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"Poet Laureate Philip Levine, still as fit and funny at age 85 as he was as a young man working the night shift at a car factory, shared his special brand of earthy, poignant and insightful poetry – and a sizable measure of good humored repartee – with over 1000 fans at UTEP (University of Texas, El Paso) recently. The poet of the working class, who was born in Detroit to poor Russian Jewish immigrant parents, began writing professionally in the early 1950’s and has been giving “a voice to the voiceless” ever since. His message and poetry resonated with his El Paso audience in a city that is predominately Hispanic and working class."
"The year I owned a motorcycle and split the air in southern Spain, and could smell the oranges in the orange groves as I passed them outside of Seville, I understood I'd been riding too long in cars, ....."
This event is open to the public “Hoagland’s imagination ranges thrillingly across manners, morals, sexual doings, kinds of speech both lyrical and candid, intimate as well as wild.”
—The American Academy of Arts and Letters
"(Part Three: Epilogue) (And from behind barbed wire,
In the very heart of the taiga—
I don’t know which year—
Having become a heap of “camp dust,”
Having become a terrifying fairy tale,
My double goes to the interrogation.)" ...................................................... "(Of all the ways for a poet to die,
Foolish boy: He chose this one—
He could not bear the first insult,
He did not know on what threshold
He stood and what road
Spread its view before him. . . .)"
"(He loved three things in life:
Evensong, white peacocks
And old maps of America.
He hated it when children cried,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . And I was his wife.)"
"Spring comes quickly: overnight the plum tree blossoms, the warm air fills with bird calls. In the plowed dirt, someone has drawn a picture of the sun with rays coming out all around but because the background is dirt, the sun is black. ....."
"On Easter morning all over America
the peasants are frying potatoes in bacon grease.
We're not supposed to have 'peasants'
but there are tens of millions of them
frying potatoes on Easter morning,
cheap and delicious with catsup.
If Jesus were here this morning he might ....."
"Daylight Saving Time went into effect in the United States for the first time on this date in 1918."
"It's the birthday of philosopher René Descartes, born in La Haye en Touraine, France (1596), called the father of modern philosophy, but he considered himself a mathematician and scientist."
"It's the birthday of the poet Andrew Marvell, born in Winestead, England (1621)."
"Oklahoma! opened on Broadway on this date in 1943. It was based on a play called Green Grow the Lilacs (1930), by Lynn Riggs."
"Department for Education funds contest for schoolchildren to learn and recite verse"
"The only photograph that I have of myself before I was born is the one that I keep in my underwear drawer. In it, my mother sits at the kitchen table. My eight months stretches the gingham of her sundress underneath her breasts, suggesting my presence at the scene. ...."
"Respondez! Respondez! (The war is completed—the price is paid—the title is settled beyond recall;) Let every one answer! let those who sleep be waked! let none evade! Must we still go on with our affectations and sneaking? Let me bring this to a close—I pronounce openly for a new distribution of roles; Let that which stood in front go behind! and let that which was behind advance to the front and speak; Let murderers, bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new propositions! Let the old propositions be postponed! Let faces and theories be turn’d inside out! let meanings be freely criminal, as well as results! ....."
"The obvious caveats: I certainly have not read every book of Canadian poetry from 2012, only what publishers sent me. However, that was quite a ton of books. As well, I’m drawn to poetry that says something of life itself, I want to be jangled and moved in a way a novel can’t move me, with the quick one-two punch only potent poetry can pack. By which I mean, poems that let the reader in on a fleeting thought, one that resonates. Basically, I like feeling the way these 12 books left me feeling: struck, like a gong. They’re not ranked, how dare I? And had I of dared, it would’ve been a three-way 1st place tie anyway: George Murray’s Whiteout, Patrick Warner’s Perfection, and Mathew Henderson’s The Lease. Three accessible, remarkable books of poems you should not be afraid to buy, savour, and read twice …"
"1/ BIRD Breath fills the decayed tree. The sky is still
a syllable. Light lives inside those wings. .... 2/ HANDS
Canyon de Chelly, AZ Sometimes we push so hard into the earth we leave
The handprint of desire. Without rocks there is no soul.
.... 3/ FAITH IN ROMANIA It must be the child has turned to call us to follow.
The cart is filled with the harvest. .... 4/ TANK TRAPS
Ljubljana, Slovenia, 1992 Someone is watching from the window across the square.
