Story Archives of 'poetry'

The MacDowell Colony in Peterborough awards resident fellowships to artists – providing them with the time, space, quiet and community to do their work. Poet Ralph Sneeden of Exeter spent two winter weeks writing there.

This week an innovative series on art and faith kicks off in the Monadnock region. The Burnt Norton Summer Forum, named for the poem by T.S. Eliot, takes place this week in Nelson, New Hampshire. Writers, philosophers, dancers, artists and others will gather to share their ideas on creativity and spirituality.

Alice Fogel will be among them. She’s an author, poet and teacher. Her most recent book is Strange Terrain: A Poetry Handbook for Reluctant Readers. On Wednesday afternoon, she’ll be talking about the effect of silence in poetry, and in the evening will read along with poet Mary Catherine Jones. Alice Fogel joins us from her home in Acworth, New Hampshire.

(Photo by Denis Collette via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Hip-hop music tends to land in controversy and in the center of political battles. We hear critics denouncing misogyny and violence that make up so much of the music, or we hear defenders of rap’s legitimacy as an artistic reflection of African-American culture. Lost in the shuffle is the poetic value of the lyrics.

As hip-hop scholar Adam Bradley writes, “The caricature of the artistically and intellectually impoverished street thug fails to account for the linguistic virtuosity and cultural literacy required to rap effectively to a beat.” Adam teaches literature at Claremont McKenna College, and is author of Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip-Hop. We called to ask him why rap deserves the academic treatment.

(Photo by NRK P3 via Flickr/Creative Commons)

Juan Felipe Herrera’s poetry, in the words of one critic, is “a manifesto you can dance to.” It’s little wonder. The son of migrant farm workers, Herrera was reared on both the hardships and the heart of California’s campesino community. Cesar Chavez loomed large. So did Allen Ginsberg, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Herrera’s mother, who taught him the power of storytelling, word play, and self-possession. His was a boyhood that kept time to Mexican ballads and San Francisco jazz - a rich brew for a kid given to solitary wanderings and prone to brooding over injustice.

By the 1970s, Juan Felipe Herrera was a pioneer of the Chicano spoken word movement, combining art and activism. Today, he holds the Tomas Rivera endowed chair in the Department of Creative Writing at the Univerisity of California-Riverside. He is the author of 25 books. One of them, One Hundred and Eighty-Seven Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border (City Lights Books), was just named winner of the PEN/West and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles poetry prizes. At the beginning of that collection, he writes, "I didn’t start out to be a poet. Because I had been silenced, I started out to be a speaker." Juan Felipe Herrera joins Word of Mouth to discuss art and activism from the studios of KUCI in Irvine, Calif.

Watch Juan Felipe Herrera read from One Hundred and Eighty-Seven Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border:

Here's a poem from a recent issue of the poetry journal Luna:

iraq tree

all the broken boys
and the shredded elms cannot be sewn back
nine generations of weeping for every wound,
all dust howls nine lifetimes, ragged, upright orange flesh open
butterfly seed tomb

colorless, almost transparent standing in between cross-fire
and five hundred pound American bombs and Shiite clerics,
the face of Walt Whitman with a pipe, or Hirschman on Columbus Street
angular, frayed and the cherubic azure of their eyes
upon the dead with fists frozen, rising up, or with shoulders bleached
hunched to serve, they fire the body, love they say, treasure
its rose-stamped holdes, Euphrates across the broken pubis
the leaf branches curled to one side, a mosque remains,
in a bitten wood of syllables, poison and beards, I hear
a mortar broadcast across the globe, general-men in
camouflage, they say nothing has changed, we are en route
to triumph, listen to them

—Juan Felipe Herrera

If you’re looking for a new experience this holiday weekend, consider the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. It’s the first ever state-wide celebration of poets and poetry on the home turf of Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Jack Kerouac. The three-day festival features readings, workshops, films and music.

Headlining tomorrow night in Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, is poet and author Nick Flynn. His two books of poetry earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship and numerous other awards. His memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, won the Pen/Martha Albrand Award. He’s also collaborated with visual artists, worked on an Academy Award-nominated film, authored a play called Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins, and is now at work on a new memoir.

Nick Flynn joins us on Word of Mouth to talk about his work and this weekend's festival.