New Poetry, Every Week
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Leslie Sainz created a playlist • 3 months ago
When asked about the advantages of poetry in the face of political exile, poet and activist 'Bra Willie' Kgositsile said, "Because poetry can be memorized, can be passed around orally, it render[s] the banning irrelevant." The following five poems are written by poets who have either faced exile and extradition directly, or have inherited the narrative of exile through cultural and inter-generational trauma. Let their stories live on.
J. David Ockunzzi created a playlist • 3 months ago
2018 was the worst year of my life. I say this not knowing how it will end, but I dare-say I was not happy. Maybe this is because happiness so often is reliant upon circumstance, and as someone with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and borderline personality disorder- the odds are rarely in my favor. Yet, here I am writing this. Because of joy. Because in the dark spaces I chased it, until my life was sore, until I was dancing cheek to cheek with that yellow grace. Joy, in its purest form is reliant on nothing but awe and openness to something other than our perception of our present selves. While similar, it is far from happiness, and thankfully neither is fully invested in the other’s presence—they exist, with or without each other. In the dark places, you must store joy where it is accessible for when it is necessary. This is where I found myself—in the dark. Driving way too fast on a highway past sun-down, my friend Emily in the passenger seat, together screaming the lyrics to Augustana’s "Boston"… and I woke back into my life, out of the nightmare, out of the vast plain of dark—I was alive again, and the stars… they were everywhere.
Elizabeth Metzger created a playlist • 3 months ago
In "Letters from Max", Sarah Ruhl refers to Virginia Woolf’s idea of “the voice answering the voice” and applies it to Max: “For most poets, the voice answering the voice is an internal dialogue. Max had the gift of an internal voice, and also the gift of answering back to so many other poets.” As I was one of the poets lucky enough to be answered by Max, I wanted to compile and share a playlist of ten of the poems I most answer to from "Four Reincarnations" and "The Final Voicemails" (in Part I, previously). I also wanted to include an accompanying playlist of poems Max answered to—the poems of his mentors and masters—as these were not only the poems that colored his voice but also the poems he offered me and many of his poet-peers for inspiration or solace, challenge or solidarity. This second list directly and indirectly shapes the first.
Among the voices that influenced Max: the gnomes of Dickinson, the love poems of Jack Gilbert, the playful F-U music of Franz Wright, the blur of allusion and personal narrative in his teacher (and the editor of TFV) Louise Gluck’s Meadowlands, the idea of “the first draft of humanity” in Nathaniel Mackey’s Splay Anthem, the go-for-broke rhythm of Wallace Stevens’ thinking, Timothy Donnelly’s zesty intelligence in a sip of anything, the scrimshawed suffering of Lucie Brock-Broido’s animals, Dottie’s primordial drive for the all-colors of survival, the wicked self-analysis of Berryman’s Dream Songs.
Among the voices that influenced Max: the gnomes of Dickinson, the love poems of Jack Gilbert, the playful F-U music of Franz Wright, the blur of allusion and personal narrative in his teacher (and the editor of TFV) Louise Gluck’s Meadowlands, the idea of “the first draft of humanity” in Nathaniel Mackey’s Splay Anthem, the go-for-broke rhythm of Wallace Stevens’ thinking, Timothy Donnelly’s zesty intelligence in a sip of anything, the scrimshawed suffering of Lucie Brock-Broido’s animals, Dottie’s primordial drive for the all-colors of survival, the wicked self-analysis of Berryman’s Dream Songs.
Elizabeth Metzger created a playlist • 3 months ago
In "Letters from Max", Sarah Ruhl refers to Virginia Woolf’s idea of “the voice answering the voice” and applies it to Max: “For most poets, the voice answering the voice is an internal dialogue. Max had the gift of an internal voice, and also the gift of answering back to so many other poets.” As I was one of the poets lucky enough to be answered by Max, I wanted to compile and share a playlist of ten of the poems I most answer to from "Four Reincarnations" and "The Final Voicemails". I also wanted to include (in Part II, forthcoming) an accompanying playlist of poems Max answered to—the poems of his mentors and masters—as these were not only the poems that colored his voice but also the poems he offered me and many of his poet-peers for inspiration or solace, challenge or solidarity. The second list directly and indirectly shapes the first.
The poems I’ve selected from "Four Reincarnations" are love poems from the border between life and death—spiritual, erotic, sage, and sometimes child-wise. The poems I’ve selected from "The Final Voicemails" have the new dark of first waking in the middle of the night—the poems are woken in the middle of a body that is disappearing and they are written with the gift of unfinishedness. As the playlist goes on, the speaker finds paternal affection for lab mice that are injected with his cancer, romance becomes a metaphysical transaction, time becomes a mode of empathy, doctors and patient reverse roles in a hilarious cringeworthy gymnastics, and the body hungers only for itself.
The poems I’ve selected from "Four Reincarnations" are love poems from the border between life and death—spiritual, erotic, sage, and sometimes child-wise. The poems I’ve selected from "The Final Voicemails" have the new dark of first waking in the middle of the night—the poems are woken in the middle of a body that is disappearing and they are written with the gift of unfinishedness. As the playlist goes on, the speaker finds paternal affection for lab mice that are injected with his cancer, romance becomes a metaphysical transaction, time becomes a mode of empathy, doctors and patient reverse roles in a hilarious cringeworthy gymnastics, and the body hungers only for itself.
Ugly Duckling Presse created a playlist • 4 months ago
'No Budu Please' emerges in the voice of “an artificial boy in some sort of plastic prairie,” as he zeroes in on desire, spirit, and diversion. A diversion for all those forgotten and on the outskirts, impenetrable. Wingston González has carved out a distinctive way of creating beats with words, a spiritual questioning of godliness, and a space of immersion in a Garifuna history marked by the 1797 expulsion from St. Vincent and subsequent exile to the coast of Central America. One of the most prolific Garifuna writers today, González has built a window into contemporary Black indigeneity in Mesoamerica, but also closed that same window in a sidelong attack on colonialist language and syntax, rewriting Spanish as he goes. Urayoán Noel’s translation moves the ludic experimentation with Spanish into an English that also tears at the colonial heart of Occidental imaginings. Both books insist that colonial fantasies are not to be stomached, that there is no easy way in or out of reality or dream, rather a series of glacial contradictions and bloody yearnings.
New Poetry, Every Week
Sign up to get a new poetry playlist in your inbox each week. You'll receive set of poems around a different theme, with a focus on contemporary poets.
P.S. It's free and you can unsubscribe any time. Learn more.