Tag: poetry

One hundred summers ago, black Chicagoans were terrorized by whites during the Red Summer. Poet Eve Ewing talks about reaching out to her neighbors across time in “1919.”

Beat poet and City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti turns 100 on March 24. Here’s a reading list to celebrate the centenarian.

“I want someone to remember even just one of my songs, especially when a night is too silent, and that old gray curls back around me like a shroud, making me wonder, again, if any song of mine will be worth recalling at all.”

For stroke survivor Sherman Hershfield, rapping and rhyming kept his seizures under control.

The poet, novelist, and playwright Ntozake Shange died Saturday, October 27.

In Mario Chard’s “Land of Fire,” was it the truth or a lie that killed the migrants in the desert? And what if that’s the wrong question? What if we say it was a horse?

A poet reflects on finding her words in the face of injustice.

“The sole criterion is, how does it move us? Does it pull us out of our everyday trot?”

Diana Arterian’s sad, lyrical essay on the legacy of the Armenian Genocide in the diaspora centers on a family story that everyone has heard — but that no one knows the truth of.

Largely unknown, Julia de Burgos may have been Puerto Rico’s greatest poet.

Poet Patricia Lockwood offers ideas on how to keep writing in the unstable, toxic, distracting times we live in.

How do we deal emotionally with the many deaths of climate change?

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in arts and culture writing.

Instagram poet Collin Andrew Yost got trounced online, but his experience offers a lesson in how to cultivate empathy.

The new poetry editor of the New Yorker says that to find poetry, “you have to look in your backyard.”

The first woman translator of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ subtly unpacks the politics of the poem — and of the male translators that preceded her.

Traveling to Arkansas to search for mythic poet Frank Stanford.

The poet and one-time presidential candidate isn’t the least bit surprised by the state of our union.

“In a poem, we feel what is there, but also what is not.”

What we all need now? Poetry, sweet poetry.

The Librarian of Congress hailed Smith as a “poet of searching.”

Rafe Bartholomew discovers his father’s voice in the very place he thought was holding him back, McSorley’s Old Ale House

In this roundtable, poets from around this world discuss the role borders play in their lives.

“It makes sense that a person would come from another culture and do their poems, because everybody at Elko thinks they’re from another culture.”

Oakland writer Carvell Wallace travels to Elko, Nevada, for the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering and reflects on what it means to be black and American.

Pauls Toutonghi lovingly recalls his grandfather, Philippe Elias Tütünji, a writer, poet, and translator from Aleppo, Syria. Tütünji immigrated to America during World War II and never gave up his dream to achieve success as a poet in his adopted homeland.

Meet Elizabeth Ebert, the “Grand Dame of Cowboy Poetry.”

I think there’s a very interesting poetry moment going on culturally now. Part of what I’m experiencing with this nice reception of this book is the way being a female poet is a certain version of coming of age — poetry is very diaristic, small pieces, an art form you can realize — you wrote […]

The New York Times’s poetry columnist on the intersection between poetry and politics.

Thoughts, observations, and reflections from the travel journals of Lawrence Ferlinghetti.