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“My impression is that there is a much bigger audience for poetry than there was when I was young,” says the late poet John Ashbery in this 2011 interview with Belinda Luscombe for TIME Magazine on fame, poverty, art criticism, obscurity, and why he dislikes poetry readings.
In this Poets House video for their Hard Hat Reading series, Monica Youn reads from her collection Blackacre (Graywolf Press, 2016) and from A Woman’s Mourning Song (Writers & Readers, 1993) by the late bell hooks.
In this interview with Charlene Wang for Foster, an online platform for writers to craft stories together, Yanyi discusses answering letters from writers for his online advice column the Reading and his second poetry collection, Dream of the Divided Field (One World, 2022), which is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“My materialist mind, I can’t / shake it,” writes Solmaz Sharif in her poem “Now What” from her second collection, Customs, forthcoming in March by Graywolf Press. The speaker of the poem sits in a hotel in Ohio eating takeout and meditating on the origins of the meal, tracing connections back into history and the people whose hands made this food possible: “Within a perfect / little tub of garlic / butter // a relief of workers, of sickles / fields of soy.” Write a poem that meditates on the origins of a favorite condiment, seasoning, or meal. Try to establish a time and place in the poem by beginning in the present, then leap into the anecdotal or historical stories that come to you.
In this 2021 reading at the Poetry Center in San Francisco State University, Angel Dominguez reads two letters to Diego de Landa from their first poetry collection, Desgraciado (the collected letters) (Nightboat Books, 2022), which is featured in Page One in the March/April 2022 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“All lions must lean into something other than a roar,” reads Roger Reeves from his poem “Grendel” included in his new collection, Best Barbarian (Norton, 2022), in this short film directed by Osvaldo Cuevas. Reeves’s collection is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“Who doesn’t know how / doubt lifts the hem of its nightgown // to reveal another inch of thigh / before the face of faith?” In this video filmed at Washington University in St. Louis, Paul Tran reads their poem “Copernicus” featured in their debut collection, All the Flowers Kneeling (Penguin Books, 2022). A profile of Tran written by Rigoberto González is featured in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“Instead begin with the body—itself a kind / of ending.” In this Poetry.LA video, torrin a. greathouse reads from their debut collection, Wound From the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020), and speaks to Mariano Zaro about writing through multiple identities and connecting trauma, disability, and transness.
As with this past weekend’s Super Bowl, singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the national anthem of the United States, before the start of sports events is a time-honored tradition. Poet Ada Limón has made that eventful moment the center of her poem “A New National Anthem,” which is included in her collection The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018). “The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National / Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good / song,” writes Limón. “And what of the stanzas / we never sing, the third that mentions ‘no refuge / could save the hireling and the slave’? Perhaps, / the truth is, every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza.” Write a poem inspired by a country’s national anthem. What are your feelings about it? Is it a good song?
In honor of the seventh anniversary of poet Philip Levine’s passing, Tom Sleigh speaks about their friendship and reads “That Word,” a poem from his latest book, The King’s Touch (Graywolf Press, 2022), dedicated to Levine in this video directed by Ed Robbins. Sleigh says of Levine: “Phil’s intelligence was as brilliantly acerbic as it was heartbreaking.”
