Poetry
by Poetic Justice, April 7, 2015 12:04 PM
Every year to celebrate Poetry Month, we select 32 poets to battle it out in a competition for the ages: Poetry Madness. This year, we decided to do things a little differently: instead of choosing the players ourselves, we asked four awesome poets — Saeed Jones, Andrea Gibson, Robert Lashley, and Hajara Quinn — to each nominate eight of their favorite contemporaries to compete for the title of Best Poet of All Time (for the year). Who will emerge victorious? Read about the contenders here and then go to our Poetry Madness page on April 8 to vote for your top choices.
Below are Hajara Quinn's picks for Poetry Madness 2015.
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Hajara Quinn lives in Portland, Oregon. She is an assistant editor for Octopus Books and the author of the chapbook Unnaysayer (Flying Object, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Banango Street, The Volta, Nightblock, and Sixth Finch. She is the recipient of a 2015 Oregon Literary Fellowship. |
Mary Ruefle
Author of Trances of the Blast
"Mary Ruefle is perhaps the poet most likely to disarm me on any given day. The way the imagination in her poetry does its transformative work on description, the way it changes everything, the way she resists easy epiphany, the way she courts impossible epiphanies."
"Provenance" by Mary Ruefle
from Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013)
In the fifth grade
I made a horse of papier-mâché
and...
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Poetry
by Poetic Justice, April 6, 2015 10:08 AM
Every year to celebrate Poetry Month, we select 32 poets to battle it out in a competition for the ages: Poetry Madness. This year, we decided to do things a little differently: instead of choosing the players ourselves, we asked four awesome poets — Saeed Jones, Andrea Gibson, Robert Lashley, and Hajara Quinn — to each nominate eight of their favorite contemporaries to compete for the title of Best Poet of All Time (for the year). Who will emerge victorious? Read about the contenders here and then go to our Poetry Madness page on April 8 to vote for your top choices.
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Saeed Jones's debut poetry collection Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House Press) was the winner of the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award and a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has appeared in publications like Guernica, The Rumpus, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Blackbird among others. Saeed is the recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and Queer / Art / Mentors. |
Below are Saeed Jones's picks for Poetry Madness 2015.
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Jericho Brown
Author of The New Testament
"Whether writing in the voice of Joni Mitchell or a lover rapt with the blues, Brown's poetry darkly glimmers like whiskey on the rocks."
Listen to him read "At the End of Hell."
Follow him on Twitter @jerichobrown.
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Patricia Smith
Author of Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah
"The roar of Hurricane Katrina, the hopeful sigh of a young mother in Chicago's South Side, Medusa fixing her hair: Patricia Smith has so many voices!"
Follow her on Twitter @pswordwoman...
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Poetry
by Poetic Justice, April 3, 2015 9:00 AM
Every year to celebrate Poetry Month, we select 32 poets to battle it out in a competition for the ages: Poetry Madness. This year, we decided to do things a little differently: instead of choosing the players ourselves, we asked four awesome poets — Saeed Jones, Andrea Gibson, Robert Lashley, and Hajara Quinn — to each nominate eight of their favorite contemporaries to compete for the title of Best Poet of All Time (for the year). Who will emerge victorious? Read about the contenders here and then go to our Poetry Madness page on April 8 to vote for your top choices.
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Robert Lashley has had poems published in such journals as Feminete, No Regrets, Nailed, Drunk in a Midnight Choir, and Your Hands, Your Mouth. His work was also featured in Many Trails to the Summit, an anthology of Northwest form and lyric poetry. His full-length book, The Homeboy Songs, was published by Small Doggies Press in April 2014. |
Here are Robert Lashley's picks for Poetry Madness 2015:
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Jay Wright
Author of Disorientations: Groundings
"He brought the oral tradition to Jacobean blank verse and stewed his fusions in African, Native American, and Spanish mythology. Complex, ambitious, and as unclassifiable as the country itself, Wright is my pick for American poetry's most unsung hero."
