e.e. cummings

The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty

 Paul Beatty, on the basis of two slim collections of poetry - Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce - has been called "a West Coast word wizard" and the "poet laureate of Generation X."

The White Boy Shuffle is a moving, deft satire on issues of race as well as the tale of the coming of age of Gunnar Kaufman, a contemporary African American who is in no way typical. Unequivocally and without apology, Gunnar states that he is not the seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son. Indeed, he wishes he were, but fate has shorted him by six brothers and three uncles, cruelly cheating him out of his mythological inheritance. And thus, unforgettably, begins the story of Gunnar's rocky expedition to manhood.

With his unparalleled ability to recreate the rhythms of everyday speech, to cut, mix, and recombine language in order to evoke a whole new world of experience, Paul Beatty here establishes himself as one of the most original and inventive writers of our time. A combination of literary and street, at once intimate and breathtakingly expansive, The White Boy Shuffle is a multicultural, multigenerational epic that is exuberant, engaging, and in the moment

Manifestation Wolverine: The Collected Poetry of Ray Young Bear by Ray Young Bear

 The American Book Award–winning collection from “The best poet in Indian Country” (Sherman Alexie, New York Times–bestselling author of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven).

Hailed by the Bloomsbury Review as “the nation’s foremost contemporary Native American poet” and by Sherman Alexie as “the best poet in Indian Country,” Ray Young Bear draws on ancient Meskwaki tradition and modern popular culture to create poems that provoke, astound, and heal.

 

This indispensable volume, which contains three previously published collections—Winter of the Salamander (1979), The Invisible Musician (1990), and The Rock Island Hiking Club (2001)—as well as Manifestation Wolverine, a brilliant series of new pieces inspired by animistic beliefs, a Lazy-Boy recliner, and the word songs Young Bear sang to his children, is a testament to the singularity of the poet’s talent and the astonishing range of his voice

"Supermarket in California" by Allen Ginsberg (read by Tom O'Bedlam)

Indigo by Ellen Bass

"Bass’s work―about marriage and parenting, illness and recovery, small daily pleasures―cultivates an exuberance that’s born of, and balanced by, close watchfulness." ―The New York Times

“A bold and passionate new collection… Intimacy is rarely conveyed as gracefully as in Bass’s lustrous poems.” ―Booklist

Indigo, the newest collection by Ellen Bass, merges elegy and praise poem in an exploration of life’s complexities. Whether her subject is oysters, high heels, a pork chop, a beloved dog, or a wife’s return to health, Bass pulls us in with exquisite immediacy. Her lush and precisely observed descriptions allow us to feel the sheer primal pleasure of being alive in our own “succulent skin,” the pleasure of the gifts of hunger, desire, touch. In this book, joy meets regret, devotion meets dependence, and most importantly, the poet so in love with life and living begins to look for the point where the price of aging overwhelms the rewards of staying alive. Bass is relentless in her advocacy for the little pleasures all around her. Her gaze is both expansive and hyperfocused, celebrating (and eulogizing) each gift as it is given and taken, while also taking stock of the larger arc. She draws the lines between generations, both remembering her parents’ lives and deaths and watching her own children grow into the space that she will leave behind. Indigo shows us the beauty of this cycle, while also documenting the deeply human urge to resist change and hang on to the life we have, even as it attempts to slip away

Def Poetry Jam - Saul Williams (Coded Language)

Human Hours: Poems by Catherine Barnett

 Winner of the Believer Book Award

The triumphant follow-up collection to The Game of Boxes, winner of the James Laughlin Award

Catherine Barnett’s tragicomic third collection, Human Hours, shuttles between a Whitmanian embrace of others and a kind of rapacious solitude. Barnett speaks from the middle of hope and confusion, carrying philosophy into the everyday. Watching a son become a young man, a father become a restless beloved shell, and a country betray its democratic ideals, the speakers try to make sense of such departures. Four lyric essays investigate the essential urge and appeal of questions that are “accursed,” that are limited―and unanswered―by answers. What are we to do with the endangered human hours that remain to us? Across the leaps and swerves of this collection, the fevered mind tries to slow―or at least measure―time with quiet bravura: by counting a lover’s breaths; by remembering a father’s space-age watch; by envisioning the apocalyptic future while bedding down on a hard, cold floor, head resting on a dictionary. Human Hours pulses with the absurd, with humor that accompanies the precariousness of the human condition

Billy Collins - Consolation

Ends of the Earth: Collected Poems of Charles Bane Jr.

