Archive for 'Poetry'
“BUNGA-BUNGA” by Quincy Lehr
A brand new poem from one of our favorite young New York poets.
Full Story“Days of 1987″ by Christopher Bakken
Christopher Bakken’s second book of poetry, Goat Funeral (Sheep Meadow, 2006) was awarded the Helen C. Smith Memorial Prize by the Texas Institute of Letters for the best book of poetry published in 2006. His first book, After Greece, won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry in 2001. Bakken is also co-translator of The Lions’ Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios (2006). He received an M.F.A. from the Writing Seminars of Columbia University and a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing at University of Houston.
Full StoryTwo by Quincy Lehr
Quincy R. Lehr was raised in Norman, Oklahoma and presently lives in Brooklyn, having returned to the U.S. after two years in Ireland. His work has appeared in print and online venues in the U.S., UK, Ireland, and Australia, including Cadenza, The Chimaera, Crannog, Iambs & Trochees, The Dark Horse, The Raintown Review, and The Shit Creek Review. His first book of poetry, Across the Grid of Streets, was published by Seven Towers (Dublin) in April 2008. He is the associate editor of The Raintown Review, and, with R. Nemo Hill, is the co-founder of Modern Metrics Press.
Full Story“After the Rain” by Anthony Hecht
“It was Hecht’s gift to see into the darker recesses of our complex lives and conjure to his command the exact words to describe what he found there. Hecht remained skeptical about whether pain and contemplation can ultimately redeem us, yet his ravishing poems extend hope to his readers that they can.” – David Yezzi
Full Story“Azaleas” by Christopher Bakken
Christopher Bakken’s second book of poetry, Goat Funeral (Sheep Meadow, 2006) was awarded the Helen C. Smith Memorial Prize by the Texas Institute of Letters for the best book of poetry published in 2006. His first book, After Greece, won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry in 2001. Bakken is also co-translator of The Lions’ Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios (2006). He received an M.F.A. from the Writing Seminars of Columbia University and a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing at University of Houston.
Full Story“Mad world! Mad kings!”: Philip the Bastard’s “Mad world” speech from King John
Thanks to David for suggesting this.
Full Story“Medusa” by Patricia Smith
Patricia is also the author of Teahouse of the Almighty (Coffee House Press), a National Poetry Series winner, the Best Poetry Book of 2006 on About.com, and a 2007 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and Paterson Poetry Prize winner; Close to Death (Zoland Books), Big Towns, Big Talk (Zoland) and Life According to Motown (Tia Chucha). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, poemmemoirstory, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, the Chautauqua Literary Journal, TriQuarterly, and other journals, and in many groundbreaking anthologies–most recently Gathering Ground, The Spoken Word Revolution, The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry and Short Fuse: The Global Anthology of New Fusion Poetry. Her poem “The Way Pilots Walk” received a Pushcart Prize, and is featured in Pushcart Prize XXXII: Best of the Small Presses. – From the poet’s website
Full Story“If God is Good” by Quincy Lehr
Quincy R. Lehr was raised in Norman, Oklahoma and presently lives in Brooklyn, having returned to the U.S. after two years in Ireland. His work has appeared in print and online venues in the U.S., UK, Ireland, and Australia, including Cadenza, The Chimaera, Crannog, Iambs & Trochees, The Dark Horse, The Raintown Review, and The Shit Creek Review. His first book of poetry, Across the Grid of Streets, was published by Seven Towers (Dublin) in April 2008. He is the associate editor of The Raintown Review, and, with R. Nemo Hill, is the co-founder of Modern Metrics Press.
Full Story“After a Death” by Tomas Tranströmer
Congratulations to the new Nobel Laureate for literature, the first poet since 1996.
Full Story“The More Loving One” by W. H. Auden
“A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.” – W.H. Auden
Full Story“Drop Out” by Ernest Hilbert in Horizon Review
“Horizon Review takes its name and its inspiration from Horizon, the magazine Cyril Connolly ran from the outbreak of the War in 1939 until it closed in 1949. Horizon was very much a war effort: a sort of ark for culture, a reliquary to remind people what it was we were fighting for. I say we advisedly, because it was our culture our parents or grandparents were fighting for.”
Full Story“Drunk” by Christopher Bakken
Christopher Bakken’s second book of poetry, Goat Funeral (Sheep Meadow, 2006) was awarded the Helen C. Smith Memorial Prize by the Texas Institute of Letters for the best book of poetry published in 2006. His first book, After Greece, won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry in 2001. Bakken is also co-translator of The Lions’ Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios (2006). He received an M.F.A. from the Writing Seminars of Columbia University and a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing at University of Houston.