Find out more about him here.
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Gjertrud Schnackenberg
Author of Heavenly Questions
"Schnackenberg helped reclaim form poetry as a space for imagination, invention, and narrative depth. I know it sounds grandiose to say that future generations will discover her like previous generations rediscovered Christina Rossetti, but the sentence can't leave my head."
Read her poem "Supernatural Love."
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Poetry
by Poetic Justice, April 2, 2015 9:20 AM
Every year to celebrate Poetry Month, we select 32 poets to battle it out in a competition for the ages: Poetry Madness. This year, we decided to do things a little differently: instead of choosing the players ourselves, we asked four awesome poets — Saeed Jones, Andrea Gibson, Robert Lashley, and Hajara Quinn — to each nominate eight of their favorite contemporaries to compete for the title of Best Poet of All Time (for the year). Who will emerge victorious? Read about the contenders here and then go to our Poetry Madness page on April 8 to vote for your top choices.
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Andrea Gibson is a queer/genderqueer poet and activist whose work deconstructs the current political machine, highlighting issues such as gender, sexuality, patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, classism, illness, love, and spirituality. Gibson is a cofounder of Stay Here With Me, an online website and community focused on suicide prevention. Gibson has published three books of poetry, released six full-length spoken-word albums, and is the editor of We Will Be Shelter, an anthology of social justice poetry published by Write Bloody Publishing. |
Here are Andrea Gibson's picks for Poetry Madness 2015:
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Hieu Nguyen
Author of This Way to the Sugar
"A brilliant, queer, heart-punched unghosting, This Way to the Sugar is a breath-giving collection of desire, grief, trauma, tradition and wise wise wonder from one of the most honest poets I have ever witnessed on a stage."
See his work here.
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Claudia Rankine
Author of Citizen: An American Lyric
"Stunning, shattering, and crucial, Citizen unpacks race relations in America, fueling a facing inward and outward, questioning constructed definitions of freedom, and interrogating the assumption that what is lived through is always survived."
Learn more about Claudia Rankine here...
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Poetry
by Mary Oliver, December 3, 2014 11:05 AM
At Powell's, we feel the holidays are the perfect time to share our love of books with those close to us. For this special blog series, we reached out to authors featured in our Holiday Gift Guide to learn about their own experiences with book giving during this bountiful time of year.Today's featured giver is Mary Oliver, author of Blue Horses: Poems. ÷ ÷ ÷ What books are you giving to friends and family this holiday season and why? Any volume of the Sufi poet Rumi translated by Coleman Barks. Additionally, The Gift by Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky. Is there a book you find yourself gifting year after year? Perhaps not gifting every year, but I read every year Emerson: The Mind on Fire by Robert Richardson. What books are you planning on reading over the holidays? A good friend just gave me A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan which is next up on my list. Or maybe I will begin with Nadine Gordimer's Life Times: Stories, 1952-2007. What type of book makes the best cold-weather reading? In any weather, Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time is one. I like long books. I recently read Shelley: The Pursuit by Richard Holmes. 900 pages. Do you have a favorite children's book to give budding readers? Whatever else they get, every child should have a Mother Goose
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Poetry
by Chris Faatz, November 26, 2014 10:00 AM
Fall has brought us a true gift in the publication of the massive The Collected Poems of James Laughlin, published by New Directions in an exceptionally beautiful hardcover edition. The book includes an inexhaustible number of poems, in a lovely 1,214(!) page tome. Laughlin is best known as the founder of New Directions Publishing, the U.S. publisher that championed, and has continued to champion, the work of people as diverse as Ezra Pound and Denise Levertov, Hermann Hesse and Henry Miller, William Carlos Williams and Roberto Bolaño, and Muriel Rukeyser and Clarice Lispector. There's a story about the origins of this dedication to such a broad and defining list, one that would go on to help shape Modernism in our time. It goes like this: when Laughlin was a young man, he took a leave from his studies at Harvard and