David Kirby: The Questions That Matter Most by Jane Smiley (review)
The point [Smiley] misses is that the best writing often contains an element of the weird, the bizarre, the outlandish, the alienating. Call it wildness, if you will…
Baron Wormser: The Dark Sky | Politics and Its Discontents
It may be that the love that lives within us cannot be turned toward something as large and seemingly abstract as the earth. But the earth isn’t abstract at all. Each moment is local and real and is always a place where we might begin.
Michael Simms: Rhythm Benders | The Musicality of American Poetry
A poem is rooted in the rhythms of pulse, breath and movement.
Katie Kapurch: Why ‘Barbie’ and ‘The Little Mermaid’ made 2023 the dead girl summer
These dead girls offer insights about living. Embracing death’s inevitability brings some freedom, as well as access to truths about time and the natural world.
Michael Simms: Tootling Along
I hope you don’t mind my sharing links to my own recent publications.
Sarojini Naidu: In the Bazaars of Hyderabad
What do you cry, O ye Fruit merchants?
Citron, pomegranate and plum.
What do you play, O ye musicians?
Sitar, Sarangi and drum.
Baron Wormser: Staggering
When each of us was alone, imagination often kicked in. Where else can a child go? What else can a child do? When asked what one was thinking, a child could answer with the blessed word, “Nothing.”
Baron Wormser: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Epitaph”
By tradition, poets have the authority to write epitaphs. It goes with their famous license, their claiming the verbal right to confront death in whatever context death presents itself while using poetry’s concision to arrive at a just, incisive summary.
Baron Wormser: Disconnected
[Tech companies] countenance evil—working children to death, creating environmental devastation, allowing labor practices to flourish not far removed from slavery, putting women in conditions that encourage sexual assault, paying people a pittance for dangerous work—while offering assurances…that no evil is being practiced.
Dawn Potter: A Small Celebration of Baron Wormser and Teresa Carson
Lived-Time, Art-Time, and Friendship
Baron Wormser: On Moral Grounds
One can be humbled into silence and one can be humbled into words. Or one can feel both—the silence that underlies the words.
Video: Julián Delgado Lopera | The Poetry of Everyday Language
In a captivating, poetic ode to the beauty and strength of mixed languages, writer Julián Delgado Lopera paints a picture of immigrant and queer communities united not by their refinement of language but by the creative inventions that spring from their mouths. They invite everyone to reconsider what “proper” English sounds like – and imagine a blended future where those on the margins are able to speak freely.
Michael Simms: Strangers at the Door | Robert Gibb, Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Jose Padua
Here I want to call attention to three mature poets who have done extraordinary work, but have not, in my opinion, received the attention they deserve, and in the process explore different ways one can be an “outsider” in the poetry field.
Carlene M. Gadapee: Give Peace a Chance
The Burning World by Sherod Santos is a complicated and arresting mytho-historical and contemporary narrative demonstrating the pain of war and conflict.
