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.
The artist Maira Kalman has always had an idiosyncratic approach to defining elegance, having co-authored a book titled "(un)Fashion," and illustrated E. B. White's " The Elements of Style." For the cover of the September 22, 2025, Fall Style & Design Issue, she chose to portray the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé. "I spent a year reading French poets with my poetry group," Kalman said.
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."
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.