#poetry

#poetry

It is impossible to talk about cancer without invoking another Big C: cliche. Illness and pain, journeys and battles, finding appreciation for life while reckoning with death these are the building blocks of cancer stories, at once uniquely devastating and devastatingly common. The poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley, romantic partners for over a decade, took divergent approaches to the Big C. As a writer and editor, Falley strived to eradicate cliche; Gibson, as Falley put it, would instead double down.

I always loved spending time at Midtown Scholar. It is one of my favorite bookstores in the world. It's a converted old theater with cozy wooden walls, several floors of books, a stage, a balcony filled with little tables and a coffee shop. Midtown Scholar is also one of poet Kate Baer's favorite bookstores. So on a rainy day last week, we met there to talk.

Mayra Flores and Cristal González Ávila honor their roots through poetry. Flores brings the stories of her East San José community. Her self-published debut, Flores, bridges generations towards change. Ávila, a daughter of farmworkers in Watsonville, has written and acted for the stage for the last 15 years. Her stories explore domestic violence and housing injustice, and recent playwriting credits include La Cortina de la Lechuga and Luz: Senior Stories, commissioned by Teatro Vision.

I'd like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. The point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer

A metal spoon with a lathe-turned wooden handle. A toolkit so tiny it fits in your hand. An album cover from a Chuck Berry record. These are among the significant objects chosen by 22 senior poets that reflect their life experiences: work, people, place, wisdom, identity. On Tuesday, Nov. 4, the poets will gather at Mother Foucault's Book Shop in Portland to read the poems,

San Francisco Poet Laureate emerita and special guests present her latest collection of paired poems and artworks about twelve species from the Pacific Coast of the United States and United States territories. Shuck's art will be on display, and she will participate in a short Q & A about her work. was San Francisco's seventh Poet Laureate. Her poetry draws on her multiethnic background which includes Polish and Cherokee heritage, and her experiences as a lifelong resident of San Francisco.

This autumn, down in tunnels where London's stories flow, TfL is sharing poems as the colder breezes blow. For four short weeks, six voices will accompany your ride, From Hungary, New Zealand, Africa, and far and wide. Sheenagh Pugh brings Days of November, racing to get things done, While Janet Frame reminds us that we strain beneath the sun. Katalin Szlukovényi writes of crowds and modern ties, Pressed close on busy networks where our tangled worlds collide. For history and remembrance, two poems

Darrel Alejandro Holnes is an Afro Panamanian American poet and playwright whose books include Stepmotherland, winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and an International Latino Book Award, and Migrant Psalms, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize.

Yet as soon as Damani and his band Mino Yanci started playing, Tongo began reciting poetry. Something clicked. "I wasn't even a guy that was really into poems, if I'm honest," admits Damani. "But when I heard him, all of a sudden, I was into poems." Realizing they'd stumbled onto something, Damani extended an invite for Tongo to meet up again at Zoo Labs studio in West Oakland.

Forget about apples and oranges nothing rhymes with orange anyway. Never mind those plums that William Carlos Williams sneaked from the icebox. The most poetic fruit of all is the blackberry. Not the mushy sugar bombs packed into plastic clamshells at the supermarket. Those are insipid, bland, prosaic. I mean the ragged, spicy volunteers that grow untended at the edge of a meadow or the side of a road. The kind you go out and pick in late summer or early fall. You'd be amazed at how many of those end up in poems.

Bruce Smith joins Kevin Young to read "Open Letter to My Ancestors" by Mary Ruefle, and his own poem "The Game." Smith, the author of eight poetry collections, including the forthcoming "Hungry Ghost," has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in addition to fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The film's protagonist, Ed Saxberger ( Willem Dafoe), is a New York poet who quit writing verse decades before but still listens to the greatest hits of yesteryear. That's how he happens to put on a recording of Pound reading his Canto LXXXI: What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross/What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee/What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage.

In it, Wiman looks back on the violence that marked both his childhood in West Texas and his family's history, and seems to gather that his past made his writing career inevitable. His conclusion is somewhat counterintuitive, because when he first began reading poetry, in college, he believed that "it had absolutely nothing to do with the world I was from." But he no longer believes that assumption was entirely accurate.

To 2049 by American poet Jorie Graham is one of my favourite collections of recent times and rereading it recently was incredibly rewarding. Filled with slippery and existentially evocative lines such as Years pulled their / lengths through us like long wet strings, it had me pointing at some of the pages gasping: I wish I wrote this! (a condition I frequently suffer from, known as poem-envy).

The Frank O'Hara poem "Katy" features seven lines of self-assessing declarations. It is the fifth line that I get the most mileage out of: "I am never quiet, I mean silent." When I am teaching writing workshops, specifically with young writers, teen-agers who-in many cases-have not let their sense of wonder be battered by waves of irony or cynicism, I ask them what distinctions they see between "quiet" and "silent."

I remember my voice entering the blend, the anonymous shallows clean and barely rippling, or sharing a duet with Krista, a bent harmony, our first altos meeting and crossing like a pair of notched sticks.

Antrobus explains that his father's insults were tied to his father's insecurities, reflecting a damaging struggle with identity marked by racism and family dynamics.

The Germans have a word for it: gesamkunstwerk. Literally, it describes everything under one umbrella, all the types of art that one does collectively being one big piece of work.

How do the small birds in the street know how not to die— that whatever they gather, hunger for, is never enough to keep them in the road when our wheels bear down upon them?

Located at the foot of Nankun Mountain in Huizhou, Guangdong, Half-Mountain Cloud Station serves as a key node in the 'Two-Mountain Architectural Art Program'. The project is inspired by Su Dongpo's 'Sixteen Joys of Life in Huizhou', specifically the verse 'viewing mountains after rain from a tower'. It responds poetically to tensions between city and nature, memory and future.

If I were dying Thursday, this might be the last smoke bush I see. Its red hair on fire.

"Andrea Gibson died in their home (in Boulder, Colorado) surrounded by their wife, Meg, four ex-girlfriends, their mother and father, dozens of friends, and their three beloved dogs."

He knows New York is just a state of mind Like Coney island, come to think of it, where the wind howls like the laughter of children.