went to study with Pound in Italy. In the end, Pound told Laughlin he couldn't write, so he should go home and use his money (Laughlin's family was quite wealthy) and publish those who could. Namely, as it turned out, Pound and his friends. Apocryphal or not, the rest is history. However, history can be read in many ways, and one of the ways that Laughlin's history has to be read is in his breaking from Pound's judgment and becoming a celebrated poet in his own right. Laughlin's poems are exceptionally lovely and often very easy to read. However, they include depths of emotion, insight, and tenderness that puts them in a realm of their own. Even though Laughlin often peppered his verse with French or Italian words and phrases, he was writing for you and me, and his poems — beautiful, spare, evocative — move our hearts. This poem is called "The Darkened Room": The room which was onceso bright has no illumi- nation now the curtains have been pulled shut and the lamps have no bulbs the man who lives here is blind he has no need of light sees what he needs with his hands he lives alone a neighbor brings him his food his book is memory her face is clear on the page of his blindness his music is the recollected sound of her voice he is lone- ly but he is content. Laughlin explored various line breaks and patterns of rhythm and structure throughout his life, and his subjects varied widely as well. Plagued by bipolar disorder, an avid athlete and correspondent, as well as a devoted womanizer, he never lacked for subjects. He writes in the foreword to his 1998 book, Poems New and Selected: Many of the writings in this book should be called verse rather than poetry. Poetry is an exalted, almost mystical writing in its nature. Poetry works with devices such as metaphor and verbal decoration. This writer seldom aspires to such high levels of expression. His writings are most often the statement of facts as he has discerned them. Many are reports on perceived feelings, his own and those of others; or a placing with imagination; or recollections from reading of matters with which classical writers were concerned. There is a minimum of decoration. He goes on to write: SOME PEOPLE THINKthat poetry should be a- dorned or complicated. I'm not so sure. I think I'll take the simple statement in plain speech compress- ed to brevity. I think that will do all I want to do. I actually think that poetry goes a bit further than what Laughlin claims here. A poet touches on human matters, on the things that are near and dear to us, even when we are not initially clear on what they may be. He or she explores them and cajoles or batters them into a form that opens them up into the deepest part of us, fiercely claiming them as a part of an interior terrain on which we live our lives. We choose our poets by what speaks to us: a poet is a beloved voice that is turned to again and again, in all sorts of moods and states of mind to enrich and ascribe meaning and succor to our lives. This massive book is one that is perfectly positioned to be just such a companion on the journey of life. It will sit on your bedside table, or on a coffee table, or on a shelf, until you need it. And, if my decades-long experience of James Laughlin, the man — the poet — who Pound claimed couldn't write, is true and even barely universal in any sense at all, you will indeed need it and turn to it and be just a little bit more secure in knowing that your heart and mind are not alone in a world gone
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Poetry
by Lizzy, October 17, 2014 3:58 PM
There's a reason Mary Oliver is one of America's bestselling poets: her work resonates not just with poetry lovers but with everyone. Her newest collection explores our cultural obsession with technology, the feeling of disconnectedness it creates, and the ability of the natural world to bring us back into the
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Poetry
by Adam P., July 24, 2014 1:53 PM
Most days, I carry a copy of Lunch Poems with me on my bus ride to work. It has been an icebreaker, a talisman, a security blanket, and much more. This 50th anniversary edition is a great opportunity to revisit one of the most celebrated poetry collections of the 20th century, or to discover it for the first time. It also includes 14 pages of illuminating correspondence between O'Hara and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, as well as a preface by John Ashbery. And it's finally in hardcover, so it'll last even
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Poetry
by Chris Faatz, April 24, 2014 2:00 PM