 Charles Bane, Jr. is a poet of humanism and its ideality. He embraces love, beauty, and kindness in his work. As a nominee for State Poet Laureate of Florida, he has carefully selected the poems he feels are worthy of publication as a full collected edition. This book includes The Chapbook, originally published by Curbside Splendor, and Love Poems published by Aldrich Books. It also brings fresh poems to the reader, including Masai poems that have only recently been published.

Charles Bane, Jr.'s anticipated collection captures the spirit of being-in-the-world.

Charles Bane, Jr. is the American author of The Chapbook (Curbside Splendor), Love Poems (Aldrich Press), and Three Seasons: Writing Donald Hall (Collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University). He created and contributes to The Meaning Of Poetry series for The Gutenberg Project, and is a current nominee as Poet Laureate of Florida. http: //charlesbanejr.com

March Book (Grove Press Poetry) by Jesse Ball

March Book is a wonder and a revelation. A shockingly assured first collection from young poet Jesse Ball, its elegant lines and penetrating voice present a poetic symphony instead of a simple succession of individual, barely-linked poems. Craftsmanship defines this collection; it is full of perfect line-breaks, tenderly selected words, and inventive pairings. Just as impressive is the breadth and ingenuity of its recurring themes, which crescendo as Ball leads us through his fantastic world, quietly opening doors.

In five separate sections we meet beekeepers and parsons, a young woman named Anna in a thin, linen dress and an old scribe transferring the eponymous March Book. We witness a Willy Loman-esque worker who "ran out in the noon street / shirt sleeves rolled, and hurried after / that which might have passed" only to be told that there's nothing between him and "the suddenness of age." While these images achingly inform us of our delicate place in the physical world, others remind us why we still yearn to awake in it every day and "make pillows with the down / of stolen geese," "build / rooms in terms of the hours of the day." Like a patient Virgil, insistent and confident, Ball escorts us through his mind, and we're lucky to follow

Billy Collins - Litany

No Enemies: Poems by Jimmy Santiago Baca

"Acclaimed poet Jimmy Santiago Baca knows something is wrong with contemporary society. He's afraid "that the whole network / that connects us / and society together / is going to collapse / that our lives / will be dependent on tiny / little blue wires / that can't shake my hand / or share my joy, / that won't challenge the police / to stop beating a brown man / or can't do even something as small / and gentle as smile." In this collection of new poems, Baca expresses his sense of responsibility to use his gift for the greater good. "If not me, then who / speaks to money, power, privilege / if not / an ordinary man / then who?" He chastises those who use their connections to benefit themselves at the expense of the impoverished, imprisoned and undocumented. Frequently, he takes aim at poets and politicians who put their lucrative positions ahead of their constituents: "Governor, if you choose a career / where you have to ignore the truth / and pillage the unfortunate, at least / outlaw automatic weapons." While many of these poems are stinging rebukes against the wealthy and powerful and their disregard for children living in poverty and the environment, others are beautiful odes to his indigenous roots. There are buffalo with their gentle hearts, sacred places where he prays to his ancestors and the plants growing on steep mountainsides that give "me courage to keep clinging to hope and to learn / life's most important lesson / practice how to lean in life so as not to fall." Baca writes urgently about the most important themes of our generation, including education, justice, the environment and even the coronavirus. Ironically, he notes, "the enemy didn't come at us crossing borders, / swinging machetes and machine guns." No, nature herself has come to clean house, to give "Mother Earth a reprieve from our greed."--

Catturare l’istante: un viaggio nel cuore degli haiku - Incontro con Diego Martina

Tutto pronto per Catturare l’istante: un viaggio nel cuore degli haiku l’incontro con Diego Martina, scrittore, yamatologo, e traduttore specializzato in letteratura giapponese. Ecco l’evento organizzato da La Casa della Poesia di Como ODV, Festival Europa in Versi e i Quaderni del Bardo Edizioni di Stefano Donno, previsto OGGI giovedì 6 marzo ore 18.30, presso Libreria La Ciurma, Viale Lecco 83, Como

Un'occasione imperdibile per scoprire la poesia giapponese, dallo Haiku tradizionale alla modernità di Tanikawa Shuntarō voce significativa della poesia giapponese, attraverso gli occhi di un esperto che in italiano ha già tradotto la raccolta di haiku “Chiodi Battuti” del poeta  Akano Yotsuba*, pubblicata da IQdB.

