Poets Beyond the Barricade by Dale M Smith
In Washington, D. C. many years ago, Denise Levertov took questions after a reading and was asked if poets were obligated to protest with poetry when their government was acting…
Poetry
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: What Alexandra Petri Should Have Said in the Washington Post.
Kelly Clarkson’s Inaugural Song Means the Death of Country Music Inaugural country singer Kelly Clarkson said that her story is America’s story. If that’s the case, America should be slightly…
Homebodies by Sarah Jane Sloat
If you open your hands to hold Homebodies, a chapbook of poems by Sarah J. Sloat, you find much about the book itself that makes the act feel personal, private.…
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: A Poet and a President
A funny thing happened on the way to President Obama’s second inauguration Monday. The president’s speech and Richard Blanco’s poem got reversed. Broadly speaking, one’s expectations of political rhetoric is…
Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room by Betsy Wheeler
Betsy Wheeler’s Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room has sort of undone me for the month and a half I’ve spent with it, reading it or letting it hang over…
My Scarlet Ways by Tanya Larkin
In age of poetry saturated with the irony and airy nonsense of the last phalanx of the grandchildren of the New York School, it is wonderfully refreshing to read Tanya…
Now Make an Altar by Amy Beeder
In Amy Beeder’s poetry, we are surrounded by the refuse and remains of the past: memories and photos of lost generations, the bones and fur of animals used to adorn…
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Things They Do Look Awful Cold — Talking ‘Bout My Generation
About eight or nine years ago I caught a ride from Northampton, Massachusetts to New York City with the poet Matthew Rohrer. We’d given a reading a few nights earlier…
A Rumpus Book Clubs Update
The Book Clubs are rocking right now with this month’s selections, George Saunders’s Tenth of December and Camille Guthrie’s Articulated Lair, but there’s some great stuff on the horizon.
In Beauty Bright by Gerald Stern
Having never read Gerald Stern’s poetry before, I took This Time: New and Selected Poems out from the library. The book won the National Book Award in 1998, and it…
Counterpart by Elizabeth Robinson
Marisa Siegel reviews Elizabeth Robinson’s Counterpart today in Rumpus Poetry.
Why I Chose Camille Guthrie’s Articulated Lair for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
These poems are not traps, but safe spaces with doors inside them.