Poetry Daily

song of ‘this world’ and (love is a world-ly thing

Besmilr Brigham

the peace of a field making grain wind in a high tree where leaves are; birds flying in from rain their low wings drooping with moisture

from the book Gathering Brief Shells by the Sea / Annulet Editions

Essay: "Something about the way I had been taught or had come to think about metaphor... was causing this sense of not being at home in metaphor or in the world."
(TYR)
#pdnews
https://yalereview.org/article/jennifer-grotz-metaphor

Report: "Right now, the future is extremely uncertain for SPD’s former small presses—but they’re adapting as quickly as they can."
(LitHub)
#pdnews
https://lithub.com/the-small-press-world-is-about-to-fall-apart-on-the-collapse-of-small-press-distribution/

Announcement: "Poet-critic Hanif Abdurraqib... [is] among this year's recipients of Windham-Campbell Prizes, for which winners each receive $175,000 cash awards."
(SF Chronicle)
#pdnews
https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/poet-critic-hanif-abdurraqib-among-8-winners-of-19381764.php

Interview: "When I first started writing poems, I thought I was supposed to sound like everyone else."
(P&W)
#pdnews
https://www.pw.org/content/wanderer_wonderer_a_qa_with_victoria_chang

Report: "The Nuyorican Poets Cafe... has launched a $24 million, city-funded renovation that organizers hope will ensure the cafe's future for decades to come."
(Gothamist)
#pdnews
https://gothamist.com/news/nuyorican-poets-cafe-an-east-village-icon-begins-a-24m-makeover

Retrospective: "Roughly 20 minutes before our presentations were set to begin, however, we received a text from her husband Larry Ochs that Lyn had died that morning. Stunned by the news, we had no thought but to continue."
(LARB)
#pdnews
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/allegorical-moments-lyn-hejinians-life-in-writing/

Obituary: "Marjorie Perloff... one of the world’s leading scholars of contemporary poetry, died on Sunday at her home in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. She was 92."
(NYT)
#pdnews
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/books/marjorie-perloff-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Report: "Small Press Distribution, one of the last remaining independent book distributors in the United States, has closed."
(PW)
#pdnews
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/94690-small-press-distribution-shuts-down.html

Essay: "Even for small magazines like us, there’s always going to be some degree of tension between radical poetic content and the realities of publishing."
(P&W)
#pdnews
https://www.pw.org/agents_editors_recommend/dominick_knowles_of_protean

Essay: "I wrote myself back to writing, I wrote myself through each day. I wrote myself, however ambivalently, back to life."
(LitHub)
#pdnews
https://lithub.com/style-as-survival-on-writing-after-death/

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: Jared Stanley on “So Tough”

Catch Up on Recent Poems

April 24, 2024

Aubade With Selichot

Mónica Gomery

And you ask again for a day of celestial advances. You ask to be witnessed, wearing your mother's old shoes. Wearing the sky's yellow blue bruise.

April 23, 2024

Race in Language

Shane McCrae

What object could I, if I stood before Them, any ancestor, what object could I gesture to, to start to learn the language

April 22, 2024

So Tough (excerpt)

Jared Stanley

a baseless waft, a mountain of sand; your restless shape cupped by all the places a grain finds to rest

April 21, 2024

Need

Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner (translated from the American Sign Language by John Lee Clark)

Need, frantic need, eagle-taloned need is a pumping drill. The oil sloshes to the brim. The lid slams and it’s a tanker spewing smoke.

April 20, 2024

Housework

Derek Chung (translated from the Chinese by May Huang)

Was that love? From the depths of the nest I took an egg Still warm. Turning around, I saw you stick your head out from the firewood, Ah ah-ing, like you wanted to tell me something you could never explain

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

Phillip B. Williams