Full Story“Another Lullaby for Insomniacs” by A.E. Stallings
“A. E. Stallings is a poet and translator mining the classical world and traditional poetic techniques to craft works that evoke startling insights about contemporary life. In both her original poetry and translations, Stallings exhibits a mastery of highly structured forms (such as sonnets, couplets, quatrains, and sapphics) and consummate skill in creating new combinations of meter, rhyme, and syntax into distinctive, emotionally compelling verse. Trained in classical Latin and Greek and currently living in Athens, she brings a wide knowledge of Greco-Roman literature, art, and mythology to bear on her imaginative explorations of contemporary circumstances and concerns. In Hapax (2006), Stallings imbues figures and events from classical drama and mythology with a modern sensibility. “First Love,” written as a multiple-choice quiz, intertwines the Persephone myth with a chilling account of infatuation, and “XII Klassikal Lymnaeryx” emphasizes the satiric edge to Greek myth through a series of limericks in witty, unexpected diction. For her ambitious translation of De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things, 2007), Stallings rendered Lucretius’s epic-length treatise on the nature of reality into rhyming fourteeners. The unusual meter and colloquial language she employs capture every cadence of Lucretius’s enthusiasm for his subject while also making the complexities of his argument easily understandable. Through her technical dexterity and graceful fusion of content and form, Stallings is revealing the timelessness of poetic expression and antiquity’s relevance for today.” – MacArthur Foundation citation
Full Story“Out of Shot” by Quincy Lehr
Quincy R. Lehr was raised in Norman, Oklahoma and presently lives in Brooklyn, having returned to the U.S. after two years in Ireland. His work has appeared in print and online venues in the U.S., UK, Ireland, and Australia, including Cadenza, The Chimaera, Crannog, Iambs & Trochees, The Dark Horse, The Raintown Review, and The Shit Creek Review. His first book of poetry, Across the Grid of Streets, was published by Seven Towers (Dublin) in April 2008. He is the associate editor of The Raintown Review, and, with R. Nemo Hill, is the co-founder of Modern Metrics Press.
Full Story“Bluebells” by Stephen Burt
Stephen Burt grew up in and around Washington, DC, taught at Macalester College in Minnesota from 2000-07, and is now Professor of English at Harvard. His most recent book is The Art of the Sonnet (written with David Mikics). His other books include Randall Jarrell and His Age, The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (2009), and Parallel Play. He is also the editor, with Hannah Brooks-Motl, of Randall Jarrell on W H Auden.
Full Story“House and Home” by Ernest Hilbert in Horizon Review
“Horizon Review takes its name and its inspiration from Horizon, the magazine Cyril Connolly ran from the outbreak of the War in 1939 until it closed in 1949. Horizon was very much a war effort: a sort of ark for culture, a reliquary to remind people what it was we were fighting for. I say we advisedly, because it was our culture our parents or grandparents were fighting for.”
Full Story“Balloon Man” by James Matthew Wilson
James Matthew Wilson teaches in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University and is an editor of Front Porch Republic (frontporchrepublic.com). He has published many essays, poems, and reviews, as well as a chapbook of poems, Four Verse Letters.
Full Story“A Change of Season” by Quincy Lehr
Quincy R. Lehr was raised in Norman, Oklahoma and presently lives in Brooklyn, having returned to the U.S. after two years in Ireland. His work has appeared in print and online venues in the U.S., UK, Ireland, and Australia, including Cadenza, The Chimaera, Crannog, Iambs & Trochees, The Dark Horse, The Raintown Review, and The Shit Creek Review. His first book of poetry, Across the Grid of Streets, was published by Seven Towers (Dublin) in April 2008. He is the associate editor of The Raintown Review, and, with R. Nemo Hill, is the co-founder of Modern Metrics Press.
Full Story“Without a Net”: Ernest Hilbert on Optic, Graphic, Acoustic, and Other Formations in Free Verse in the Contemporary Poetry Review
Many strategies have emerged to cope with the open field of free verse, several of them before Frost was even born. When moving away from oppositional definitions—free verse is non-metrical, non-strophic—one is confronted with such a vast array of possibilities and examples that it is necessary to summarize and, at times, simplify them for the sake of argument. The possibilities are staggering, but one must begin somehow.
