Sunday, September 6, 2015

POETRY EVENTS - CHICAGO

 
POETRY & MUSIC

Salon Concert: The Transcendentalists

Thursday, September 10 
7:00 PM
Poetry Foundation
61 West Superior Street
Free admission
The first salon concert of the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago’s 2015 Collaborative Works Festival explores the impact of Transcendentalism on American composers. The program begins and concludes with a reception. 
Cosponsored with the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago
 
 
POETRY & MUSIC

Robert Schumann’sDichterliebe

Tuesday, September 29, 7:00 PM
Poetry Foundation
61 West Superior Street
Free admission
Celebrated musicologist Don Michael Randel, president emeritus of the University of Chicago, leads an exploration of interpretation and expression in Robert Schumann’sDichterliebe. Tenor Jonathan Johnson, a member of the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center at Lyric Opera of Chicago, and pianist Craig Terry, Ryan Opera Center music director, perform the masterpiece in its entirety.
Cosponsored with Lyric Unlimited

Submit an event

If you would like your poetry event to be included in the Around the City Newsletter, please e-mailmedia@poetryfoundation.orgwith a web link to your event site. Also include the event sponsor or series, names of featured poets, and date and time.

Plug Nickel Cabaret

September 2 & 3: Enjoy an entertaining evening of spoken word, kinetic storytelling, and darned good tunes featuring acclaimed playwright and performer Beau O'Reilly, accompanied by the wildly talented Troy Martin, along with the "exquisitely... surprising" Judith Harding reprising her most irreverently agile character, La Dink.

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

a POEM for your thoughts

**************************
American Life in Poetry: Column 527
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
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Seventy years ago, when I entered Beardshear Elementary in Ames, Iowa, the school employed a custodian, Mr. Shockley, who had for an office a closet under the stairs. I wish I could thank him for mopping up all our vomit and helping us buckle our galoshes. Here’s a fine poem about custodians by David Livewell, from New Jersey, whose most recent book of poems is Shackamaxon (Truman State Univ. Press, 2012).





Custodians 

Retired from other trades, they wore
Work clothes again to mop the johns
And feed the furnace loads of coal.
Their roughened faces matched the bronze

Of the school bell the nun would swing
To start the day. They limped but smiled,
Explored the secret, oldest nooks:
The steeple’s clock, dark attics piled

With inkwell desks, the caves beneath
The stage on Bingo night. The pastor
Bowed to the powers in their hands:
Fuses and fire alarms, the plaster

Smoothing a flaking wall, the keys
To countless locks. They fixed the lights
In the crawl space above the nave
And tolled the bells for funeral rites.

Maintain what dead men made. Time blurs
Their scripted names and well-waxed floors,
Those keepers winking through the years
And whistling down the corridors.

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

POETRY NEWS -NYC


Carolyn Forché to Judge Walt Whitman Award

 
Submissions are now open for the 2016 Walt Whitman Award contest! The winner receives $5,000, publication by Graywolf Press, an all-expenses-paid six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy, and distribution of the winning book to thousands of Academy members.Submit your manuscript between September 1 and November 1. Carolyn Forché will judge.
more-at-poets


Fall Conversation Series

 
Our new fall series with The New York Public Library pairs poets with complementary creative minds. The stellar lineup features Claudia Rankine and artist Carrie Mae Weems (September 9); Mark Doty and choreographer Bill T. Jones (October 19); Kevin Young and chef Gabrielle Hamilton (November 19); and Sharon Olds and actress Cynthia Nixon (December 11). Events are free and open to the public, but online advance registration is required.
more-at-poets

Listen to Mark Doty read his tribute poem to artist Jackson Pollock.

listen

Read Kevin Young's essay on Langston Hughes's first book.

read more

Check out our new video series that explores the publishing process.

