poetry
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Tao Lin/ Ben Lerner Conversation on Poetry/A Novel About Poetry
Tao Lin interviews the poet and novelist, Ben Lerner for the Believer. After three poetry collections, Lerner just published a novel, Leaving Atocha Station (Muumuu House excerpts it here). It turns out his poetical prowess is just one of Lerner’s…
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The Dead Man’s Back Arches
The collection works as poetic biography and Whitmanesque dialogue, and this approach and its repetitions become irresistibly hypnotic.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Revolutionary Letter #1” by Diane di Prima
The summer I turned 19, after my first year of college, I took off, leaving behind my small midwestern campus, to work in a gift shop in Yosemite National Park. That’s a whole other story, and maybe someday I’ll tell…
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Wings Wands Stars Tulle
These poems have all the instinct and fangs of a canine, and the plush, electric fur of a wolf: the intensity and sheer quality of workmanship in the poems is impressive.
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The Poet as Pinup
Wild Women Press just wrapped a photo shoot for a 2012 calendar featuring a new nude poet for every month of the year, with proceeds from sales going to type one diabetes research. To top it off, all of the…
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The Last Poem I Loved: “South America” by Tom Raworth
Can words become a part of you? I found Tom Raworth’s “South America” published in Keith Tuma’s Anthology of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry (Oxford, 2001) and have always looked back. Listen to Raworth read it. It asks us to…
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To the Language of Doves
Darwish’s identity (and the Palestinian identity) has been, at least partly, developed in exile. Darwish writes: “I am absence./ The heavenly and the expelled.” Here he speaks not only for himself, but for his people.
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Former Detroit Autoworker Named Poet Laureate for 2011-12
Philip Levine, at 83 years old, has been named the Poet Laureate for 2011-2012. As a former autoworker from Detroit, his poetry draws largely on his working-class Jewish background. Deemed “America’s most acclaimed working-class poet,” his work expresses the “simple…
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Slashed Narcissi, Drilled Stone
In physics terms, the poetry world is underground “all the way down,” so Influence lurks in each sea cave like a bastard eel, recharging in darkness, awaiting his next dinner with flickering impatience and slaverous hunger.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Lea Graham
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Lea Graham about her collection Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You This is an edited transcript of the Poetry Book Club discussion with Lea Graham. Every month The…
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The Last Poet I Loved: Maggie Nelson
After four years in England, I know that summer is not the season of budding trees, shy morning sunlight, blue skies, and merry picnics on the grass that my Midwestern American childhood promised me. It is the season of gray.…
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A Pterodactyl Song
“So…I haven’t read…in 5 and a half years.” David Berman’s baritone voice drizzled out to the 8th floor auditorium at Columbia College in Chicago, sliding shyly over the beige carpet like a hand falling from a bed to the floor…