poems
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Cultural Constellations of Agee and Smith
But who said a chronology had to be straightforward?
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Sprose Poems and Flarf
Dan Piepenbring has had a bee in his bonnet about the spam comments they get over at the Paris Review Daily—”they’re by turns,” he says, “ludic, cryptic, disquieting, emotional, and inadvertently profound”—so fascinating, in fact, that he has kept a…
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How to Enjoy Poetry
Poetry can intimidate. Casual consumers of other art forms like film or fiction often willingly offer uninformed opinions, even if that only means rating a product on Amazon. But asking readers for opinions on poetry regularly leads to avoidance and…
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Poetry Is Useful—Or At Least It Can Be
Poetry is always already revolutionary, then. What it says hardly matters. Poetry is useful because of its useless essence, not because of its individual meaning. Of course, this is nonsense. The way Noah Berlatsky sees it, mainstream culture and poets agree…
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Poems from the South Pole
In a recent post about newly discovered undeveloped photos of a Shackleton expedition to Antarctica 100 years ago, we mentioned that Riverhead Books publicity director Jynne Dilling Martin is currently an artist-in-residence in Antarctica, and that she had written a…
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Happy Labor Day!
Celebrate the workers of the world with the Poetry Foundation’s list of “poems reflecting on work, responsibility, and the end of summer.” The post includes links to audio recordings of readings and interviews, as well as a few analytical articles, for…
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“I Never Intended Anyone to Read These ‘Poems’”
Previously, we blogged about a reading by Victoria Chang from her new poetry collection The Boss. Here’s a Q&A with Chang about that book, her approach to poetry, and her day job in the business world. An excerpt: I wrote these…
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Listen to Sylvia Plath Read Her Poems Out Loud
Open Culture’s Josh Jones suggests listening to Sylvia Plath perform her poems out loud as a way to encounter them anew, “without the morbid celebrity baggage Plath’s name carries.” They do seem, in some ways, like completely different poems when…
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Man to Purchase Drone, Drop Poems Instead of Bombs
The Los Angeles poet, translator, and filmmaker David Shook has created a Kickstarter campaign with the imaginative objective of purchasing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)—i.e., a drone—to rain specially comissioned poems on cities around the world. The poems, printed on…
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I Did Not Vanish: On Writing
But writing poems allows me mastery over a miniature universe. For those moments or hours, I am God of my kingdom. No one tells me how things go. No one can argue against me when I’m writing poems. When I…
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FUNNY WOMEN #102: How to Read a Poem
One misconception people have about poetry is that it is written in “code,” one they aren’t smart enough to understand. In fact, if you do not comprehend a poem, you may return it.
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National Poetry Month
April Fools and the beginning of National Poetry Month? Seems like a killer day to us! [April 1] marks the start of National Poetry Month, the monthlong celebration of the verse inaugurated in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets. The…