There are Nightbirds complaining as they maneuver .... 5/ SHORELINES Nobody sees what the other person sees. As when
you pick up at a piece of driftwood and it is not driftwood, ...."
"Poet Gerald Stern is in his late 80s. But the poet still seems to be hurtling toward the reader at full throttle, with works that are concise and direct."
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"When we view a work of art, we add our own brush strokes of memory — finishing a creative process that, until then, is incomplete."
"Now all the doors and windows are open, and we move so easily through the rooms. Cats roll on the sunny rugs, and a clumsy wasp climbs the pane, pausing to rub a leg over her head. ..........................."
"All that I am hangs by a thread tonight as I wait for her whom no one can command. Whatever I cherish most--youth, freedom, glory-- fades before her who bears the flute in her hand. ....."
"(The city, beloved by me since childhood,
Seemed to me today
In its December silence
Like my squandered inheritance.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But with a stranger’s curiosity,
Captivated by each novelty,
I watched how the sleds skimmed,
And listened to my native tongue.)"
"And the just man trailed God's shining agent, over a black mountain, in his giant track, while a restless voice kept harrying his woman: 'It's not too late, you can still look back at the red towers of your native Sodom, the square where ...'"
Record-a-Poem Group Opens on Soundcloud
"Blanco will be the first Hispanic to recite work at an inauguration." "Richard Blanco, a Cuban-American poet whose work has explored his immigrant roots and homosexual awakening, will deliver the poem at President Obama’s inauguration this month, the Presidential Inaugural Committee announced Wednesday." "His first collection of poems, 'City of a Hundred Fires,' won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize from the Universrity of Pittsburgh. His second book, 'Directions to the Beach of the Dead,' received the PEN American Center Beyond Margins Award. His third, 'Looking for the Gulf Motel,' was published last year."
"In the afternoon of his 39th birthday, less than a year after his wedding day, poet Christian Wiman was diagnosed with an incurable cancer of the blood. Wiman, who announced Wednesday that he will step down in June as editor of Poetry magazine, the oldest and most esteemed poetry monthly in the world, had long ago drifted away from the Southern Baptist beliefs of his upbringing. But the shock of staring death in the face gradually revived a faith that had gone dormant (a story he first told publicly in a 2007 article for The American Scholar). Wiman's new book of essays, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), took shape in the wake of his diagnosis, when he believed death could be fast approaching. These writings come from someone who is less a cautious theologian than a pilgrim crying out from the depths. They divulge the God-ward hopes (and doubts) of an artist still piecing together a spiritual puzzle. San Francisco-based lawyer and author Josh Jeter corresponded with Wiman about his new book, his precarious health, and the ongoing challenge of belief in God."
"At some location between the rod itself and the hook, which, having shot straight on its filament through the locust-sung summer air (all sun-blistered and clover-hung), at the flick of her cousin’s right wrist..."
"Poet Kevin Young picks out his favorite poetry books from 2012, including works from the U.S. poet laureate to up-and-coming writers."
"I don't think my brother realized all
the responsibilities involved in being
her guardian, not just the paperwork
but the trips to the dentist and Wal-Mart,
the making sure she has underwear,
money to buy Pepsis...
"One female poet from the early part of the century who still enjoys a good reputation is Louise Bogan. Roethke (he was her lover at one time) described her poems as “seeking a moment when things are caught, fixed, frozen, for an instant, under the eye of eternity.” It is this relationship between the momentary and the eternal, expressed in a poem like “Medusa” that lies behind a terse, epigrammatic style that descends from Jonson and Campion: in this poem, one of Medusa’s victims speaks, now stone, yet now also half a part of time’s outward movement: 'And I shall stand here like a shadow
Under the great balanced day,
My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind,
And does not drift away.'
Bogan’s range is quite impressive, and she is easily on of the major poets of the century, but it may be that it was her style that suggested something akin to what the critics of the day would have recognized as a forceful male voice. Of course, other female poets of the first half of century have achieved the attention they deserve, though probably not as much as they should have, notably Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser, Marianne Moore, and H.D. But my aim here is to take a brief introductory look at three poets who have received little or none of the attention they very much deserve, not in terms of their gender, or gender issues, but in terms of their artistry and enduring power, a criterion based upon [Ellen Bryant] Voigt’s idea of intense intellectual rigor and intense emotional engagement within --or creatively breaking-- the conventions and long standing tradition of the art-- a criterion all three poets fought for themselves."
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