My Affairs Are Just My Questions
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.
Poetry
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Poem Forest
“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…
“Newspoet” Kick-off
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…
An Angel Pricked With Breathing Holes
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…
You Simply Die of Want
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.
Denied the Work of Natural Generation
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…
A Busted Advent Calendar
The Weary World Rejoices has its unadorned moments of grief, punctuated by moments of energetic wit and intelligent levity.
“Ode to Ross Watson,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Steve Fellner
Ode to the Painter Ross Watson Don’t imagine me as the woman who you replicated from the Vermeer
The Rumpus Interview with Barbara Jane Reyes
It’s hard for me to know how much to push against popular culture, because certain trends are fleeting.
There Are More Knowzits Than Ever
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,…
The Last Poem I Loved: “Poem at the New Year” by John Ashbery
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…