A contemporary take on an ancient Arabic form.
Did the poems of this 18th-century poet prefigure modern hip-hop rivalries?
Ezra Pound thought she ruined imagism, but her erotic lyricism turned it into a style all her own.
Anne Bradstreet became a cultural icon for speaking out. Anne Hutchinson was banished.
Are these pieces translations, inventions, or interventions that add to a story that has been lost to us?
How poetry became the 18th century’s social media network.
The impersonal power of a confessional classic.
Hillman’s lecture draws on her experience as a teacher of poetry as well as her own poetry’s engagement with difficulty and complexity.
Annie Finch is a contemporary American poet whose work is deeply engaged with the connection between feminism and formalism. This essay, “Female Tradition as Feminist Tradition,” which was published in her essay collection The Body of Poetry (2005), traces the historical and psychological paths that have drawn contemporary women poets toward the use of traditional formal structure, despite a lack of critical and theoretical attention.
In his essay “The Fire,” Blaser writes, “the real business of poetry is cosmology.” He discusses poetry and the quality of its connection to the world, a world that is entered by the poet’s writing: “the processional aspect of the world has to be caught in the language also.
Who are all these people? Where is this waste land they inhabit? What is this chaos of impressions we are privy to? Wherefore such madness?
The journey from idea to draft.
Opening the luminous door in your writing.
How line breaks shape meaning.
There is lightness within these downtrodden lives!
Through a variety of techniques such as the “new sentence,” language writers sought to engage the reader in new ways, making them active participants in the process of reading and meaning-making. Like other language writers, Hejinian’s own work is a blend of philosophy, literary theory, and experimental lyricism. Her essays on poetics are important in understanding her work and the aims of the language movement in general.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, author of the poems “God’s Grandeur,” “Pied Beauty,” and “The Windhover,” among others, was one of the most innovative poets of late 19th-century England. Since the posthumous publication of his poetry in 1918, his original poetics has influenced modern and contemporary poets.
The sources of Mackey’s poetry are diverse and include West Africa folklore and music, American jazz, Bedouin traditions, the Koran, and African American music and history.
Created in partnership with Motionpoems, this animated film explores the complex and multifaceted beauty that can be overlooked by unobservant eyes. Jamaal May, “There Are Birds Here” from The Big Book of Exit Strategies. Copyright © 2016 by Jamaal May. Reprinted by permission of Alice James Books. Produced by USC Film School.
Using simple, illuminative paper-cut puppetry, this enchanting video imagines the moment of witness that inspired Gwendolyn Brooks to write her landmark poem, “We Real Cool.” Created by Manual Cinema in association with Crescendo Literary, with story by Eve Ewing and Nate Marshall and music by Jamila Woods and Ayanna Woods.