Poet Laureate
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Clearing the Bar with Care and Complexity: Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind
The Hurting Kind’s epigraph, a quote from Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik [implores] us to “Sing as if nothing were wrong. / Nothing is wrong.” When we read Limón, we can almost believe that.
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Catalyst Events and a Time for Poetry: An Interview with Charles Flowers
Consider: My coming out story has been told, but coming out is constantly changing and shifting and needs retelling, and each telling has value for a particular audience.
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Crossroads
In a new poem titled “@ the Crossroads: A Sudden American Poem,” US poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera reacts to last week’s violence by asking the reader to consider the men who were killed, their names, their faces, “the stories…
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Literature as Expression, Exchange, and Peace
Everything make sense if you’re an artist. At the Dallas Observer, Caroline North exchanged a few words with current US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, who is kicking off his second term with a book tour and several forthcoming projects, including…
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Poetry of the Moment
Juan Felipe Herrera is at the top of his game…He served as California’s Poet Laureate from 2012-2014, the first Latino poet to hold that post. He’s also the first Latino to be U.S. Poet Laureate. He’s the only child of…
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Poet Laureate Grew Up a Migrant Worker, Seeing Poetry All Around Him
Those are some deep landscapes of mountains and grape fields and barns and tractors; families gathering at night to have little celebrations in the mountains and aquamarine lakes way down below. So, see, all that is like living in literature…
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Learning from Yeats
There is music in those words, yes, but music, when things go right, is always wed to sense, as though he were speaking to you directly, trying to work things out. It is, to employ a word not often heard…
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Larkin’s Social Anxiety
Philip Larkin disliked literary parties. He also disliked giving lectures. His general dislike of public and social events led the British poet to push back against attempts to nominate him for a prestigious Oxford professorship. He also turned down the poet laureateship…
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Do We Need a Poet Laureate?
For Literary Hub, Nick Ripatrazone breaks down—and defends—the poet laureate.
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Official Bards for the Bay State
All but six US states have official Poet Laureates; the Massachusetts House of Representatives is poised to cut that number down to five. Although many individual cities appoint poets to these literary ambassador positions, the larger Commonwealth has never passed…
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Hell on Earth
Former Poet Laureate Charles Simic grapples with the current global situation in the New York Review of Books. The world is going to hell in a hurry. At my age, I ought to be used to it, but I’m not.…
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Who are the Poet Laureates?
After the recent dust-up over North Carolina’s poet laureate, the New York Times takes a look at 45 state poet laureates to see who they are and just what exactly it is they do.