Rites of Passage: Steven Toussaint’s Lay Studies
We are liturgical animals, Toussaint’s poems suggest, designed to satisfy some ultimate desire with worship.
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Posts Tagged: Robert Lowell
Subtext Rising to the Surface: A Conversation with Matthew Olzmann
Poet Matthew Olzmann discusses his work with Julie Marie Wade.
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The Poem Remembers: A Conversation with David Baker
David Baker discusses SWIFT: NEW & SELECTED POEMS.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Katie Ford
Katie Ford discusses her new collection, IF YOU HAVE TO GO.
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Visitations: Gwendolyn Brooks at One Hundred
A visitation is how I describe the past weeks walking with Gwendolyn Books. It is like she is just around every corner.
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Radiant with Terror: Lowell and the Uncertain Country of Love
I found comfort in the way that Lowell’s poems frequently explore the landscape of mental illness and blur the lines between the self and the world.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Nikki Wallschlaeger
Nikki Wallschlaeger discusses her new collection Crawlspace, why she chose to work with the sonnet form, and how segregation in American never ended.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 10): “The Gods”
Poetic contemplation typically is a means to container experience, like a still life.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Shane McCrae
I think that the moment we’re living in offers the best opportunity we’ve had in a long time in that a lot of things having to do with identity politics are being talked about in poems.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #74: A Social Practice
Everywhere there is sterling musicianship, of the original, unexpected sort.
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It’s Women’s History Month at the Poetry Foundation. The editors peg Elizabeth Bishop’s poems—in volumes with titles like North & South, Questions of Travel, Geography III—to her wide-ranging geography, and to her illustrious cohort.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #67: The Franchise Restaurants of Song
Musician Owen Ashworth on his new album, Nephew in the Wild, literary influences, self-expression in songwriting, and how becoming a father has changed his work.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: We Are Not Dead
“The wants and desires of dead people, the one’s they didn’t get to fulfill—that’s what slays me…What if they wanted more? What if they didn’t want to leave behind the things they left behind?”
...moreElizabeth Bishop’s Favorite Island
We know Bishop primarily as the eager traveler who wrote of distant, tropical locations and lived for many years as an expat in Brazil. She was that, of course, but she was also an aficionado of her native landscape and climate. Our canon’s consummate poet of geography, maps, and the mystery of spatial awareness loved […]
...moreFlannery on the Couch
In a new biography, Brad Gooch makes romantic assumptions about the relationship between O’Connor’s life and art.
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