Conoscerete da vicino Tanikawa Shuntarō , attraverso un’anticipazione della sua raccolta "Alla donna" che uscirà per i tipi di IQdB  e grazie al racconto di aneddoti e curiosità sulla sua vita e poetica.

Diego Martina vi accompagnerà in un'immersione nel mondo degli Haiku, attraverso la lettura e il commento di alcune poesie in lingua originale e in traduzione italiana.

L’autore dialoga con Riccardo Valsecchi, filosofo e socio de La Casa della Poesia di Como ODV

Letture di Jalisco Pineda Vázquez, poeta e socia de La Casa della Poesia di Como ODV

 

*Chiodi Battuti – Scheda libro / Nel discorso tenuto durante la cerimonia di premiazione alla 34esima edizione del Premio Nuove Voci dello Haiku Moderno (現代俳句新人賞), il vincitore Akano Yotsuba (1977-) ha definito lo haiku «la forma poetica più bella dopo il silenzio», sottolineando con tali parole quanto la brevità (di fatto quasi prossima al silenzio) giochi in esso un ruolo fondamentale. Yotsuba non è certo il solo: già in passato, infatti, autori come Terayama Shūji avevano definito lo haiku «un ago», rintracciando nella brevità della forma la ragione della sua “puntura poetica”. Tuttavia, è proprio questa brevità concisa a essere talvolta considerata il limite intrinseco dello haiku, in quanto difficilmente ciò che è grande riesce a trovare spazio in ciò che è piccolo. Ma tale assunto – pure ipotizzabile a seconda dei casi – viene del tutto azzerato nei componimenti di Yotsuba, dove lo haiku non è più ciò che intende esprimere, quanto ciò che intende indicare. Proprio come nel celebre insegnamento Zen del dito che indica la luna, dunque, lo haiku si fa dito, e nel leggere i singoli componimenti c’è chi scorgerà la luna di volta in volta indicata e chi, per forza di cose, si fermerà a osservare il dito. (dall’introduzione di Diego Martina)

 

 

La Casa della Poesia di Como ODV

https://www.lacasadellapoesiadicomo.com/

 

Info link I Quaderni del Bardo Edizioni di Stefano Donno

https://www.quadernidelbardoedizionilecce.it/

Talking About Nothing: Numbers, Hallucinations, and Fictions Reprint Edition by Jody Azzouni

Ordinary language and scientific language enable us to speak about, in a singular way (using demonstratives and names), what we recognize not to exist: fictions, the contents of our hallucinations, abstract objects, and various idealized but nonexistent objects that our scientific theories are often couched in terms of. Indeed, references to such nonexistent items-especially in the case of the application of mathematics to the sciences-are indispensable. We cannot avoid talking about such things. Scientific and ordinary languages thus enable us to say things about Pegasus or about hallucinated objects that are true (or false), such as "Pegasus was believed by the ancient Greeks to be a flying horse," or "That elf I'm now hallucinating over there is wearing blue shoes." Standard contemporary metaphysical views and semantic analyses of singular idioms on offer in contemporary philosophy of language have not successfully accommodated these routine practices of saying true and false things about the nonexistent while simultaneously honoring the insight that such things do not exist in any way at all (and have no properties). That is, philosophers often feel driven to claim that such objects do exist, or they claim that all our talk isn't genuine truth-apt talk, but only pretence. This book reconfigures metaphysics (and the role of metaphysics in semantics) in radical ways that allow the accommodation of our ordinary ways of speaking of what does not exist while retaining the absolutely crucial presupposition that such objects exist in no way at all, have no properties, and so are not the truth-makers for the truths and falsities that are about them

John Berryman: There Sat Down, Once, a Thing on Henry's Heart.

