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"Your life is your life. / know it while you have it. / you are marvelous / the gods wait to delight / in you." In this short film, Charles Bukowski's poem "The Laughing Heart," from his poetry and story collection Betting on the Muse (Ecco, 2002), is read by Tom Waits and animated by Bradley Bell.
Think back over the past year. What does the memory of each month feel like? What is its emotional tone, vibration, form? Write a poem in twelve parts that tries to capture each month’s abstract feeling in a single line or stanza. Like Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” you can repeat the same object or setting throughout the poem, or offer a different context for each section. Challenge yourself to avoid the clichéd images that are often paired with months (i.e. the beach and July, leaves and October), and instead, try to translate the ineffable into the visual. When finished, you’ll have a calendar of metaphor.
Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich has said, “I love how humans talk...I love the lone human voice. It is my greatest love and passion.” Write a series of short poems each written in the voice of a distinct first-person speaker using casual spoken language. You might try loosely connecting the poems by having the voices in dialogue with one another, or by using recurring themes or repeated phrases. Emphasize the uniqueness of each voice with different perspectives, speech tics, slang, and tone.
"Sometimes you see the leaves as birds who have traveled all night and come to rest at dawn." Alicia Jo Rabins's poem "How to Travel," from The Divinity School (American Poetry Review, 2015), is interpreted in this short film with animation by Zak Margolis and read by Alicia McDaid. Rabins is featured in "Fractures Through Time," the eleventh annual Debut Poets roundup in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Corina Copp reads an early version of her poems from The Green Ray (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015) for the sixth Antibody Series in 2014. Copp is featured in "Fractures Through Time" in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“The asking was askance. / And the tale all told. / So then, in tandem, / Anathema and anthem.” Hannah Sanghee Park reads “And a Lie” from her poetry collection The Same-Different (Louisiana State University Press, 2015) in this video from the Academy of American Poets’ 2014 Poets Forum. Park is one of the debut poets featured in “Fractures Through Time” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“There is a kind of formlessness to poetry, as much as everyone is obsessed with form.” Ken Chen, the executive director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, talks about his personal relationship to poetry in a discussion at the Academy of American Poets’ 2013 Poets Forum. Chen is featured in “AAWW Continues the Conversation” by Arvin Temkar in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
"She creates an intimate space in which these bodies can connect," says Claudia Rankine, describing the poems in Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems (Knopf, 2015) by Robin Coste Lewis. Lewis won the 2015 National Book Award in poetry for her debut collection and is one of the debut poets featured in "Fractures Through Time" in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Morgan Parker reads her poem "Black Woman With Chicken" for Pen Pal Poets. Her debut collection, Other People's Comfort Keeps Me up at Night (Switchback Books, 2015), was selected for the 2013 Gatewood Prize, and her second collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, is forthcoming from Tin House Books in February 2017. Parker is one of the debut poets featured in "Fractures Through Time" in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
"The future isn't machines constantly slamming..." Corinna Copp reads her poem "Poor Wave" at the Poetry Project along with Miguel Gutierrez. Copp, author of The Green Ray (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), is one of the debut poets featured in "Fractures Through Time" in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
