Jump to navigation Skip to content
“The next time you stop speaking, / ask yourself why you were born,” reads Naomi Shihab Nye from her poem “Separation Wall” in this episode of Ours Poetica, a series produced by the Poetry Foundation in collaboration with Complexly.
“The moment you walk away from the conversation with a poem, you lose it, and it will never return.” —CAConrad, author of AMANDA PARADISE
“My father was reading War and Peace when he gave me my name. / I was born near Easter, 1966, in Mississippi,” writes Natasha Trethewey in her poem “Miscegenation,” which begins with the story of her parents traveling to Ohio to marry in 1965 when interracial marriage was still illegal in Mississippi. The poem is a ghazal, a form that consists of couplets ending on the same word or phrase. Write a ghazal with your city of origin as the repeating word. Try, as Trethewey does, to weave together various subjects that speak to the time and place of your homeland.
In this NEW INC virtual event, Brain Pickings founder Maria Popova speaks with Patrick Rosal about art, cities, and nature and how poetry helps connect people to the natural world. Rosal’s latest collection, The Last Thing: New & Selected Poems (Persea Books, 2021), is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“It is a wonderful gift to be able to swim in rivers, especially on bright, clear days like these. You step into an inverted version of the world,” says poet Alice Oswald about the connection between water and grief in this 2020 virtual lecture for the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. “The water fits around you like a velvet suit, and you float along seemingly decapitated by reflections.”
In her poem “Bestiary of Bad Kisses,” Ashley M. Jones compares bad kisses in the form of a catalog of animals with three sections titled: “The Frog,” “The Anteater,” and “The Bulldog.” The bestiary is a textual compendium of beasts, both real and imaginary, dating back to the Middle Ages that has seen a resurgence in contemporary literature. From Julio Cortázar to Donika Kelly, writers have sought ways to explore the metaphorical and literal resonances of cataloging animals. Write a poem in the form of a bestiary. How can you glean inspiration from myths and real-life stories? What is the relationship between your chosen animals?
Submissions are open for this year’s X. J. Kennedy Prize. Given for a full-length poetry collection, the prize includes publication with Texas Review Press, a $10,000 advance, a standard royalty contract, and twenty author copies. Poets at any stage of their career are eligible to submit and the prize is not limited to a particular style or form of poetry.
Using only the online submission system, submit a manuscript of 50 to 100 pages with a $28 entry fee by September 30. Kazim Ali will judge. The winner will be revealed in December. Visit the website for complete guidelines.
The X. J. Kennedy prize was first awarded in 1998 and the most recent winner was Brooke Sahni for her debut collection, Before I Had the Word. The prize’s namesake, X. J. Kennedy, has been widely celebrated for his poetry and books for young readers. Kennedy earned the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers in 2015 and the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America in 2009. In his citation for the Jackson Prize, the judges praised Kennedy for delivering “wit, savagery, and compassion” in his work. In admiration of his characteristic brevity, they added, “The size of his poems is small but their scope is vast.”
“The work of most poets whom I admire requires an apprenticeship to the language of that particular poet.” Jorie Graham speaks about reading habits, influence, and accessibility to a wider audience as a poet in this 1999 interview with Michael Silverblatt, host of the long-running KCRW series Bookworm, produced by the Lannan Foundation.
“imagine his joy as the sun / wizarded forth those abundant sugars / and I plodded barefoot / and prayerful at the first ripe plum’s swell and blush,” reads Ross Gay from his poem “Burial” in this video featuring music by Mary Lattimore. The track is featured in an album called Dilate Your Heart, part of a yearlong release campaign celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of indie record label Jagjaguwar.
