By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Amanda Gorman’s poem ‘We Rise’ is an inspiring piece celebrating female empowerment and solidarity which calls upon women to support each other to bring about social change. The poem also cleverly summons the work of earlier poets who had written on the same topic. Summary Gorman begins the poem […]
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter— sign up here . On a Sunday in October, 2021, well into a second year of the pandemic, in the incipient stages of a new novel, I woke up to a total retinal detachment in my right eye. I describe the experience as palm branches […]
“Music for New Bodies,” premiering Saturday at Rice University in Houston, sets Jorie Graham’s poetry to music with a chamber group of instruments and electronics, as well as five vocalists. Peter Sellars wanted to know more. He was in San Francisco a few years ago, attending a performance of “ The No One’s Rose ,” […]
Credit…Eric Timothy Carlson THE SORROW APARTMENTS, by Andrea Cohen Contemporary poetry isn’t witty. That’s not to say it isn’t funny; on the contrary, it can be extremely amusing, sometimes even intentionally. But for the most part, the art form today vacillates between, on one hand, decrying social and/or personal injustices and, on the other, aiming […]
Brody Grant, center, as Ponyboy Curtis after the rumble in the musical “The Outsiders” at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater in Manhattan. For many young misfits and wannabes, “The Outsiders,” published in 1967, is still a sacred text. Written by an actual teenager — S.E. Hinton drafted it in high school — it spoke with […]
Photo by Samuel Pagel via Unsplash Poets for generations have contended with the indeterminable, fluid relationship between the speaker and the self. We all know the dictum to write what you know, but I find more possibility and permission in Eudora Welty’s way: “Write about what you don’t know about what you know.” In my […]
‘Sestina’ is a poem by the twentieth-century American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79), first published in the New Yorker in 1956. The poem, which uses a very specific verse form, describes a grandmother and a child as they sit in a kitchen together, with a mysterious and unspecific air of grief or sadness haunting them both. […]
Light Me Down: The New and Collected Poems of Jean Valentine by Jean Valentine I MET JEAN on my own creative quest at 22. The summer after I graduated college, I went to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, to take her weeklong workshop. My doubts about whether I was a “real” poet […]
Credit…Rebecca Clarke “I mean that as an organizing principle,” says the U.S. poet laureate, who has edited a new anthology of nature poetry called “You Are Here,” “and also as a slight against prose.” Credit…Rebecca Clarke What books are on your night stand? My night stand doesn’t speak to me anymore. That’s because, here’s the […]
I met Allie Tanner in November of 2016 at the Brooklyn reading series Franklin Park. The first words she ever said to me were “Are you okay?” (I was. I used to call the raffle at Franklin Park, and felt that microphones were for cowards, so I did not use them.) We’ve been together for […]
