Our April poet, Carmen Giménez Smith, was featured on NPR’s NewsPoet series. (NewsPoet has featured Rumpus Poetry Book Club poet and recent Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith as well.) Check it out.
And if you’d like to become a member of the Poetry Book Club–we’re talking about Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s collection The Ground right now–click here.
Emily Kendal Frey’s compact, laconic poems from her first collection, The Grief Performance, outwit, outlast, and, eponymously, outperform not only death, but failure, ennui, and despair.Vol. 1 Brooklyn converses with Michael Robbins about his recently released poetry collection, Alien vs. Predator. Other topics of discussion include his hatred of Mississippi, Dadaism, suberversion in music, Occupy, and the police.
“The stuff that interests me is dangerous, and it’s not always designed to suggest the proper ameliorations, you know. Art is contradiction. It’s not something that’s going to conform to our nice, liberal values.”
Voices of the Rainbow: Contemporary Poetry by Native Americans is a reissue of an anthology first published in 1975. Sacred Clowns won’t jump off the pages, but you will be reminded whose land you may be parked on—if you arrived after Columbus, that is.This brings us to the end of our National Poetry Month project, one poem short of a sestina’s worth. We close out this year with a poem by Mary Jo Bang, whose forthcoming translation of Dante’s Inferno will be our Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection for the month of August. You can find links to all the poems we’ve run during this project here. Thanks for reading along with us this month.
A Room In Cleopatra’s Palace
Flies and a fan and a pillar
in this or that arch of the empire. …more
Harriet, the Poetry Foundation blog, reports that poet Joshua Clover and 11 students at UC Davis are potentially facing a $1 million fine and up to 11 years each in prison. Their crime? Peaceful protest.
A petition is circulating which demands that UC Davis drop all charges, and if I hear about any other plans to pressure the UC Davis administration, I’ll update this post to reflect them.
Well I got to keep it going keep it going full steam.
Two Lyrics from “Rondo”
The boys pawing the ground are horses.
They will drag you between them.
Come, give them your arms! …more
Was National Poetry Month over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!
The Lover’s Field Guide to Lesser Coinage
There are eight stycas in a penny, two pennies in a farthing, three farthings in a nearthing, and eight nearthings in a positutely. …more
So maybe you’re following our National Poetry Month project and you want to know who else is going to be featured. You’re following, right? I mean, sure you get the tweets from Rumpus Poetry and The Rumpus, and you regularly check the Rumpus and Rumpus Poetry Facebook pages, but what you really want, what you yearn for, is a link list of this month’s poems, updated daily.
I’ve got what you need. …more
We decide when National Poetry Month is over.
A Double Sestina on Happiness
Part 1:
I should never be happy, the Samsung Chairman’s eldest daughter Eunhee thought
as she picked up a capsleeved dress in Seoul’s only Marni boutique, and paid …more
Don’t miss this poem from Sherman Alexie’s forthcoming collection, Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories.
“Until he became an elephant, Sheldon referred to his left hand as ‘my hand’ and to his right hand as ‘my brother’s hand.’”
Because thirty days just isn’t enough National Poetry Month for us.
Death is a Hysterical Dynasty
Tonight we shall read from my personal book of lamentations,
sit shiva in a room lit with those overly perfumed candles as thick
as the aluminum bat I used just last week to flip away the possum
carcass I’d found collapsed against the house. Forensics tell us …more
No tyrannical calendar will define National Poetry Month for us!
Carpal Seeple
I want to get Augustan
pass the mustard
make it matter make it …more
We’re never satisfied with the thirty days that April allots us for National Poetry Month, so we’re extending it a bit. Enjoy!
Zoo
Unbridled, the sick pony
traverses listlessly a circle. …more
Howell surprises by not trying to surprise at all…. Once a reader takes these poems on their terms, the poems become really intricate and beautiful.
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Linda Hogan about her poetry collection Indios. …more
We’re never satisfied with just the 30 days that April offers for National Poetry Month, so we’re keeping it going for a little while longer.
Machine Song
I Xerox what I need to keep
(a sheaf of papers, taxes, real estate),
everything that once was ours. …more
Welcome to The Rumpus’s National Poetry Month project. We’ll be running a new poem from a different poet each day for the month of April.
From “Sungone Noon”
One raised
goats; …more
Welcome to The Rumpus’s National Poetry Month project. We’ll be running a new poem from a different poet each day for the month of April.
A Children’s Story
One snowflake was a lantern, the other
a shellfish. They were unnatural enemies. …more
The promised west in The Oregon Trail IS The Oregon Trail is an amalgam of bootstrap romance, wilderness bordered by suburban sprawl, death, and the ferocity of natural processes.Welcome to The Rumpus’s National Poetry Month project. We’ll be running a new poem from a different poet each day for the month of April.
Nine Out of Ten Dentists Agree I Am Not an Octopus
I think I am an octopus.
Nine out of ten dentists agree
that I am not an octopus. …more