Poetry Daily

After

David Baker

We came to the island. We stayed in the house. Rain and sun. Bougainvillea. Pink cedar. How many shadows slipped along walls or whetted the leaves of century plants?

from the book Swift: New and Selected Poems / W. W. Norton & Company

Announcement: "British poets have won all of this year’s Forward prizes, with Caroline Bird’s...THE AIR YEAR taking best collection, Will Harris’s RENDANG winning best debut, and Malika Booker winning for best single poem." (The Guardian)
#pdnews
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/25/forward-poetry-prize-goes-to-audacious-erotically-charged-the-air-year

Review: "[Kooser's] 15th book of poetry, 'Red Stilts,' demonstrates that poets, like fine wines, continue to improve with age." (Lincoln Journal Star)
#pdnews

https://journalstar.com/entertainment/books/review-kooser-offers-poetic-peace/article_89580df6-ee08-5256-8147-a8e046a3367a.html

Interview: "I am not interested in writing about myself in a direct way and purposefully try to distance my poems from the personal—the use of 'us' and 'we' does that and can be alternately inclusive or implicating." (The Adroit Journal)
#pdnews

https://theadroitjournal.org/2020/10/12/in-this-broken-unbroken-place-a-conversation-with-tracy-zeman/

Essay: "Because I am no art expert, although I have studied the classics, I want to try to think about Twombly through the poems of Catullus. These two spirits seem to me somehow in tune." —Anne Carson (Lit Hub)
#pdnews
https://lithub.com/anne-carson-the-sheer-velocity-and-ephemerality-of-cy-twombly/

Obituary: "Lee Sharkey, a poet and peace activist with an empathetic soul, who mentored writers in Maine and around the world, died Sunday from pancreatic cancer. She was 75." (Portland Press Herald)
#pdnews

https://www.pressherald.com/2020/10/21/maine-poet-activist-and-mentor-lee-sharkey-dies-at-age-75/

What Sparks Poetry

Translation

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

In our current series, What Translation Sparks, we’ve asked a group of poet-translators to share a seminal experience in translation. How does the work of translating poetry feel essential to the writing of one’s own poetry? Our contributors reflect on inspiring moments as intricate as a grammatical quirk and as wide-ranging the history or politics of another place.

This week's issue: Dan Beachy-Quick on “Alcman 89”

Catch Up on Recent Poems

October 26, 2020

Alcman 89

Alcman (translated from the Greek by Dan Beachy-Quick)

They are sleeping, mountain-heads, headlands, and the gullies, too— the fallen leaves and the tribe of slow-footed creatures the dark earth grows—

October 25, 2020

My Mother as Tom Cruise

Luisa Muradyan

Or as every other late 80s action hero my mother successfully jumping off of a skyscraper onto another skyscraper my mother hunting the Predator with a cigar lodged in her mouth my mother saying sonofabitch in the coolest way imaginable

October 24, 2020

Ode to Hushpuppy

Joy Priest

how long we done lived— us-folk, for whom heaven is live broadcast. our down-at-the-heel place. filthy & barefoot.

October 23, 2020

After the Funeral, at Your Favorite Gallery

Anna Newman

The girl is pacing back and forth in my mind inside her payphone booth. Her pennies are like fancy moths.

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