It"s been five years since the morning that I stood in front of a television set watching in stunned horror as the news services replayed over and over and over the footage of a plane crashing through the second of the twin towers at the World Trade Center. I have yet to write about it. The enormity of it staggers me still, ...
Gyorgy Faludy, the Hungarian poet who lived through years of censorship and exile from his native country, died Friday night at his home in Budapest. He was 95, and had spent decades of his life living outside Hungary, the country that he always thought of as "home". Faludy was born in 1910, and published his first works, translations of the French poet, Francois Villon, at 27. ...
If you"re going to be anywhere in the neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island this coming Tuesday night, you have GOT to be at Reflections Cafe on Wickendon Street. That"s the night that Patricia Smith will be featuring at the GotPoetry Live reading - and Patricia Smith reading her poetry is something not to be missed. I"ve written about Smith here before, and I promised ...
Random web searches sometimes turn up some lovely finds - and this is one of them. Todays-Woman.net is an active portal for poets - and despite the name of the site, it"s not just for women poets. Named one of Writers" Digest"s Top 101 Sites of 2006, Todays-Woman.net welcomes both men and women - in fact, nearly half of their members are ...
Want to do something really special this year? How about inspiring a young poet and encouraging them to keep on with their writing? For many adults, poetry was something we memorized in school, often taught by someone who had about as much interest in trophes and iambs and lyrical feet as we did. That sort of teaching made for a healthy dislike of anything bearing ...
I am a lover of poetic forms. Language is music and magic and poetry. Fitting language and meaning together into a set form is like working a puzzle, creating a work of art from scattered thoughts. This is not to say that free verse has no place in poetry - it is very much in favor in most academic circles at the moment ...
Ever since I first read the lines: Glory be to God for dappled things For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; when I was no more than 12 year old, I have been in love with the musical quality of Gerard Manley Hopkins poetry. His poems play with sound like an artist plays with color, rubbing ...
Among the other things dropping into my mailbox this week are updates from Quickmuse, which is rapidly developing into a mini-media sensation. It"s been written up in a few offline newspapers and journals, which has, I"m quite sure, made it easier for the QM folks to entice known poets to feature in their advertised poetry bouts. Since the last time I wrote about the ...
Where do you go when you"re looking for information about upcoming poetry events? Calls for submissions? Calls for papers? A list of blogs that feature poetry? Something new to read? If you"re like most people, you"ve got a list of your own of places to check in for each of those things, but at The Poetry Kit you can find it all ...
Poetry is sound is poetry. The difference between prose and poetry, according to many of history's foremost poets, is the way that poetry plays with the ear, the stressed and unstressed accents, the elides and slides from one sound to the next, the staccato rhythm that you can achieve with a series of t-t-t words - it's magic to the ear. That's what you'll ...