I have no hesitation in saying that Jerome Rothenberg is one of our greatest living poets and that his latest book, Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader, is among the top books published last year. Eye of Witness, published by the relentlessly pioneering Black Widow Press, is a huge, 580-page tome that encompasses the entirety of Rothenberg's vast and many-hued career. Rothenberg's terrain is the intersection of language and culture. He explores how the two mesh, in different times and places, to produce works redolent of both beauty and horror, pieces that can be prophetic or starkly pedestrian and coolly informative. It is in this meshing, this coming together, that his poetry is rooted. A large part of the book is dedicated to his translations or versions (he calls them "variations") of the work both of great historical figures, such as Pablo Neruda and Tristan Tzara, and the mythic utterances of native and ethnic traditions arising, for example, out of Judaic or shamanistic experience. These pieces are in turn disturbing and challenging. They rise up before you, like a mighty golem of the imagination, and show you things that you'd never dreamt could be. In the end, what one receives in reading anything that Rothenberg has touched is a gift: wild, stormy, insidious, and completely new. One of my favorite poems is Holocaust survivor Paul Celan's "Death Fugue." Rothenberg's version reads, in part: Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktimewe drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night we drink and drink There's a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes who writes when it's nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair Margareta he writes it and walks from the house and the stars all start flashing he whistles his Jews to appear starts us scooping a grave out of sand he commands us play up for the dance And so on. Rothenberg's own work, whether prose or poetry, is equally compelling. I'm intellectually and spiritually stimulated and excited by material such as these lines from the poem "The Sleep of Reason": ...All things that fly at nightfly past him. Wings that brush an ear, an ear concealed, a memory beginning in the house of sleep. His is a world where owls live in palm trees, where a shadow in the sky is like a magpie, white & black are colors only in the mind, the cat you didn't murder springs to life, a whistle whirling in a cup, gone & foregone, a chasm bright with eyes. There is a cave in Spain, a fecal underworld, where bats are swarming among bulls, the blackness ending in a wall his hands rub up against, a blind man in a painted world, amok & monstrous banging on a rock. This stuff gets me at a level and in a place that very few other poets have ever reached — Celan, Trakl, some of the great surrealists, Vasko Popa, Simic's early and prose poems — but it's different, deeper. It shakes me, like a word-induced earthquake of the mind. A coworker showed me a book the other day and said, "This is my desert island book." I don't know if I could choose only one book, but if I could choose two or three, Rothenberg would definitely be included. Many of Rothenberg's individual volumes were published by New Directions and bore titles such as Khurbn (the Yiddish and Hebrew term for the Holocaust), Poland/1931, A Seneca Journal, and That Dada Strain. He's also edited a number of anthologies, including A Big Jewish Book and Poems for the Millennium. Eye of Witness includes manifestos, artistic statements, interviews, and pieces on ethnopoetics, an approach to poetics that he pioneered, beginning in his 1968 anthology, Technicians of the Sacred. All of this material is rich, informative, and transformative, yet it's the poetry that I'll return to again and again. There's little like it in our impoverished world, and I'm proud and eager to celebrate and explore it while I
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Poetry
by Kim Stafford, March 20, 2014 11:31 AM
This year we celebrate the centennial of William Stafford's birth — in Hutchinson, Kansas, 1914. He started in the Midwest but published 59 of his 60 books in Oregon (not to mention the dozen published since his passing in 1993). When people would ask him, "Bill, when is your next book coming out?" he would often answer, "Which one?" How did he do that? Well, the answer is very simple and lavishly inviting: he wrote something every day for 40 years, and his books were made from about one day's writing out of eight that he found worthy. In this little remembrance of him, I want to consider what those daily writing pages contained, and how they worked for him — and how something like his approach might work for any of us who chose to give such daily writing practice a chance. His pages, which are now housed in the William Stafford Archives at Lewis & Clark College, exhibit a varying daily mixture of four prevailing elements: 1. Each page includes the date of the writing. Is that even worth mentioning? Well, it turns out to be strangely helpful — in the act of writing, and of course for keeping track of the writings. "Once I write the date on a piece of paper," William Stafford said, "I know I'm okay. I have made it to my writing." This is the "open sesame" move of the daily writing practice, for by jotting the date down on a page, you have accomplished the most difficult first step: you have shown up, and you have begun. The pen is active before any wisdom is required, and you have stepped humbly into what William Stafford called "the realm where miracles happen." 