poetry
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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 illegally or immorally. Levertov replied that of course poets should…
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The Rumpus Interview with Jill McDonough
Poet Jill McDonough chats about teaching in prisons, controversial art exhibits, getting lost in research, and writing fifty sonnets about American executions.
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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 concerned. Ms. Clarkson is a walking example of the American…
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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. You’re holding paper and ribbon (the chapbook is bound by…
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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 that, at its worst, it reduces complex argument to slogans…
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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 to the side and reverbrate while I try ways through…
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The Rumpus Interview with Rosie Schaap
Rosie Schaap discusses Drinking with Men, her love of poetry, her intriguing family members, and what she would do with her life if she weren’t a writer.
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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 Larkin’s poems in My Scarlet Ways. She uses a refreshing…
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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 ourselves, the smell of fallow plants. Her second collection of…
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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 deserves it; the poems are consistently charming, witty, disarmingly beautiful,…
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Counterpart by Elizabeth Robinson
Marisa Siegel reviews Elizabeth Robinson’s Counterpart today in Rumpus Poetry.
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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.