Copper Yearning by Kimberly Blaese

Copper Yearning invests itself in a compassionate dual vision―bearing witness to the lush beauty of our intricately woven environments and to the historical and contemporary perils that threaten them. Kimberly Blaeser’s fourth collection of poetry deftly reflects her Indigenous perspective and a global awareness. Through vividly rendered images, the poems dwell among watery geographies, alive to each natural nuance, alive also to the uncanny. Set in fishing boats, in dreams, in prisons, in memory, or in far flung countries like Bahrain, the pieces sing of mythic truths and of the poignant everyday injustices. But, whether resisting threats to effigy mounds or inhabiting the otherness of river otter, ultimately they voice a universal longing for a place of balance, a way of being in the world―for the ineffable

Sylvia Plath reads November Graveyard

Greening: Poetry of the Spring by Mandy Whyman

 Una raccolta vivida di poesie, ricca di immagini, che esplora la gioia e la meraviglia della primavera, dal miracolo della Terra che si sveglia alle minuzie del canto degli uccelli e della pioggia primaverile. Una raccolta che traccia la rinascita del mondo naturale e tutta la speranza che rappresenta

Sylvia Plath Reads 'Daddy'

Poesie nuove e selezionate | Marie Howe | WW Norton & Company

Poesie nuove e selezionate | Marie Howe | WW Norton & Company

Allen Ginsberg Reading Howl (Part 2)

Perfidious Proverbs and Other Poems: A Satirical Look At The Bible by Philip Appleman and Dan Barker

 This collection of satirical poems homes in on the inconsistencies and downright perversities of what passes in our culture as "Holy Writ." Turning to satire, with its long and distinguished record of exposing folly and bringing enlightenment through humor, the author leaves no doubt that primitive religion posing as eternal truth is just the sort of folly that satire is meant to correct.He lets his poetic imagination roam widely, as he takes on the roles of Eve, Noah, Sarah, Jonah, David, Mary, Jesus, Judas, and even the biblical Jehovah Himself, ("I never apologize, never explain."). We also hear from priests, televangelists, and faith healers, as well as some sensible contemporaries, commenting on what it means to live a life of reason. At the conclusion to the introduction, the author says: "Intelligent and well-meaning people have argued for centuries against the fatal attraction of foolishness, but their efforts have been largely unproductive, partly because many people seem impervious to rational discussion. So perhaps satire is our most effective way of lighting candles in the darkness and communicating effectively to those who are immune to reason. That is, at any rate, the hope, and the rationale, of this book."In this age of suicide bombers and resurgent fundamentalism, we need these lighted candles like never before

Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein | Goodreads

Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein | Goodreads

The Descent: Poems by Sophie Cabot Black

 "Black's poems, in their measured grace, have a quiet intensity, animated by her passion for a clarity of understanding, in the art as in the life."-Stanley Kunitz

I have not handled the ordinary well

And wandered into much time spent

Taking on the unfaithful,

Blunder and flaw. --from "Heaven, Which Is"

Sophie Cabot Black's anticipated follow-up to her award-winning debut, The Misunderstanding of Nature, describes a restless spirit at the crossroads of love and damage, rapture and disenchantment, the mountain and the descent. The voices of these poems struggle through the hesitancies of doubt and loss to end at more than survival or witness; they achieve clarity by singing of the resiliencies of the known world, after paradise inevitably fails

Irma Kurti interviews Allison Grayhurst. Canada – Alessandria Today Italia News Media

Irma Kurti interviews Allison Grayhurst. Canada – Alessandria Today Italia News Media

Jack Kerouac - "San Francisco Scene"

Wild Civility (Pacific Northwest Poetry Series) by David Biespiel

 David Biespiel's long poetic lines crackle with rhythmic energy and a jazzy, bittersweet richness of language. Rolling out across the page like darkly luminous highways, his innovative, nine-line "American sonnets" promise adventure, offering a variant on the sonnet form that is both lyric and dramatic and bringing his masterful formal inventiveness to free verse. "I've come to imagine the nine-line sonnet to be like one of those classic Thunderbirds," says Biespiel, "something distinctly American: wide, roomy, and with a robust engine."

