Poetry Daily

Black Ice on Green Dolphin Street

Reginald Shepherd

We are capable of making lies sound true, but we can also tell the truth. You wander like a blind cat through your night, first idea of sky which weather only contradicts.

from the book The Selected Shepherd / University of Pittsburgh Press

Report: "I don’t really go in with a competitive mindset. It’s more just like, how can I make this a great experience for the people watching?"
(WTOP News)
#pdnews
https://wtop.com/montgomery-county/2024/07/how-a-montgomery-co-student-became-marylands-first-ever-youth-poet-laureate/

Essay: "Just as these movements reshaped the music scene and the visual arts, they asserted their influence on poetry as well... the lists of finalists they arrived at suggest at least an awareness of the need to evolve."
(Washington Post)
#pdnews
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/07/19/national-book-awards-1970s/

Report: "My voice is my voice ... but sometimes, I think it’s the voice of history, or it’s the voice of ancestors in history, all coming through my particular lens at this place, time and space."
(Brown University)
#pdnews
https://www.brown.edu/news/2024-07-11/joyharjo

Announcement: "My favorite part of this process was getting to spend intensive time with these fresh voices and my fellow judges."
(Publishing Perspectives)
#pdnews
https://publishingperspectives.com/2024/07/uk-shortlists-named-for-the-2024-forward-prizes-for-poetry/

Report: "It is for everyone, no matter if you started writing poetry 10 minutes ago or 10 years ago...poetry is not dead, it’s here, it’s alive, it’s everywhere."
(NYT)
#pdnews
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/16/style/nyc-poetry-festival-governors-island.html

Report: "Keats - who asked in his will that his library be shared among his friends - is known to have owned at least one other collected works of Spenser."
(Antique Trade Gazette)
#pdnews
https://www.antiquestradegazette.com/print-edition/2024/july/2652/books-works-on-paper/poetry-work-that-awakened-the-genius-of-john-keats/

Obituary: "The most repeated word in these 250 pages is God, and the fact that Moss’s God is the God of the dis- or the unbeliever suggests that the best religious poetry still comes out of longing rather than conviction."
(NYT)
#pdnews
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/06/books/stanley-moss-dead.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytobits

Interview: "I ... feel like certain people who I love have really taught me how to be an observer and to witness and to be in the world and pay attention, and they have their practices of doing that have imbued the book."
(The Creative Independent)
#pdnews
https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/writer-madeleine-cravens-on-creating-a-school-for-yourself/

Essay: "To answer a question of the poet Paul Celan, 'I' was there to bear wit- ness to the witness. I, Claudia, was not the woman on the roof, but there was a woman on a roof having the experiences that we as readers step into."
(Poets & Writers)
#pdnews
https://www.pw.org/content/dont_let_me_be_lonely_an_american_lyric

Essay: "But in these beginning moments ... readers who don’t know a word of Yiddish are invited to simply be with these sounds, the reaching ‘ay’ in the middle of each word, the sloping, shrugging final ‘eh,’ philadelphiye, amerike."
(Lit Hub)
#pdnews
https://lithub.com/breaking-english-open-on-privileging-sound-over-sense/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Weekly:%20July%208%2C%202024&utm_term=lithub_master_list

What Sparks Poetry

Ecopoetry Now

What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems.

In Ecopoetry Now, invited poets engage in an ecopoetic conversation across borders. In poems and poetics statements, their work describes important local differences, including bioregion and language, as well as a shared concern for the Earth. We hope to highlight poetry’s integral role in creating and sustaining a broadly ecological imagination that is most alive when biologically, culturally, and linguistically diverse.

This week's issue: Matthew Tuckner on Timothy Donnelly’s “This Is the Assemblage”

Catch Up on Recent Poems

July 25, 2024

On Being Told You’re Dying, but Not Quite Believing It

Jeannine Hall Gailey

After all, angels have no investment in the living, in the dirty nature of breeding and birth, in our grubby hands clutching at the soil from beginning to end, as if to stay a little longer.

July 24, 2024

In the Sine-Saloum Delta

Quan Barry

of the Sine-Saloum delta, I lean east, and the four of us lean east. Then someone leans west, and whether we want to or not we all lean west toward the setting sun.

July 23, 2024

Surfacing

Stefanie Kirby

I woke up afraid I'd bled through the skin of my body. The furniture wept at the sight of all that blood.

July 22, 2024

This Is the Assemblage

Timothy Donnelly

Times like these we are immortal together. Say the word and you’re our conqueror.

July 21, 2024

I’ll Come to You

Leeladhar Jagoori (translated from the Hindi by Matt Reeck)

I'll come like new life comes to a beaten-down exhausted soul

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

Phillip B. Williams