MUSE – An Interview with Patricia Powell
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.
The other one dreaming
flutter, come and whisper
two green girls all deep and meaning
unseen mountains always moving.
– Cecilia Pinto, “Green Girls Villanelle”
Watch Cecilia Pinto read her work:
Listen to and read Cecilia Pinto’s short story, “Cups,” on the New Ohio Review:
New Ohio Review
Winter Online Exclusive
Kiss my cheek and think cul-de-sac,
think normative fence, think, my love,
of all the stars where better versions are breathing,
where the soft-focused-wanted me slowly wakes.
– C. Russell Price, “Our Love Transcends Sexuality & Gender & Time & Place; Translation: Not Now, Not Ever”
Watch C. Russell Price’s 2024 reading with Teresa Dzieglewicz at the Chicago Poetry Center:
C. Russell Price begins at 41:47 minutes.
C. Russell Price reading at the Six Points Reading Series for the Poetry Center of Chicago
Listen to C. Russell Price, with Valerie Wallace, read for the Poetry Center of Chicago’s Six Points Reading Series:
When I call him after a proper cry in the office supply closet,
he asks what is drowning me today, as if memory is a growing leak,
as if he could offer some Oprah level shit.
– C. Russell Price, “Why Can’t My Heaven Be A Mobile Home Park In A Carolina Where I Have Big Hair and Work Reception at My Husband’s Tattoo Parlor?”
Listen to C. Russell Price read their poem “Apocalypse with Eyeliner”
She saw him sitting in the door of his motel room, half in/half out, two long legs splayed out in front of him. He looked vulnerable, wearing only underwear, and big, unlaced boots. The sun shone on his pale knees, turning them pink.
– Caroline Picard, “Diamond Vehicle”
Continue reading this short story⇒
Watch Caroline Picard read some of her work at the MAKE reading:
Vintage poster of Harry Mark Petrakis’s reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.
…I will burrow once more into the cloisters of my life, exhume the spirits of those I loved. I will revisit the neighborhoods of my youth; call up the visages of old friends and in Homer’s words, “Look both before and after.”
– Harry Mark Petrakis, “Song of My Life”
Continue reading this novel excerpt⇒
Read an interview with Harry Mark Petrakis from Poets&Writers:
An Interview With Fiction Writer Harry Mark Petrakis
The ninth novel and eighteenth book by Harry Mark Petrakis, who turns 80 on June 5, will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in the same month. Twilight of the Ice is set in the Chicago railyards, in the blue-collar, industrial neighborhoods of the early 1950s.
Watch Marjorie Perloff give a talk from Unoriginal Genius at the University of Richmond:
Writers Series: Marjorie Perloff, American poetry critic
Marjorie Perloff is the author of 13 books and a few hundred essays and reviews on twentieth century poetry and poetics and visual arts. Her books include Radical Artifice: Writing in the Age of Media, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, Frank OHara: Poet Among Painters, Twenty-First Century Modernism, and Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary.
Read the article by Marjorie Perloff, “Towards a conceptual lyric:”
Towards a conceptual lyric
Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don’t give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them.
I keep stamps in odd colors: moss, mauve,
diamond gray. They looked obsolete
the day they were minted.
Feathers that dropped from the sky,
my airedale’s bark, a child’s cry.
– Mark Perlberg, “The Box of Clouds”
Broadside of “The Box of Clouds” by Mark Perlberg
Buy a signed copy of this broadside⇒
Listen to Mark Perlberg’s 2002 reading for the Poetry Center of Chicago:
What does dying mean?
Is it living like a stone?
Being everywhere at once,
like river mist or rain?
– Mark Perlberg, “When At Night”
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.
Buy this audio recording featuring Mark Perlberg⇒
Something happened to the cables
that run under miles of water to our island,
so we play cribbage in the light of six candles
and a hurricane lamp.
– Mark Perlberg, “Orchids and Eagles”
Broadside of “Orchids and Eagles” by Mark Perlberg
But now at the same time
it splits – half for each.
Our “then” is inside its “now,”
its halved pit unfleshed –
– Molly Peacock, “Couple Sharing A Peach”
Listen to Molly Peacock’s 1997 reading for the Poetry Center of Chicago:
Watch Molly Peacock’s keynote presentation at the 50 and Better Conference, sponsored by The Loft Literary Center and Hennepin County Library:
Molly Peacock at the Loft
On June 2, 2012 Molly Peacock gave a keynote presentation as part of the 50 and Better Conference, cosponsored by The Loft Literary Center and the Hennepin County Library. Molly Peacock is an award-winning poet, creative nonfiction writer, and author of The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begin’s Her Life’s Work at 72.
A city mouse darts from the paws of night.
A body drops from the jaws of night.
A woman denies the laws of night,
awake and trapped in the was of night.
– Molly Peacock, “Of Night”
Read an interview with Molly Peacock from Savvy Verse and Wit:
Interview with Poet and Author Molly Peacock
My review of The Paper Garden by Molly Peacock posted last week. The cover and the illustrations of Delany’s work is stunning, and like the multilayered…
Old woman,
enrobed in nothing
but faith
and strands of chiseled hair,
the living tree once hid
those gnarled limbs, that face
worn to its perfect bones
which has seen everything.
– Linda Pastan, “Donatello’s Magdalene”
Watch Linda Pastan speak at the 2011 National Book Festival:
Linda Pastan: 2011 National Book Festival
Poet Linda Pastan appears at the 2011 National Book Festival. Speaker Biography: Linda Pastan is the author of many works of poetry, including “Carnival Evening,” “Queen of a Rainy Country,” “Waiting for My Life,” “PM/AM,” “The Last Uncle” and her latest work, “Traveling Light: Poems” (Norton), among others.
This landlocked house should grace a harbor:
its widow’s walk of grey pickets
surveys an inland sea
of grass; wind
breaks like surf against
its rough shingles.
– Linda Pastan, “Widow’s Walk, Somewhere Inland”
Read an interview with Linda Pastan from PBS:
Linda Pastan
Jeffrey Brown talks with award-winning poet Linda Pastan.
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