The vastly varied voices within the poems are united by a wonderfully limber diction. Using with revelatory precision the vocabularies of history, science, art, sport, philosophy, religion, literature, government, and domestic life, Biespiel has crafted a hip, melodic, elastic language that travels the registers of expression: lush and coarse, gaudy and austere, pliant and rigidly tough. The civility of the poems is the form; the wildness is the bristling energy of the language.

Passionate, resilient, rich with wit and word play, these poems affirm David Biespiel's increasing stature as a poet of remarkable accomplishment and promise

Kerouac - October in the Railroad Earth

Allen Ginsberg reads America

Poems About Work by Miles Ridley

Poems About Work is a collection of themed poetry. It's an assembly of uncomfortable truths, proud proletariat rebellion, and whispers from dirty hand prophets. It's wisdom from deep trenches. Poems About Work is 30+ honest poems that transport the reader to the filthy underground of America that only its unknown heroes can teach

Empatia di Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

 The groundbreaking poetic work by our “Mondrian in verse” (Susan Barba, Boston Review), now back in print in a newly revised edition with a new preface by the author.

Empathy, first published by Station Hill Press in 1989, marked a turning point in Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s poetry, her lines lengthening across the page like so many horizons, tuned intimately to the natural world and its human relations, at once philosophical, lush, and rhythmic. As she writes in the new note for this edition, “I started to feel my way toward an intuited subliminal wholeness of composition.” In these poems, empathy not only becomes the space of one person inside another, but of one element (water, or fog), one place (tundra or desert mesa), one animal (the swan) as the locus of human illumination and desire

Anne Sexton at home reading Wanting to Die

Il poeta di Miami RM Drake rivitalizza l'entusiasmo per la poesia attraverso Instagram | Miami Herald

Il poeta di Miami RM Drake rivitalizza l'entusiasmo per la poesia attraverso Instagram | Miami Herald

19 Year Old Debuts Poetry Book, Becomes Bestseller Ahead of The Holidays | Miami Herald

19 Year Old Debuts Poetry Book, Becomes Bestseller Ahead of The Holidays | Miami Herald

Opinion | Is poetry useless?

Opinion | Is poetry useless?

Pitch of Poetry by Charles Bernstein

 Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American literary theory. Pitch of Poetry is his irreverent guide to modernist and contemporary poetics.

Subjects range across Holocaust representation, Occupy Wall Street, and the figurative nature of abstract art. Detailed overviews of formally inventive work include essays on—or “pitches” for—a set of key poets, from Gertrude Stein and Robert Creeley to John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Larry Eigner, and Leslie Scalapino. Bernstein also reveals the formative ideas behind the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. The final section, published here for the first time, is a sweeping work on the poetics of stigma, perversity, and disability that is rooted in the thinking of Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Blake.

Pitch of Poetry makes an exhilarating case for what Bernstein calls echopoetics: a poetry of call and response, reason and imagination, disfiguration and refiguration.

‘The Study’ Review: A Book-Lined Retreat - WSJ

‘The Study’ Review: A Book-Lined Retreat - WSJ

‘Poet in the New World’ Review: Czesław Miłosz Crosses Over - WSJ

‘Poet in the New World’ Review: Czesław Miłosz Crosses Over - WSJ

‘Love and Need’ Review: Robert Frost’s Dark Journey - WSJ

‘Love and Need’ Review: Robert Frost’s Dark Journey - WSJ

Expect Delays by Bill Berkson

Praise for Bill Berkson:

"A serene master of syntactical sleight and transformer of the mundane into the marvelous."—Publishers Weekly

"That was Bill through and through, still curious and receptive after a lifetime of glamorous soldiering through the fields of art and poetry.” —City Lights, "Homage to Bill Berkson"

Wide-ranging and experimental, Expect Delays confronts past and present with rare equilibrium, eyeballing mortality while appreciating the richness and surprise, as well as the inevitable griefs, inherent in the time allowed.

Dress Trope

Critics should wear

white jackets like

lab technicians;

curators, zoo

keepers' caps;

and art historians,

lead aprons

to protect them from

impending

radiant fact.

Bill Berkson is a poet, critic, and professor emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute