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"All the things / I hoped would go away this morning. / The stuff I live with every day. What / I've trampled on in order to stay alive." Raymond Carver's poem is read by Alessio Morglia and illustrated and animated by Alessandro Ferraro in this short video.
"You have speakers engaged with everything from the purple gonads of moon jellyfish to ancient Egyptian burial rights," says poet and molecular biologist Katherine Larson about her collection Radial Symmetry, winner of the 2010 Yale Series of Younger Poets, in this recent profile on the PBS NewsHour.
Write a lyric poem titled "Ode to the Girl in the Red Shoes." Read the Poetry Foundation's definition of the ode, for more information.
P&W–supported poet and presenter of literary events Michael Cirelli, executive director of Urban Word NYC and author of Lobster with Ol' Dirty Bastard, Vacations on the Black Star Line, and Everyone Loves The Situation, blogs about Willie Perdomo's teaching style.
Last week I wrote about my journey from Poets & Writers Magazine subscriber to P&W-supported presenter of literary events. I reflected on the “power of Perdomo’s pedagogy,” which compels forty teens to cram into a small office space on a beautiful spring day to write poems. Here's why they write after a long school day...
Working with various teachers, I've come to understand what makes good teachers great. The best teachers “keep it real” with their students and, even more importantly, with themselves. Willie Perdomo is a master of this. He knows what he brings to the table, and by being an active listener, is able to identify the interests, needs, joys, and pains of his students. He meets his students where they are, then helps facilitate their growth. But how do we meet a student where they are, if we don’t acknowledge where we are? Even the “downest” teacher needs to acknowledge the inherent power dynamic of student/teacher.
I’ve seen countless teachers give up because they take things personally or feel alienated by their students. So, really, the best educators find the intersection between themselves and their students, accounting for all of the privileges, challenges, and ignorance that s/he may have. To do this takes constant research, an awareness of your students, and an awareness of your power/privilege. Breaking down these hierarchies, and creating educational experiences that address these experiences, not only ignites a dedication to learning in students, but also provides the platform for teachers to become more human. Willie Perdomo’s P&W-supported workshops at Urban Word NYC embody it all.
Photo: Michael Cirelli. Credit: Syreeta McFadden.
Support for Readings/Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, the A.K. Starr Charitable Trust, and Friends of Poets & Writers.
The winners of this year's National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced last night in New York City. Among the winners was Edith Pearlman, whose fourth collection of stories, Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories (Lookout Books), had also been nominated for the National Book Award last year, and went on to win the PEN/Malamud Award.
In poetry, Laura Kasischke won for her collection Space, In Chains (Copper Canyon Press), which recently received the first Rilke Prize from the University of North Texas. Mira Bartók won in autobiography for her memoir, The Memory Palace (Free Press).
Awards were also given in criticism, to Geoff Dyer for Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews (Graywolf Press); in biography, to John Lewis Gaddis for George F. Kennan: An American Life (Penguin Press); and in general nonfiction, to Maya Jasanoff for Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Knopf).
Awards were also given to reviewer Kathryn Schulz, who received the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and Roberts B. Silvers of the New York Review of Books, who won this year's Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.
In the video below, Pearlman reads from her winning collection.
Sarah Browning, director of Split This Rock and DC Poets Against the War, blogs about the P&W–supported Split This Rock Festival in Washington, D.C.
What is a poet to do? The world seems to be exploding around us: The earth is warming at an alarming rate; the right wing attacking the basic human rights of women, LGBT people, and people of color; the rich trying to buy elections; and so many Americans and others around the world suffering from poverty, violence, and repression. How do we keep on writing our poems, telling our stories, perfecting our craft, as this madness rages around us? Split This Rock will offer answers to such questions for the more than 500 poets of all ages who will converge in Washington, D.C., this month to join with others in wrestling these questions to the ground and speak out for another world.
Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 22 to 25, will be the third Festival of Poems of Provocation & Witness that we've presented with Poets & Writers' support. The funds from Poets & Writers are helping us bring five of the most visionary voices of our time to the D.C. stage: Sherwin Bitsui, Douglas Kearney, Rachel McKibbens, Jose Padua, and Minnie Bruce Pratt. Other stellar citizen-poets include Homero Aridjis, Kathy Engel, Carlos Andrés Gómez, Khaled Mattawa, Marilyn Nelson, Naomi Shihab Nye, Kim Roberts, Sonia Sanchez, Venus Thrash, and Alice Walker. And, as this will be the tenth anniversary of June Jordan's death, the festival will celebrate and honor the life and legacy of this poet-essayist-activist and teacher.
Panels presented during the festival will address the ways in which “poets (like June Jordan) have been at the forefront of many liberation struggles in the Americas and how poetry has sustained others in their pursuit of social justice.”
White poets who write about race will invite attendees to think about the legacy of slavery and genocide in our country and the ways this history plays out today. Educators will consider strategies for teaching the great diversity of American poetry. And, poets who are organizers for environmental justice will ask, “Who will speak for the river?”
At Split This Rock, we encourage participants to have the difficult discussions they might not have elsewhere and to step outside their self-identified group(s) to attend a reading, workshop, or discussion that might be new to them. We must talk to one another and read one another's work—across our differences—if we are to figure our way out of the many messes we find ourselves in as a nation.
Friday, March 23, at 4:30 PM, we’ll head to the Supreme Court to use our art form—poetry—to demand that the very rich stop hijacking our national conversation. Money is not speech, the poets will declare in a group poem, created spontaneously on the spot. Poetry is speech! Please join us!
Photo: Sarah Browning. Credit: Jill Brazel.
Support for Readings/Workshops events in Washington, D.C., is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.
Actor Dave Foley (The Kids in the Hall, NewsRadio) reads “Suck It,” a poem from Suzanne Weber’s To What Miserable Wretches Have I Been Born: Revenge Poems for Babies and Toddlers, forthcoming from Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, in April.
During the next week collect images, photographs, small objects, lines of poetry that you've written, passages from other writers' work, snippets of conversations you overhear. Throughout the week put these things in a shoe box or something similar. At the end of the week, sit down and lay out each thing around you. Use the things you've collected as the ingredients for a poem.
Her Majesty's Secret Players present "Pulp Shakespeare," an Elizabethan take on Quentin Tarantino's 1994 movie, now playing at Theatre Asylum on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles.
