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Search Results for: poetry
Can Kevin Young Make Poetry Matter Again?
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For Esquire, Robert P. Baird talks to Kevin Young, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the recently appointed poetry editor at the New Yorker about the future of poetry.
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Esquire
Published: Nov 6, 2017
Length: 15 minutes (3,768 words)
What My Father’s Death Taught Me about Poetry
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Matthew Zapruder examines his relationship with poetry and with his father. Despite being two men with great facility for precise language, they were unable to use it to bridge the distance between them. In likening poems to people, Zapruder posits that the most beautiful thing about the poems most important to him is that their gravity and meaning cannot fully be articulated.
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The Walrus
Published: Jul 25, 2017
Length: 15 minutes (3,879 words)
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Pablo Neruda on the Intersection of Politics and Poetry
Posted by 
Mark Armstrong
Mark Armstrong 
Photo by edmundyeo
In 1970, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) sat down for an interview with The Paris Review just months before abandoning his campaign for president, running as the Chilean Communist Party candidate. American author Rita Guibert conducted the interview at Neruda’s home in Isla Negra, just south of Valparaiso:
Oh, there is no advice to give to young poets! They ought to make their own way; they will have to encounter the obstacles to their expression and they have to overcome them. What I would never advise them to do is to begin with political poetry. Political poetry is more profoundly emotional than any other—at least as much as love poetry—and cannot be forced because it then becomes vulgar and unacceptable. It is necessary first to pass through all other poetry in order to become a political poet. The political poet must also be prepared to accept the censure which is thrown at him—betraying poetry, or betraying literature. Then, too, political poetry has to arm itself with such content and substance and intellectual and emotional richness that it is able to scorn everything else. This is rarely achieved.
… My poetry has passed through the same stages as my life; from a solitary childhood and an adolescence cornered in distant, isolated countries, I set out to make myself a part of the great human multitude. My life matured, and that is all. It was in the style of the last century for poets to be tormented melancholiacs. But there can be poets who know life, who know its problems, and who survive by crossing through the currents. And who pass through sadness to plenitude.
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Publisher
The Very Quiet Foreign Girls Poetry Group
Longreads Pick
Migrant and refugee students write poems that tell their untold stories of loss and trauma.
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The Guardian
Published: Jul 14, 2016
Length: 17 minutes (4,443 words)
Can Poetry Matter?
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California poet laureate Dana Gioia’s classic essay on poetry’s diminishing place in American culture. The essay sparked a firestorm of debate and discussion when it was published in 1991, and it remains just as relevant today, a quarter-century later.
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The Atlantic
Published: May 1, 1991
Length: 31 minutes (7,996 words)
The High School Where Poetry Covers the Walls
Posted by 
Aaron Gilbreath
Aaron Gilbreath Photo by Paul Townsend, Flickr
Where does musical genius come from? A more reasonable question to ask might be: where did Bob Dylan come from? To find out, music writer Greil Marcus visited Hibbing High School in northern Minnesota, the school where Dylan graduated, and whose legend centers around the school’s striking architecture, lavish decoration and creative influence. Originally printed in 2007 in the journal Daedalus, Marcus’ essay appears in his book Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010. We share it online here through The New School’s Riggio Honors Program.
Climbing the enclosed stairway that followed the expanse of outdoor steps, we saw not a hint of graffiti, not a sign of deterioration in the intricate colored tile designs on the walls and the ceilings, in the curving woodwork. We gazed up at old-fashioned but still majestic murals depicting the history of Minnesota, with bold trappers surrounded by submissive Indians, huge trees and roaming animals, the forest and the emerging towns. It was strange, the pristine condition of the place. It spoke not for emptiness, for Hibbing High as a version of Pompeii High—though the school, with a capacity of over 2,000, was down to 600 students, up from four hundred only a few years before—and, somehow, you knew the state of the building didn’t speak for discipline. You could sense self-respect, passed down over the years.
We followed the empty corridors in search of the legendary auditorium. A custodian let us in, and told us the stories. Seating for 1,800, and stained glass everywhere, even in the form of blazing candles on the fire box. In large, gilded paintings in the back, the muses waited; they smiled over the proscenium arch, too, over a stage that, in imitation of thousands of years of ancestors, had the weight of immortality hammered into its boards. “No wonder he turned into Bob Dylan,” said a visitor the next day, when the bus tour stopped at the school, speaking of the talent show Dylan played here with his high-school band the Golden Chords. Anybody on that stage could see kingdoms waiting.
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