Listen to the audio recording of the first performance in the series Things that should not be picked up in the first place created and produced by Becky Grajeda with Jessica Speer, and Kurt Peterson:
Watch this video about the Read/Write Library where Jessica Speer works:
If you had sensational love,
what would you feel?
Certainly my heart
would be in the realms of glory
with the great mind of Divine.
– Sahara Sunday Spain, “Follow Your Dreams”
Broadside of Sahara Sunday Spain’s poem, “Follow Your Dreams.”
Read this article about Sahara Sunday Spain from The Guardian:
Sahara Sunday Spain’s book of poems
Sahara Sunday Spain’s book may be a sensation, writes Edward Helmore.
I was hoping to be happy by seventeen.
School was a sharp check mark in the roll book,
An obnoxious tube playing at noon…
– Gary Soto, “Saturday at the Canal”
Broadside of Gary Soto’s poem, “Saturday at the Canal.”
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.
– Gary Soto, “Her”
Watch Gary Soto read some of his work:
I taught myself to name my name,
To bark back, loosen love and crying;
To ease my woman so she came,
To ease an old man who was dying.
I have not learned how often I
Can win, can love, but choose to die.
– W. D. Snodgrass, “April Inventory”
Read this interview with W. D. Snograss from the Paris Review:
The Art of Poetry No. 68
W. D. Snodgrass received one of his profession’s highest honors early on in his career when he won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, in 1960, for his first book of poems, Heart’s Needle. Yet the winning of this coveted prize brought numerous pressures and seductions. Snodgrass…
The eyelids glowing, some chill morning.
O world half-known through opening, twilit lids
Before the vague face clenches into light;
O universal waters like a cloud,
Like those first clouds of half-created matter;
O all things rising, rising like the fumes
– W. D. Snograss, “Monet: ‘Les Nymphéas'”
Watch W. D. Snodgrass read some of his work:
In spatter of spring shade and sun,
I spread my grandfather’s death
on his picnic table, his keys, notes
on cars he owned, travels he made,
repair kits for everything, an aerial
map of the Chesapeake Bay.
– Dave Smith, “A Boy With Ringworm”
Read this interview with Dave Smith from How a Poem Happens:
Dave Smith
Dave Smith’s recent books include Afield: Writers on Bird Dogs (Skyhorse, 2010), edited with Robert DeMott ; The Wick of Memory: New and Se…
They hawk the yard, heaving big beaks,
laborers with picks, hoes, mattocks,
black all over them the formal suits
something has taught them to hang up
in bright air, brushed to sleekest shine,
and worn with the insouciance of rakes.
– Dave Smith, “Morning Grackles”
Watch Dave Smith read some of his work:
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”
Watch Patricia Smith read some of her work:
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.
I wanted to do the right things.
Pull the spit back into my mouth.
Scrape the gum-chewed secretes
off the bottoms of the chairs.
Drag the dumb, go-along laughs
out of the air.
– Marc Smith, “i wanted to be”
Watch Marc Smith read some of his poetry:
Poster for Marc Smith & Tony Fitzpatrick at the Poetry Center of Chicago, 2011.
The pensive Daddy-O, cool on the patio,
Stares at the silver moon
Blowin’ out a why?
But the silver moon laughs
Dancin’ with the dipper spoon
Says, “Nobody’s gonna catch
The spirit in the sky.”
– Marc Smith, “Daddy-O on the Patio”
Watch Marc Smith on TEDx Talks – LUC:
Custom made poster of Marc Kelly Smith’s poem, “My father’s coat”
My touch is on the highest mast.
It cries at four in the morning
For a lantern to be lit
On the rim of the world.
– Charles Simic, “The Body”
Listen to Charles Simic’s 2001 reading for the Poetry Center of Chicago:
Vintage poster of Russell Edson and Charles Simic giving a joint reading at the Poetry Center of Chicago.
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, “Why I Still Write Poetry”
Read this interview with Charles Simic from the Paris Review:
The Art of Poetry No. 90
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…
Watch Charles Simic read some of his work:
We all scream, most of us inside.
Outside is another world.
A neighbor fills her television dinner
With too much pepper and screams.
– James Schevill, A Screamer Discusses Methods of Screaming
I fixed my body
under his and went
to sleep in love
all trace of me
was wiped away
– Sonia Sanchez, “Ballad”
Watch this interview with Sonia Sanchez from APIARY Magazine:
APIARY Interviews Sonia Sanchez – Part 1: Poetry & Language
No Description
Your limbs buried
in northern muscle carry
their own heartbeat
– Sonia Sanchez, “14 haiku”
Watch Sonia Sanchez read some of her poetry:
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