2. Some prose notes from a recent experience, a few sentences about a recent connection with friends, an account of a dream. This short passage of "throwaway" writing, it turns out, is very important, as it keeps the pen moving and gets the mind sniffing along through "ordinary" experience. You are beginning the act of writing without needing to write anything profound. No struggle, no effort, no heroic reach. Just writing. (As he says in his classic statement, "A Way of Writing," "A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.") 3. An "aphorism" — a freestanding sentence, an idea, a question, a puzzle. Often, William Stafford would next write a sentence that "lifted off" from daily experience to observe a pattern, a truth, an idea, or a private joke ("It still takes all kinds to make a world, but there is an oversupply of some"). This provisional understanding from daily life begins to raise your attention out of the mundane into the gently miraculous realm of poetry. It is your own koan. These aphorisms in William Stafford's daily writing rarely become part of poems (though some of his poems are built from a series of such lines). Most often, they are little wonders left to resonate as private treasure, threshold, key. A bell has been struck, bringing the writer to attention. | Sample of a "Daily Writing Page" by Kim Stafford | 4. Then he would write something like a poem... or notes toward a poem... or just an exploratory set of lines that never became a poem. To write in poetic lines, rather than prose — this can begin a process for distilling from ordinary experience the extraordinary report of literature. For this day, again, you give yourself a chance to discover worthy things. Nothing stupendous may occur... but if you do not bring yourself to this point, nothing stupendous will happen for sure... and you will spend the balance of your day in blind reaction to the imperatives of the outer world — worn down, buffeted, diminished, martyred. ÷ ÷ ÷ Most of us do an assignment shortly before it is due. (That's often true for me.) It's better to begin the project when it's first assigned, not when it's due. And, I realize again and again, it's even better to practice self-directed searching, writing, thinking on the page — when there is no assignment given. This empowers the free range of mind, of "hands-on thinking." By something like this daily practice, you build up a personal sheaf of riches, a democracy of inner voices, an archive you can draw from as needed for work and pleasure over time. My students once said to me, "You give us a deadline for our writing. Who gives you a deadline?" A terrible sentence came to my mind: "Death is my deadline." There are myriad latent discoveries in me. Daily, I must bring them forth. So, for this William Stafford Centennial year, I am trying this four-part practice every day. And I have to tell you, I carry a private satisfaction into each day's struggle. This was my father's way, each day, for the long run of his adult life. What I tell my students about daily practice is this: You may not consistently compose something of lasting value — but it will be a better day! Something like this structure may lift your journal-keeping into a realm of episodic discovery reaching beyond your days. Gradually, inexorably, you will accumulate riches to return to, an archive of discrete beginnings to nurture on the path of your devotions. ÷ ÷ ÷ Books by and about William Stafford published in this centennial year: Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems, by William Stafford, edited by Kim Stafford (Graywolf Press). The Osage Orange Tree: A Story by William Stafford, with illustrations by Dennis Cunningham, edited by Kim Stafford (Trinity University Press). Sound of the Ax: Aphorisms and Poems, by William Stafford, ed. Paul Merchant & Vincent Wixon (University of Pittsburgh Press). We Belong in History: Writing with William Stafford (Ooligan Press). A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford, ed. Rebecca Lachman (Woodley Press). Everyone Out Here Knows: A Big Foot Tale, ed. Tim Barnes, illus. Angelina Marino-Heidel (Arnica Publications). William Stafford: An Annotated Bibliography, ed. James Pirie, et. al. (Oak Knoll Press). ÷ ÷ ÷ Join Kim Stafford and friends at Powell's City of Books on Wednesday, April 23, for an event in honor of William Stafford's 100th birthday. Click here for
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