Poetry Daily

Two Poems

Lucille Clifton

a woman precedes me up the long rope, her dangling braids the color of rain. maybe i should have had braids. maybe i should have kept the body i started,

from the book The Book of Light / Copper Canyon

Interview: "It’s an interpretive and imaginative failure to assume that someone’s poem is motivated by a misguided effort to pursue their therapy on the page."
(Electric Lit)
#PDNews
https://electricliterature.com/charif-shanahan-book-poetry-collection-poems-interview-trace-evidence/

Report: "Guam native Craig Santos Perez is the first Pacific Islander to win the prestigious National Book Award for Poetry — and the first Pacific Islander to win in any category."
(Hawaii Public Radio)
#pdnews
https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/the-conversation/2023-11-30/local-poet-from-guam-is-the-first-pacific-islander-to-win-a-national-book-award

Essay: "This spring, I fell in love with John Gower, who died in 1408."
(LitHub)
#pdnews
https://lithub.com/archival-romance-on-finding-love-in-the-papers-of-an-obscure-medieval-poet/

Report: "Providing a close examination of Herrera in all his poetic variety, 'Our book stands out as the first critical collection of this outstanding and internationally known writer,' Lomelí said."
(The Current)
#pdnews
https://news.ucsb.edu/2023/021277/compendium-chicano-poet-laureate-juan-felipe-herrera-strikes-gold

Conversation: Jesse Nathan holds a brief interview with Gary Snyder for McSweeney's.
(McSweeney's)
#pdnews
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/gary-snyder

Interview: "[James Tate] lived for poetry so it seems natural poetry would find its way into a lot of his poems just as love and life and death, beauty and truth and those blue antelope, babies and donkeys and dogs do."
(LitHub)
#pdnews
https://lithub.com/dara-barrois-dixon-on-the-lived-poetry-of-the-late-james-tate/

Essay: “Fellows are in workshops all morning, break for lunch and then go back into workshops all afternoon.”
(The New York Times)
#pdnews
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/27/arts/cave-canem-black-poets-collective.html

Essay: "Boyer’s resignation was not merely a protest against the continuous killing in Gaza."
(Salon)
#pdnews
https://www.salon.com/2023/11/26/poetry-blindness-and-the-gaza/

Interview: "I take hope seriously. I write with and from that hope."—Maya C. Popa
(Poetry Society of America)
#pdnews
https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essays/stopping-by/stopping-by-with-maya-popa

Report: "A new exhibit at Vassar College highlights the personal papers of the renowned 20th Century poet Elizabeth Bishop – with a fun twist."
(WAMC)
#pdnews
https://www.wamc.org/news/2023-11-20/vassar-exhibit-examines-life-of-poet-alumna-elizabeth-bishop-through-her-postcards

What Sparks Poetry

Building Community

What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems.

In our occasional series, Building Community, we spotlight connections between our work on the page and our work in the community. In each issue, we pair a poem from our featured poet with an interview that explores what poetry brings to our neighborhoods, cities, and the wider world — and what community makes possible for poetry itself.

This week's issue: Kerry Folan on What Keeps Us: A Community Poetry Reading in Response to Violence

Kerry Folan on What Keeps Us:</br> A Community Poetry Reading in Response to Violence

Catch Up on Recent Poems

December 6, 2023

Hers (excerpt)

Maria Laina (translated from the Greek by Karen Van Dyck)

While whole phrases pass by and she accepts them and she constantly faces great danger still the body she remembered but there was something she had never seen.

December 5, 2023

As Though It Were a Small Child

Cynthia Dewi Oka

I wake up these days, a new mother again, watching, waiting, to understand what to offer, how to serve, by which I mean, organize my body around what cannot be spoken.

December 4, 2023

What Keeps

C.D. Wright

We love in silence We keep our poetry locked in a glass cabinet Some nights We stay up passing it back and forth between us drinking deep

December 3, 2023

The Wound

Joe Hall

Accuracy without ambition is all I can ask for from a poem.

December 2, 2023

Fragments II

Nora Hikari

Did you know tears are sieved blood? Spit, too. We are just one leaky vessel trying to keep everything in. Keep trying.

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B&W Photo of Dana Levin by B.A. Van Sise — Dana Levin

Phillip B. Williams