Poets, what is an artist’s responsibility to the political moment? Poet Danez Smith raises that issue here. http://donshare.blogspot.com/2014/11/open-letter-to-white-poets-from-danez.html
Read his powerful, succinct poem “juxtaposing the black boy & bullet” here: http://blogthisrock.blogspot.com/2014/01/poem-of-week-danez-smith.html
#DanezSmith #Ferguson #poetry
Danez Smith, from Split This Rock
Dec. 13 is our next Poetdelphia event with Eckes, Groff and Parker! See the event listing at this link: https://www.facebook.com/events/561453627275595/?ref=22
In the meantime, you can also read a review of David Groff’s CLAY at the Huffington Post. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tomas-mournian/clay-poems-by-david-groff_b_4331284.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices
We’re happy to announce Poetdelphia’s December 13th Reading and Salon line-up:
DAVID GROFF, RYAN ECKES & SUZANNE PARKER!
Time and Place:
Friday, December 13, 2013
6:30 – 8:00 pm
at Cups & Chairs Tea Cafe
701-03 S. 5th Street
(just below 5th and South)
DAVID GROFF is a poet, writer, independent book editor, literary scout, and teacher. His book of poems, Clay (Trio House Press, 2013) was chosen by Michael Waters as winner of the Louise Bogan Award. His previous collection, Theory of Devolution (University of Illinois Press, 2002) was selected by Mark Doty for the National Poetry Series and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary and Publishing Triangle awards. He has co-edited two anthologies, Who’s Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners, and Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS. He completed the book The Crisis of Desire: AIDS and the Fate of Gay Brotherhood for its author, the late Robin. David has received residencies from the Anderson Center, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Ragdale, the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Saltonstall Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. A graduate of Princeton and the Iowa Writers Workshop, he teaches in the M.F.A. creative writing program of the City College of New York.
RYAN ECKES lives in South Philadelphia. He’s the author of Old News (Furniture Press, 2011), Valu-Plus (forthcoming, Furniture Press, 2014), and other books. Recent work has appeared in The Rumpus,OnandOnScreen, GlitterPony, COYDUP, and Jupiter 88. He works as an adjunct at Temple University and Community College of Philadelphia. (Here’s Eckes’ recent poem in The Rumpus: http://therumpus.net/2012/03/into-a-film-a-rumpus-original-poem-by-ryan-eckes/)
SUZANNE PARKER is a winner of the Kinereth Gensler Book Award; her collection of poetry, Viral, was published by Alice James Books in Sept. 2013. Her poetry has appeared in Drunken Boat, Hunger Mountain, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Rattapallax, and numerous other journals, and she is a winner of the Alice M. Sellars Award from the Academy of American Poets and was a Poetry Fellow at the Prague Summer Seminars. Of Viral, poet Carol Muske-Dukes writes, “These are relentlessly tender, impossibly empathetic poems— which echo and clarify the body of grief— ‘…the need to pass/through the impassable and land/in a space I fill, exactly.’ The emotional tension is unbearable, but sustained, just as the human heart goes on, after unimaginable loss.”
#poetry #music
I love this news! So many writers since the Imagists think it’s all image, image, image, but poetry is first processed in our brains as sound. Even when we read poetry on a page, our eyes translate the words into an internal monologue, and the sound of the word help conjure the word’s meaning. Sonics sometimes get lost in a lot of contemporary poetry, it seems to me. What do you think?
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112971504/effects-of-poetry-on-the-brain-101013/
Slam and Spoken Word poetry is alive and well in Philadelphia. What do you think of this view of the significance of Slam poetry, published recently by Rattle magazine? http://www.rattle.com/poetry/2009/03/can-slam-poetry-matter-by-susan-ba-somers-willett/ Thoughts?
http://www.everyday-genius.com/2013/07/angie-mazakis.html
It’s fishing season. So here’s a repost of a poem about the One that Got Away. And here’s to hoping you are making the best of this rainy, rainy season with some writing or reading of your own. May the gray skies bring about some new beauty!
Don’t be naughty this holiday season! Come to Poetdelphia! It’s only two days until POETDELPHIA’s next literary reading/salon! Read interviews with Mike Ingram (Barrelhouse editor), Leonard Gontarek (poet extraordinaire) , and Kathleen Volk Miller (Painted Bride Quarterly editor) on our page at http://www.poetdelphia.wordpress.com. See the link for details. http://www.facebook.com/events/128522777295569/
Here is a preview from one of our readers at the upcoming inaugural POETDELPHIA reading. We hope you can make it! Details are on our Facebook page and under our main Poetdelphia page.
“Autumnals” by John Timpane
Autumnals
I
autumn bereaving
rainswept thrusts time in broken
sequence glittering
passages fall like whispers
destiny space dense beyond
(beyond dense space des
tiny whispers like fall pas
sages glittering
sequence broken in time thrusts
rainswept bereaving autumn)
II
October’s inner
weathers turn changes exchange
sufferings bright suf
ferings exchange changes turn
weathers inner Octobers
III
taste after summer
concentrate soilsalts rainsweets
tang tomatolin
gus tangsweets rainsalts soil con
centrate summer aftertaste
Introducing POETDELPHIA, a new community of writers that hosts quarterly readings near where Passyunk Avenue meets South Street. We have a blog at https://poetdelphia.wordpress.com/about/ . We are sponsoring our first reading this September. You can also learn more at http://www.facebook.com/Poetdelphia . Poetdelphia is not just about poetry; it’s also about poetic prose! Check us out and welcome us to the Philadelphia writing world by clicking “Like”!
What do other people have to say about the Philadelphia literary scene? Check out this Ploughshares blog at http://blog.pshares.org/2012/07/04/literary-boroughs-7-philadelphia-pennsylvania/#comment-55118
While I find the resource great, there are a lot of other terrific Philadelphia writers out there who are not mentioned. Hmmm… maybe we should brainstorm on our favorites. Stay tuned!
Poetdelphia 