poetry Archive
Sometimes, place is an obvious theme or motif in a work, while other times it informs a work in a subtler but still necessary way.
Poems, for me, are the epitome of Dickinson’s capital-L Loneliness, that loneliness that accompanies and keeps one from feeling utterly alone, its shadow-shape, its cameo presence.
A poem’s epigraph does more than set the tone—it raises the stakes before the poem even begins. Almost every poem could have an epigraph, if inspiration and interest were the criteria. But I’d like to propose the opposite. Let’s put a moratorium on epigraphs.
A discussion with Jonathan Jacob Moore regarding Frank Ocean, blackness, queerness, presence/absence, music, and Moore's recent poem "frank ocean and all black things that disappear on their own."
“Poetry is a space in which logic plays a secondary role to imagination and feeling, and that can be a really great playground for a young person who is trying to define themselves and understand the world (i.e., all young people).”
—Franny Choi
Over the years, I’ve distilled people’s reactions down to a core set of misconceptions about poetry. Some of the most pervasive: Poetry is overly difficult. It’s obtuse on purpose. It’s like a riddle. You need to read between the lines. It can mean anything you want it to.
A new kind of writing about motherhood may be emerging. Rachel Zucker's and Arielle Greenberg's Home/Birth, Brenda Shaughnessy's Our Andromeda, Eula Biss's On Immunity, and Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, for example, are conscious in a contemporary way about new possibilities of childbearing and parenting, about choices and agency, yet
“We live in a late-capitalist situation where if something is not worth money then culture says it’s not worth anything at all.”
Naoko Fujimoto’s lyrical, musical poems are written across distances—whether it’s the personal distance between the poet and the personas she adopts, or the psychological distance of writing from the U.S. about the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami.
Poet and educator Kyes Stevens believes we should all make space for human beings to be the beautiful, rich, complicated, messy folks that we are. Art and poetry help provide this space for all people, and Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project helps provide this space for prisoners.