Tag: poetry

“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.

Indeed, the famous eclecticism of “The Waste Land,” which incorporates quotations from multiple languages and literatures, can be seen as a tribute to the educational philosophy that governed Harvard during Eliot’s time there… Yet as Crawford shows in the impressively researched Young Eliot, the “melange of topics” that Eliot explored in college “mightily enriched his poetry.” […]

A few weeks later, my friend sends me a copy of Dunn’s poem “A Coldness.” The speaker says about his sick brother, “From then on he was delusional, / the cancer making him / stupid, insistently so, and lost. / I wanted him to die. / And I wished his wife / would say A […]

I was brought up in Cincinnati, Ohio. My parents were very nice. The first time I wrote a poem, my mother gave me a big kiss and said, “I love you.” The whole idea of writing poetry had a lot to do with escaping, escaping from the bourgeois society of Cincinnati, Ohio, escaping from any […]

[W.B. Yeats’s 1919 poem] “The Second Coming” may well be the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English. (Perhaps Macbeth’s famous “sound and fury” monologue is a distant second.) Since Chinua Achebe cribbed Yeats’s lines for Things Fall Apart in 1958 and Joan Didion for Slouching Towards Bethlehem a decade later, dozens if not hundreds of others have followed suit, […]

With the recently released What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, the work of a brilliant, difficult, much-mythologized and little-known American poet is finally widely available. Frank Stanford’s short life was a study in contradictions: his childhood was divided between the privilege of an upper-crust Memphis family and summers deep in the Mississippi Delta; he was a […]

An intimate recollection of a Beat legend.

Fifty years later, he awoke one fine morning like Rip Van Winkle, and found himself again with his sea bag on his shoulder looking for anywhere he could live and work. The new owner of his old flat now wanted $4,500 a month, and many of his friends were also evicted, for it seemed their buildings weren’t owned by San Franciscans anymore, but by faceless investors with venture capital. Corporate monoculture had wiped out any unique sense of place, turning the “island city” into an artistic theme park without artists. And he was on the street.