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In this Poetry.LA video, Altadena co-poets laureate Lester Graves Lennon and Sehba Sarwar read a selection of their poems and speak about how the Eaton Fire has affected their lives and community. Lennon and Sarwar were recently awarded a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets to launch their poetry project “After the Fires: Healing from Histories.”
“There are names for what binds us: / strong forces, weak forces. / Look around, you can see them.” Danusha Laméris reads and talks about “For What Binds Us” by Jane Hirshfield and shares why this poem is meaningful to her for “The Poem I Wish I Had Read” series in this video from the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.
“I like the idea of action writing, putting text on the floor and playing with arrangement like abstract expressionist painting.” —Anne Waldman, author of Mesopotopia
“I often think of poetry as something that is beyond the true and the false,” says poet and critic Michael Leong on what he feels is true about the art of poetry in a Literary Hub interview with Peter Mishler. “Poetry’s strangeness is so tied up with how it productively messes with what we previously thought were stable truths and stable falsehoods.” Taking inspiration from this notion that poetry exists in a space that is “beyond the true and the false,” write a poem that explores a seemingly stable truth or falsehood, one that you may be interested in interrogating and undermining. Experiment with using surrealist imagery, playing with expanding far out into the white space of the page to stretch further into the incongruity of your subject.
