A Poetry Daily Prose Feature:
"Beijing
Twenty poets speaking seven languages on a field trip to the outskirts of Beijing. A birdless summer day, no insect whirr. We enter the gate of the Summer Palace as a horde, then dissolve into pairs. Without his Persian translator, Emran Salahi is pensive, mute. I trail him through The Hall of Dispelling Clouds, past its discolored statuary and dusty tapestries symbolizing, say the placards, eternal power. Wandering to the corner of a side room, I peer around a painted screen and find, in the back warren, an old man face-down on a table strewn with syringes.
Behind everything
I see, something I don't
Know how to look for."
—Forrest Gander, The Pamirs Poetry Journal (American Poetry Review)
Poetry Out Loud: 2008 Competition
Editors' Note: The 2008 National Recitation Contest, presented by the National Endowment of the Arts and The Poetry Foundation and their state partners culminated in the April 29 National Finals in Washington DC. We tracked events as they happened across the country on the road to the Nationals...
"We are taking the impulse of the electric popular culture and linking it to the masterpieces of poetry."
• Valerie Strauss reports on the culmination of this year's Poetry Out Loud competition, which saw 200,000 high school students from 1,500 schools participate. (The Washington Post)
• "Tone maps" help Poetry Out Loud competitors approach poems.
•
Valerie Strauss chats with
Dana Gioia, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, about poetry and Poetry Out Loud. (The Washington Post)
• Current U.S. Poet Laureate, Charles Simic, and former Laureate, Billy Collins offer tips for writing and reciting poetry. (The Washington Post)
•
What are poetry readers like? A survey commissioned by The Poetry Foundation has some answers. (The Washington Post)
The 2008 National Champion: Shawntay A. Henry!
• The 10th grader from the U. S. Virgin Islands wins top honors from among 12 finalists and 52 state champions. (Press release from the National Endowment for the Arts)
• An airport welcome awaits as the new champ heads home.(Caribbean Net News)
• Listen to Shawntay Henry's final-round reading of "Frederick Douglass," by Robert E. Hayden. (Audio from NPR)
Oregon's Sophia Soberon is national first-runner-up!
The Brookings-Harbor High School senior earns scholarship and the applause of a packed house in Washington, D.C. (Curry Coastal Pilot)
MORE....
American Life in Poetry:
Ted Kooser introduces a poem by
Ann Struthers. (American Life in Poetry)
The "field poet:"
William Georgiades talks with Nick Flynn. (Los Angeles Times)
Other Ranks :
Isaac Rosenberg:
The Making of a Great War Poet. A New Life, by Jean Moorcroft Wilson, reviewed by Peter Parker. (The Times Literary Supplement)
Wales Book of the Year Awards:
Poet Dannie Abse honored with the award given to a Welsh author writing in English for his memoir The Presence.
(Guardian Unlimited)
Brake for moose:
A visit to The Frost Place. (New Hampshire Magazine)
The imagination of death:
Adam Kirsch
on Stanley Plumly's Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography. (The New Yorker)
"Poetry and criticism don’t interfere with each other, not exactly..."
A very quick chat with William Logan. (The New York Times)
"You have to be an agent of social change."
At Cloud Place, a Boston studio and performance space, teen "spoken-word curators" focus their work on social realities. (The Boston Globe)
Poet's Choice:
Mary Karr introduces poems by Miroslav Holub. (The Washington Post)
"Blissfully trivial" :
William Logan reviews Selected Poems, by Frank O’Hara, edited by Mark Ford. (The New York Times)
Two years, a lifetime:
Edna Longley surveys the work of WWI poet Edward Thomas. (Guardian Unlimited)
Elizabeth Bartlett, 84
An obituary. (Telegraph)
Sustaining not one but two livings on poetry:
A visit to Seattle's Open Books: A Poetry Emporium, one of two poetry-only bookstores in the U.S. (Crosscut Seattle)
"So much for the Tang dynasty, but what about poetry in China in 2008?"
Shirley Dent looks for signs.
(Guardian Unlimited)
G. E. Murray, 62:
An obituary. (Chicago Tribune)
Recently Arrived Titles
These just in... Highlighted titles may be purchased from Poetry Daily / Amazon.com. A complete
list of all books and journals recently received at Poetry Daily is also available.
- City of Corners, John Godfrey (Wave Books)
- The Wave-Maker, Elizabeth Spires (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.)
- Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 (new in paperback), Ellen Bryant Voigt (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.)
- For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut, Takashi Hiraide, tr. Sawako Nakayasu (New Directions)
- Warhol-O-Rama, Peter Oresick (Carnegie Mellon University Press)
- Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs, Adonis, tr. Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard (BOA Editions)
- A Map of the Night, David Wagoner (University of Illinois Press)
- Matching Skin (featuring the EP, John Anonymous), Shirlette Ammons (Carolina Wren Press)
- Bray, Paul Gibbons (Elixir Press)
- Reliquaries, Angela Patten (Salmon Publishing)
- Promise Supermarket, Elizabeth Quinlan (Ibbetson Street Press)
- Please Do Not Feed the Ghost, Peter Ramos (BlazeVOX Books)
- Immortal Sofa, Maura Stanton (University of Illinois Press)
Recent Anthologies, etc.
- Why Poetry Matters, Jay Parini (Yale University Press)
- Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry, ed. Dennis O'Driscoll (Copper Canyon Press)
- All That Mighty Heart: London Poems, ed. Lisa Russ Spaar (University of Virginia Press)
- River of Words: Young Poets and Artists on the Nature of Things, ed. Pamela Michael (Milkweed Editions)
- The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology, ed. Edward Hirsch and Eavan Boland (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.)
- The Art of the Poetic Line, James Longenbach (Graywolf Press)
- The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye, Donald Revell (Graywolf Press)
- The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry, Adam Kirsch (Norton)
- Poetry Daily Essentials 2007, Diane Boller, Don Selby, ed.s (Sourcebooks)
Past Features:
Original
articles, interviews, selections from special collections and journal issues, and more are available in the Archives.