Watch

POETRY NEWS - CHICAGO


September 1, 2015

2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship Winners Announced

$129,000 in prizes awarded to five young poets
CHICAGO – The Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine are pleased to announce the five recipients of the 2015 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships: Nate Marshall, Erika L. Sánchez, Danniel Schoonebeek, Safiya Sinclair, and Jamila Woods. Among the largest awards offered to young poets in the United States, the $25,800 prize is intended to encourage the further study and writing of poetry and is open to all US poets between 21 and 31 years of age.
“Our winners this year are five poets who are accomplished in the most capacious and meaningful sense of the word,” says Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine. “They are not only gifted writers but also keen educators, activists, leaders in their communities. Each of these distinctive and skillful people, both at and away from the writing desk, is devoted to illuminating us in significant and inspiring ways."
Established in 1989 by Ruth Lilly to encourage the further writing and study of poetry, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship program has dramatically expanded since its inception. Until 1995, university writing programs nationwide each nominated one student poet for a single fellowship; from 1996 until 2007, two fellowships were awarded. In 2008, the competition was opened to all US poets between 21 and 31 years of age, and the number of fellowships increased to five, totaling $75,000. In 2013, the Poetry Foundation received a generous gift from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund to create the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships, which increased the fellowship amount from $15,000 to $25,800.
“One of the Foundation’s proudest moments every year is the announcement of five young poets whom we know will do great things in poetry,” said Henry Bienen, interim president of the Poetry Foundation. “This is a phenomenal group. The greatest applause you can give them is to read their poems.”
Nate Marshall’s first book, Wild Hundreds (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. He is a coeditor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (2015). He is a visiting assistant professor at Wabash College, a founding member of the Dark Noise poetry collective, and a Cave Canem fellow. His work has appeared in Poetry, Indiana Review, and The New Republic, among other publications. He was the star of the award-winning documentary Louder Than a Bomb and has been featured in the HBO original series Brave New Voices. Marshall received the 2014 Hurston/Wright Founding Members Award for College Writers and the 2013 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award.
Erika L. Sánchez is a CantoMundo fellow and winner of the 2013 “Discovery”/Boston Review Prize. She has received scholarships from the Fulbright Program and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Her poetry has appeared in Boston Review, diode, Hayden's Ferry Review, Hunger Mountain, Pleiades, and Poetry; on Latino USA (NPR); and in the anthology Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (2015). Her nonfiction has been published in Al Jazeera, Cosmopolitan, the Guardian, NBC News, Rolling Stone, Salon, and many others. Sánchez lives in Chicago.
Danniel Schoonebeek’s American Barricade (YesYes Books, 2014) was named one of the year’s ten standout debuts by Poets & Writers. His work has appeared in theNew Yorker, Poetry, Tin House, Iowa Review, Fence, BOMB, the Brooklyn Rail, jubilat, Guernica, and elsewhere. He has received awards and honors from the Millay Colony for the Arts, Poets House, the Ace Hotel, and Oregon State University. Schoonebeek hosts the Hatchet Job reading series in Brooklyn and has served as editor of the PEN Poetry Series since 2013. His second book, a travelogue called C’est la guerre, is forthcoming from Poor Claudia in 2015.
Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and earned her MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia. Her first full-length collection, Cannibal(University of Nebraska Press, 2016), won a Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, theCincinnati Review, the Journal, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. She has been awarded a writing fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, an Amy Clampitt Residency Award, an Emerging Writer Fellowship from Aspen Summer Words, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is currently pursuing a PhD in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California, where she is a Dornsife doctoral fellow.
Poet, singer, and teaching artist Jamila Woods has been called “a modern-day Renaissance woman” by the Chicago Sun-Times. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and her poetry has been published by MUZZLE, Third World Press, and Poetry. She is the associate artistic director of Young Chicago Authors and a founding member of its Teaching Artist Corps. Woods is a member of Dark Noise, a collective of poets and educators of color, and the frontwoman of the Chicago-based soul music duo M&O. She lives in Chicago.
About the Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience. The Poetry Foundation seeks to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for poetry by developing new audiences, creating new avenues for delivery, and encouraging new kinds of poetry through innovative literary prizes and programs. For more information, please visit poetryfoundation.org.
About Poetry magazine
Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry is the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world. Monroe’s “Open Door” policy, set forth in volume 1 of the magazine, remains the most succinct statement of Poetry’s mission: to print the best poetry written today, in whatever style, genre, or approach. The magazine established its reputation early by publishing the first important poems of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, and other now-classic authors. In succeeding decades, it has presented—often for the first time—works by virtually every major contemporary poet.
Follow the Poetry Foundation and Poetry on Facebook at facebook.com/poetryfoundation or on Twitter @PoetryFound.
POETRY FOUNDATION | 61 West Superior Street | Chicago, IL 60654 | 312.787.7070


Media contact:
Polly Faust, pfaust@poetryfoundation.org, 312.799.8065
Elizabeth Burke-Dain, eburkedain@poetryfoundation.org, 312.799.8016

POETRY NEWS - AMHERST, MA

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

READ this POEM out LOUD


Patience Taught by Nature

 
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

a POEM for your thoughts

***************************
American Life in Poetry: Column 526
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
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I once attended a memorial service at which a friend’s ashes were put in the Platte River at first light, just as thousands of Sandhill Cranes were lifting off the water, crying. Flowing water has just what it takes to carry someone away in fine style. Here’s a poem by Kyle Harvey, who lives in Colorado.





Settler's Creek 

You’d been gone four months by then,
but we brought you along anyway.

On my back, you rested
riding inside a wooden box.

The idea was to lay you gently
at the water’s surface,

but our clumsy hands spilled you,
and it was hard to tell whether you went head

or feet first, but it didn’t much matter
anyway, I suppose.

You would float on down the creek
until you had reached the next and so on.

My father gave a little wave and joked,
“We’ll see you back on down in Denver, Dad.”

We stood there in silence
listening to you chuckle

under the bridge and over
the first set of riffles downstream.