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Born in Columbia, South Carolina, Terrance Hayes earned a BA at Coker College and an MFA at the University of Pittsburgh. In his poems, in which he occasionally invents formal constraints, Hayes considers themes of popular culture, race, music, and masculinity. “Hayes’s fourth book puts invincibly…
Dennis Richards's insight:
I am delighting in the brilliant poems of Terrance Hayes from his 2018 collection, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. More about him and his poetry at the Poetry Foundation. Samples…
1) American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [“Probably twilight makes blackness dangerous”] "Something happened In Sanford, something happened in Ferguson And Brooklyn & Charleston, something happened In Chicago & Cleveland & Baltimore & happens Almost everywhere in this country every day." 2) American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [“I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison”] "I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart. Voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor. It is not enough To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed." 3) American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [“Inside me is a black-eyed animal”] "Would you rather spend the rest of eternity With your wild wings bewildering a cage or With your four good feet stuck in a plot of dirt?" 4) American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin [“Why are you bugging me you stank minuscule husk”] "The meat inside your exoskeleton Is as tender as Jesus. Neruda wrote of “a nipple Perfuming the earth.” Yes, you are an odor, an almost Imperceptible ode to death, a lousy, stinking stinkbug.” —— I recommend you read all 70 American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, or better yet, also listen to Terrance Hayes read them to you via audible.com . 
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The 75-year-old rock legend received the prize "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition".
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Route Six ………………….."
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An animation from a Harvard neuroscience course explores representations of perception
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"The Library of Congress is to announce on Wednesday that Juan Felipe Herrera, a son of migrant farmworkers whose writing fuses wide-ranging experimentalism with reflections on Mexican-American identity, will be the next poet laureate.
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"Don't worry about what to pick for summer reading this year. Pope Francis has a suggestion: Dante's 'Divine Comedy.' • Francis had much praise for the 14th century allegorical poem as the Italian government celebrated the 750th anniversary of Dante's birth May 4. Francis is quoted as saying, in both the Italian and U.S. media, that Dante's experience can help us 'get through the many dark woods we come across in our world.' • Catholic News Service quotes the pope as calling Dante 'a prophet of hope, herald of the possibility of redemption, liberation and the profound transformation of every man and woman, of all humanity.'"
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"The proliferation and power of graduate degrees in creative writing have inspired heated scholarly debate. Aspiring novelists, take note."
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Mr. Levine’s work was vibrantly, angrily and often painfully alive with the sound, smell and sinew of heavy manual labor.
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Considered Slovenia's greatest living poet, Tomaž Šalamun was born in Zagreb in 1941 and lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is one of the foremost figures of the Eastern European avant-garde in poetry. He is revered by many American poets for his unique surrealistic style. His books have been translated into twenty-one languages, and nine of his thirty-seven books of poetry have been published in English. His first collection, Poker, was published when he was only twenty-five. His most recent collections are There's the Hand and There's the Arid Chair, The Blue Tower, The Book for My Brother; Row, Woods and Chalices and On the Tracks of Wild Game (2012).
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One of the great postwar Central European poets, Slovenian Tomaz Salamun has published over thirty books. Publisher's Weekly praises his "postmodern mix of giddy and global [and] the earthy retrospect he takes from his homeland. Salamun has taught at universities around the world. His There's the Hand and There's the Arid Chair, translated by Thomas Kane, is forthcoming from Counterpath Press in 2009.
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Lyrics by Leonard Cohen: “It was good, it wasn’t boring / It was almost like the blues . . .”
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Tonight when I knelt down next to our cat, Zooey, And put my fingers into her clean cat’s mouth, And rubbed her swollen belly that will never know kittens, And watched her wriggle onto her side, pawing the air, And listened to her solemn little squeals of delight, I was thinking about the poet, Christopher Smart, Who wanted to kneel down and pray without ceasing In every one of the splintered London streets,
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Mingus at The Half Note by William Matthews ……………."
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"I needed a heavy canvas jacket riding the cold red tractor, air an ice cube on bare skin. Blue sky over the aspen grove I drove through on the way back to the field, throttle wide open, the empty wagon I pulled hitting all the bumps on the dirt road. In the high branches of the aspens little explosions now and then sent leaves tumbling and spinning like coins tossed into the air. The two-row, tractor-mounted corn-picker was waiting at the end of the corn rows,..."
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"For decades, much has depended on his red wheelbarrow, streaked with rain, next to some white chickens, even if no one has known — or perhaps even wondered — exactly who he was. • But now, the owner of the humble garden tool that inspired William Carlos Williams’s classic poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” will finally get his due. • On July 18, in a moment of belated poetic justice, a stone will be laid on the otherwise unmarked grave of Thaddeus Marshall, an African-American street vendor from Rutherford, N.J., noting his unsung contribution to American literature. • 'When we read this poem in an anthology, we tend not to think of the chickens as real chickens, but as platonic chickens, some ideal thing,' William Logan, the scholar who recently discovered Mr. Marshall’s identity, said in an interview.
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"'He exalted the nature around and within us. His work is an expression of primal joy: He celebrated our animal senses, and the pleasures of being alive.'” • "In Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself (public library), artist Allen Crawford brings Whitman’s undying text to new life in gorgeous hand-lettering and illustrations, transforming the 60-page poem originally published in 1855 as the centerpiece of Leaves of Grass into a breathtaking 256-page piece of art. His elegant, lyrical play of text size and orientation layers over Whitman’s poem a kind of visual rhythm that not only harmonizes with the original verses but enriches them and gives them uncommon dimension."
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This collection, which gathers work from seven decades, is sure to win the Nobel laureate even more fans.
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Tomas Transtromer, a Swedish poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011 for a body of work known for shrewd metaphors couched in deceptively spare language, crystalline descriptions of natural beauty and explorations of the mysteries of identity and creativity, died on Thursday in Stockholm. He was 83.
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"Philip Levine was one of the leading poetic voices of his generation, 'a large, ironic Whitman of the industrial heartland,' according to Edward Hirsch. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Levine was born and raised in industrial Detroit, where he began working in the auto factories at the age of 14. As a young boy in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, he was fascinated by the events of the Spanish Civil War. His heroes were not only those individuals who struggled against fascism but also ordinary folks who worked at hopeless jobs simply to stave off poverty. Noted for his interest in the grim reality of blue-collar work and workers, Levine resolved 'to find a voice for the voiceless' while working in the auto plants of Detroit during the 1950s. 'I saw that the people that I was working with … were voiceless in a way,' he explained in Detroit Magazine."
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When Tomaž Šalamun arrived at a poetry festival in San Miguel de Allende two years ago with a bad back, which he had hurt tobogganing down the Great Wall of China, I was not surprised to learn that he had risked life and limb to have a little fun. The Slovenian poet seemed to possess the gift of eternal youth until he passed away on Saturday, at his home in Ljubljana. He was always alert to what young poets were doing -- they fed his imagination -- and they repaid him in kind with translations and imitations of his work; it is a great irony that although he wrote in a language spoken by less than two million people English versions of his poems have for several decades profoundly influenced American letters. What surprised me about his Chinese adventure was that he had not escaped unscathed. I had imagined him to be indestructible.
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"The 92nd Street Y is marking the centennial of Dylan Thomas’s birth with an exhibition and a revival of his 1953 radio play 'Under Milk Wood' this weekend."
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Digital publishers have gotten better at creating e-books that preserve a poet’s meticulous formatting, but some writers are still leery of surrendering their work to the digital realm.
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"A longish poem about wallpaper. A short lyric about discouragement in white. A medium-length thesis of uncertain importance. ........” — Stephen Sandy
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