Full Story“Couple” by Justin Quinn
Justin Quinn was born in Dublin in 1968 and educated at Trinity College. Since 1995 he has taught American literature at the Charles University, Prague. He has published three books of criticism, most recently the Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry (2008). He also translates Czech poetry and From the Interior: Selected Poems 1995-2005 by Petr Borkovec appeared from Seren in 2008. Previous collections of poetry are The ‘O’o’a’a’ Bird (1995) and Privacy (1999). UCD Press published his Gathered Beneath The Storm: Wallace Stevens, Nature and Community in 2002. He has published three collections with The Gallery Press, Fueslage (2002), Waves and Trees (2006) and Close Quarters (2011). He is married to Tereza Limanová and they have two sons, Finbar and Manus.
Full Story“Nibble Song” by J.H. Prynne
“The poetry of J. H. Prynne is both obscure and difficult; qualities tolerated in canonical and foreign writers (Blake, Mallarmé, Celan, late Beckett), but treated with enormous resentment and suspicion in contemporary English poets. Prynne’s detractors see little else in the work, perhaps being so distracted by the first few words of his collected Poems (“the whole thing it is, the difficult / matter”) that they seem not to have read any further. Craig Raine, for example, recently wrote dismissively of “a postmodern poetic school led by J. H. Prynne whose purpose is to be difficult – emulatively difficult. (Not difficult to be difficult, actually)”. Nonetheless, it is notable that none of Prynne’s critics feels able to wholly ignore him, or the so-called Cambridge School with which he has come to be associated.” – Robert Potts
Full Story“Palm” by Laura Kasischke
Laura Kasischke’s work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Poetry, Southern Review, Iowa Review, New Republic, and elsewhere. She lives in Chelsea, Michigan, with her husband and son, and is an associate professor at the University of Michigan in the Department of English and the Residential College.
Full Story“Darkness” by George Gordon, Lord Byron
“Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” – Lady Caroline Lamb
Full Story“Laryngitis Lights” by Paul Siegell
“I haven’t had this much fun reading a book of poems in a long time. Paul Siegell’s fast-paced rave-on-the-page jambandbootleg follows a loose narrative in which the speaker and his friends travel the country attending concerts by their beloved jam band Phish. The poems mostly explore the ecstatic experiences of phandom and concert-going. For me, the most exciting moments—and there are scores of such moments—center on the revelry of the “phans” in parking lots before the concerts and the descriptions of the emotional rush of the music in the midst of them. The poems surge with the love of fun, and it’s about time poetry engaged fun.” – Lynn Levin
Full Story“I Saw the Spiders Marching through the Air”: Top Five Spider Poems
They creep, they crawl, they net pests, they send a shiver down the spine if they get too big, but we find them endlessly fascinating. Let’s have a look at some spider poems. Please post your own favorites in the comments below.
Full Story
“Curriculum Vitae” by Samuel Menashe
“The public career of Samuel Menashe demonstrates how a serious poet of singular talent, power, and originality can be utterly ignored in our literary culture. There are, of course, several reasons for Menashe’s continuing obscurity. He has lived a bohemian life in an age of academic institutionalism. He has not worked as a teacher, editor, or critic—the common paths to literary visibility. But the major cause of his obscurity, I suspect, is strictly literary. Menashe has devoted his entire poetic career to perfecting the short poem—not the conventional short poem of 20-40 lines beloved of magazine editors, but the very short poem. As anyone surveying his Collected Poems (1986) will discover, few of his poems are longer than ten lines.” – Dana Gioia
Full Story“Sepsis” by C. Dale Young
C. Dale Young practices medicine full-time, serves as Poetry Editor of the New England Review, and teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He is the author of The Day Underneath the Day (TriQuarterlyBooks, 2001), The Second Person (Four Way Books, 2007), and Torn (Four Way Books, 2011).
Full Story“Sci-Fi” by Tracy K. Smith
“We read poems because they change us, and our reasons for writing them hover around that same fact. A poem, a good poem, speaks to and from a place that belongs to us—that elusive pitch of being some might call the soul, the psyche, the sub- or unconscious. We believe it’s there because we feel it working, but we’re powerless to tell it when, or how, or even why to work. Surely, as poets, most of us have discovered ways of “letting go” enough to embolden whatever it is that sends words and questions and inklings out from that space. And the best readers know that that place is where poems go when they hit us hard, teach us, reach home.” – Tracy K. Smith
Full Story
