Marge Piercy’s unflinching clarity of vision continues to be the kind of sturdy example so vital to literature. She has long been teaching and in the public arena, on the humane side of almost every contemporary issue. …more

At The New Republic, Ruth Franklin celebrates the work of the late Wislawa Szymborska, and explores the brilliance of Polish poetry throughout the last half-century.

“Assuming that there weren’t any mind-altering chemicals in the run-off from Nowa Huta, the notoriously polluted steelworks outside Krakow (where Szymborska spent nearly her entire life), we can only conclude that Poland’s postwar poetic greatness was largely a historical accident—the collision of a deep and enduring literary culture with Europe’s ghastliest battleground.”

(Via The Book Bench)

In three very different but equally gorgeous sections, Griffith guides us through every poetic form from sonnet to villanelle, all while examining the idea of what it means to be in one place instead of all others, what it means not to know your own momentum and position at the same time, to never see the moon from every window. …more

Disappearing

I’d like to cap this pen, lock the drawers,
and take my coat off the chair. I’d stop
the clocks at half-past two, then grab my keys …more

A lot, really. First of all, we’re about to chat with Aase Berg and Johannes Gorannson about Berg’s book Transfer Fat It’s the first time we’ve done a translation, and we’re very excited to be able to talk with both the poet and the translator. Look for the transcript later this month.

February’s book is D. A. Powell’s Useless Landscape. Those are in the mail and we’ll start talking about them soon. Look for my essay on why I chose this book later this week. March’s book will be Linda Hogan’s Indios, and Camille Dungy will be leading that discussion.

Finally, this really isn’t book club news, but what the hell. The Rumpus is holding a fundraiser at the AWP convention, so if you’re going to be in Chicago on March 1, come by 826 Chicago. Readers include Nick Flynn, Cheryl Strayed, Peter Orner, Sommer Browning, Brian Spears and Stephen Elliott.

These poems are often about the strange, complex and imperfect mapping of nature—human and wild—onto our 21st century lives. …more

These poems are about unintentional association, the ways our minds wander even when — especially when? — they’re trying to wrap themselves around a given idea. …more

“Thousands are gathered outside the interior ministry…”

Bloody lullabies soothe the centuries.
Can’t see the cradles for the tops of trees
but you know the rest: you can’t rest, poor babies. …more

This is an intelligent and well-crafted poetry that demands multiple readings. And it is a voice–perhaps a bit apprehensive and damaged by experience–that seems willing to express it all, even the ugly and cruel. …more

Scissor Half

You were telling me your dream
at some point you started
just making it up …more

“Urban planners, artists, and citizens around the world must open poetic space within increasingly cramped, increasingly bottom-line-driven cities. Our political animalness gets claustrophobic. We require the commons to encounter each other and the physical landscape.”

Poem Forest involved participants reciting 15 lines from 2500 years of poetry at pre-established locations throughout the 50-acre old-growth forest that was recently renovated in the New York Botanical Garden. Jon Cotner, the artist behind the project, discusses his thought process and walks us through an audiovisual tour.

These are poems that want to be breathless, that want to mirror the intensity of passion and desire and heartbreak, and leave the reader light-headed. …more

NPR’s All Things Considered is starting a monthly project that brings poets into the newsroom before unleashing them to write a poem “reflecting on the day’s news.” Their inaugural poet is Rumpus Poetry Book Club author Tracy K. Smith. You can read or listen to her poem here.

Goldbarth still infuses his poems with an old-fashioned, childlike wonder at the marvels of our world, along with a bemused chuckle at the ways in which we so obviously fall short of our lofty goals. …more

The poems are themselves stealthy, hiding but then eventually revealing themselves to the writers. Or the stealth writers, both Seaton and Ace autonomous and authentic somewhere in that collaborative voice. …more

Haunted by the paradoxes associated with Shakerism that both glorified and doomed it, Kirchwey uses the place of Mount Lebanon to explore a layering of spaces and themes that accesses vast time and situation. …more

The Weary World Rejoices has its unadorned moments of grief, punctuated by moments of energetic wit and intelligent levity. …more

Ode to the Painter Ross Watson

Don’t imagine me as the woman
        who you replicated
                from the Vermeer …more

Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Diwata (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010), recently noted as a finalist for the California Book Award. She was born in Manila, Philippines, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is the author of two previous collections of poetry, …more

Coleman’s work is functional and communal; she wields the oral tradition in a way that reflects her poetry ancestry—the blues queen, Koko Taylor, for example, or the fringe Beat genius, Bob Kaufman—but she also shows planed, hewn lines of intellectual poem-making. …more

To truly commit a poem to memory is to commit your life to that poem. Out of all the many verses I’ve memorized over the last year, no other has so fully enveloped my days than John Ashbery’s “Poem at the New Year.” So much so that its evocative and elegiac images mark all my mythologies, memories, lies, fantasies, evasions, romances. …more

Innovation is at the heart of these poems, and King’s ability to see through the surface to the deeper and often disconnected intricacies of life make them pleasurable and powerful to read. …more

Death, Is Always

Turning my hair inside out, I only see
Emma Bee making sense of excess,
making something of it online, via high fashion,
which shouldn’t be but is,
along with every other thing,
both uber- and central- Pacific—
Turns out the world is a big one. So,
This is where I am tonight: …more

What is a woman’s place in a world full of overwhelmingly masculine ideas and works? Marthe Reed, in her newest book of poetry, Gaze, examines the many intersections between women and modern society as a whole. …more

Kināyah

“[concerning] women, the sexual organs, defecation, various forms of
uncleanliness and everything which is a bad omen” –Sandra Naddaff

“when a woman desires something, no one can stop her” –The Thousand
and One Nights

her “slit”
different forms of discourse

basil of the bridges
in the interests of narrative variety …more

Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ Mule & Pear is one of the most affecting books of poetry I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. …more

Guernica has an extensive interview with South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, who elaborates on life as a woman poet and the state of feminism in Korea. Hyesoon discusses the role of the grotesque, the human body, and exposure in her poetry.

“I also came to grotesque language in the patriarchal culture under the dictatorship. The body that was broken into pieces is a sick body. I put the disease of this world and my sick body together. The grotesque in my poems is the motion I use to put myself and the grotesque world together. So the miserable images I use in my poems are the same as the letters I send into the miserable world.”

A Fire-Proof Box is a porous work, languages overlapped, breathing, an English translation that manages to capture the icy weight of classically “Russian” sensibilities. …more

“That was the question Nicola Behrman asked her pals on the eve of Thanksgiving 2010. Then, on a whim, she asked them to write it out by hand and pop it into the mail to her in California. Guess what happened? In this fast paced, modern world, where we can hardly find the time to respond to our emails, poem after poem in stamped addressed envelopes started landing on her doorstep.”

The letters eventually came from friends and strangers alike, and Behrman built a collection of favorite poems, which she carried around and shared on request. Poetry Post brings those poems online by way of Poetry Tuesdays and asks readers to reflect on that original question.

The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Amy Newman about her poetry collection Dear Editor. …more