Poetry Daily

Blessing the Baby

Diannely Antigua

We blessed the baby while we tied around our wrists one long, red string. For a moment, the string connected us-wives, mothers, and me, neither-until it didn't, until the scissors severed us, made a bracelet of the blood string.

from the book Good Monster / Copper Canyon Press

Profile: "When Kevin Young ’92 came to Harvard as an undergraduate, he dreamed of becoming a poet."
(Harvard Gazette)
#pdnews
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/04/acclaimed-poet-receives-arts-medal/

Retrospective: "Again, I half suspected Jerry thought he’d be writing my eulogy before I had to write his."
(Jacket2)
#pdnews
https://jacket2.org/commentary/jerome-rothenberg-december-11-1931-%E2%80%93-april-21-2024

Essay: "...most Shakespeare fans have rarely met an adaptive concept they didn’t like."
(JSTOR)
#pdnews
https://daily.jstor.org/shakespeare-and-fanfiction/

Interview: "The letters that have moved me are letters from older writers who never knew that writing was possible, and they wrote their first poem and wanted me to see it."
(P&W)
#pdnews
https://www.pw.org/content/qa_maldonado_leads_the_academy

Interview: "The art that I really care about is the art that I carry with me into the future."
(Adroit)
#pdnews
https://theadroitjournal.org/issue-forty-nine/a-conversation-with-annelyse-gelman/

Essay: "In Gawain we encounter the terrifying prospect that our civilized places are vulnerable to total annihilation."
(LitHub)
#pdnews
https://lithub.com/what-medieval-poets-can-teach-us-about-climate-change-and-what-evangelicals-today-get-wrong/

Obituary: Helen Vendler has passed away at age 90.
(Boston Globe)
#pdnews
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/04/23/metro/helen-vendler-towering-presence-poetry-criticism-dies-90/

Announcement: "PEN America has canceled its 2024 Literary Awards ceremony..."
(PW)
#pdnews
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/awards-and-prizes/article/94876-pen-america-cancels-2024-literary-awards-ceremony.html

Report: "For National Poetry Month, Oregon's poet laureate is bringing... to the public... a daily poetry hotline."
(NPR)
#pdnews
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/12/1244478709/call-this-hotline-to-listen-to-a-new-poem-each-day-for-national-poetry-month

Conversation: "I love the unexpected revelation—that which offers itself in a quiet moment, buried in the middle of the poem."
(The Rumpus)
#pdnews
https://therumpus.net/2024/04/15/sarah-ghazal-ali/

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: Lindsay Turner on “Forms of Displeasure”

Catch Up on Recent Poems

April 30, 2024

Two Poems

Diane Seuss

Blue once told me I walked in on him peeing and laughed. That it ruined his life. Well, Jesus, I'm sorry. I would never have apologized back then.

April 29, 2024

Forms of Displeasure

Lindsay Turner

what you need to understand is it's systems not people the bright formal nothings go rising up the hill

April 28, 2024

Bronze Like Nightfall

Joyce Mansour (translated from the French by C. Francis Fisher)

Yesterday pastel pink Colored my dreams again Everything clouded with you

April 27, 2024

A Dog Barking into the Night

Kevin Prufer

Antigone was a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl, and then she was, like her brother, like all of us, eventually, nowhere.

April 26, 2024

[…]

Fady Joudah

All disasters are natural including this one because humans are natural.

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

Phillip B. Williams