Donald Hall offers The New Yorker a series of reminiscences, observations and gentle declarations concerning the poetry reading, a beast he has come to know most intimately during his lifetime,…
The Tornado Collects the Animals The tornado likes animals because they pay attention. The tornado sees the dogs howling up from rippling yards, the cows huddled mutely against one another,…
There is a canon of cinema that revolves around girls leaving girlhood, and finding themselves young and nubile, ready (so they think) to embrace their future as women. There’s the…
McSweeney’s brand-new poetry series begins tomorrow evening in San Francisco. The inaugural reading will feature writers Allan Peterson, author of Fragile Acts (a Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection), Rebecca Lindenberg, author of Love: An Index,…
Ever heard that gobsmacking troubadourist Ezra Pound read his elaborate, funkified sestina, “Sestina: Altafore,” in a voice that is one part American-as-European, swilling-with-the-rolling-R’s accent and cantorian swoons and another part…
First things first: you don’t have to be a fan of Weldon Kees to enjoy this book. Shameful confession: until I read the note that precedes the table of contents,…
The translation of poetry requires justification. Not necessarily for conceptual reasons, but because the experience of reading translated poetry however transcendent and beautiful always feels lacking, incomplete, like living in…
NPR’s Weekend Edition interviews Mary Oliver, Pulitzer-prize winning poet and author of the recently released collection, A Thousand Mornings. “One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must…
The University of San Francisco has established a fellowship in honor of Lawrence Ferlinghetti “who published and supported the work of writers who were outsiders―outside traditional academia or traditional social…