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Poets anthologized in Legitimate Dangers
Listen to LIVE to many of these
poets at Fishouse
Poems AUDIO OF EMERGING POETS
Rick Barot
“With an eye and ear so
finely tuned we are reminded of Elizabeth Bishop, Barot's
poems convince us that philosophy and landscape are inseparable from human
vision. Painters like Miró, Bonnard, Rembrandt, and the ideas of
Wittgenstein and others are caught in Barot's line of sight, but so are
alleyway shards of glass. These poems are filled with the pleasures of
vivid language, yes, but they are more than that.” –Sarabande Books
Dan
Beachy-Quick
"For anyone who
thinks that Postmodern poetry represents a complete break from that of the
Romantics, Dan Beachy-Quick's Mulberry will come as a
revelation... – Lyn Hejinian
“Metaphor, repetitive
rhythm, and a common theme of searching for the Infinite by scrutinizing
the world, whether with a magnifying glass or a telescope, characterize the
original contemplations of Mulberry.” –The Midwest Book
Review
Joshua
Beckman
Ernest Hilbert writes on
Beckman: "Beckman's poems flow out from a long American tradition
beginning with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass through Carl
Sandburg's Chicago Poems to Charles Olson's Maximus poems and
Allen Ginsberg's Fall of America, even, perhaps strangely, the
columnar iconographic gestures of Concrete poets like Ian Hamilton Finlay,
overlaid onto otherwise buoyant lines." Ernest Hilbert writes on
Beckman: "Beckman's poems flow out from a long American tradition
beginning with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass through Carl
Sandburg's Chicago Poems to Charles Olson's Maximus poems and
Allen Ginsberg's Fall of America, even, perhaps strangely, the columnar
iconographic gestures of Concrete poets like Ian Hamilton Finlay, overlaid
onto otherwise buoyant lines."
Poetry and
Collaboration: Joshua Beckman & Matthew Rohrer
Joshua Bell
“Bell’s
fierceness of wit, his deft lyricism, his ability to swing adroitly between
dictions high and low, combine to create a world that is savage and
irreverent, yet fraught with longings spiritual and corporeal.” – Cate
Marvin
David Berman
“Revered for their
careful observation and off-kilter humor, the poems in Actual Air
read like offspring of the union of Wallace
Stevens and Kenneth Koch, both
of whom Berman cites as important influences.”
“He describes his poems
as “psychedelic soap operas,” and in them he name-checks such pop cultural
icons and brand-name products as Judas Priest, Visine, Woolite, and Elmer
of Elmer’s Glue, all without diluting his wry sense of wonder at the
mysteries of fin-de-siecle American existence. […] Well before putting
together said collection, Berman released three alt-country-inflected
indie-rock albums—Starlite Walker, The Natural Bridge, and American
Water—on the Chicago-based label Drag City. His fourth, Bright Flight,
followed in 2001. Thus—not unlike, say, Jewel—Berman is that rare
well-established singer/songwriter who’s been able to write and release a
successful collection of poetry.” (full interview in Redivider)
See also Silver Jews
album Bright
Flight
Erica
Bernheim
“Bernheim's lack of
regard for the reader--her tightly packed one-liners and inward
language--is her way of keeping us close. Bernheim lets us in on a mind
mid-thought, too absorbed to either universalize itself nor linger on its
"good lines." (Read full Review
of Between the Room and the City)
Mark Bibbins
“I am sometimes wondering
about the concept of a queer sensibility, and how such a thing (if there is
one) makes its way from background to foreground (or if it should).
Grammar, sex, salvation, travel, pollution, public television, and
(especially) music have all been involved in the production of these
poems.” – Mark Bibbins
“There is a comforting
urban rythym to Bibbins writing, like scat poetry infused with hip hop
rythyms while overdosing (a common theme of Bibbins) on Robert Pinsky.”
(excerpt from review
at Bookslut.com)
Read a review
of Sky Lounge
Reads a poem that borrows
a line from Wallace Stevens Live Audio
Sherwin
Bitsui
Live
Audio from At the Fishouse
Richard Blanco
Joel Brouwer
Oni Buchanan
Julianne Buchsbaum
Stephen Burt
Dan Chiasson
Carrie St. George Comer
Olena Kalytiak Davis
Monica de la Torre
Timothy Donnelly
Ben Doyle
Thomas Sayers Ellis
Andrew Feld
Monica Ferrell
Miranda Field
Nick Flynn
Bio and Audio of poems
“Father Outside” (with graphic poem) and “Swarm”
“Flynn’s work has been
described as post-confessional, primarily because of the poems in Some
Ether, which focused on his mother’s suicide when he was twenty-two,
his difficult childhood, and his stilted family life. In Blind Huber,
however, the poems eschew Flynn’s history and focus on the life of the
blind beekeeper, Francoise Huber, who lived in the 18th Century. While the
subject matter may differ dramatically, in all of Nick Flynn’s work there
is the struggle for connectivity in a disjointed and harsh reality. As Claudia Rankine noted about Some
Ether, "We are guided by a stunning and solitary voice into lives that
have spiritually and physically imploded. No one survives and still there
is so much to be felt. Here is sorrow and madness reconciled to
humanity." (excerpt from Academy of American Poets website)
Katie Ford
Arielle Greenberg
Jennifer Grotz
Matthea
Harvey
Several audio poems
Reading at Pete’s
Candystore
Reading
from No One Will See Themself in You at Zeke’s Gallery
Reading
at Prairie Lights
I'm probably primarily
influenced by what comes in through my eyes (sorry ears, mouth, nose and
fingers). My sister (Ellen Harvey) is a painter. My poems are friends with
paintings by Amy Cutler and Julie Morstad, photographs by Gabriel Orozco and
admire, but can't talk to paintings by Agnes Martin. I enjoy the feeling of
finding a kindred spirit as well as finding my opposite. I have an orange
binder labeled “Current” full of torn-out pages from magazines…When I page
through it right now, it's mostly artwork -- a shiny green chicken rocking
chair by Jaime Hayon, photographs by Eirik Johnson (of strange temporary or
interstitial places), and a picture of the miniature gloves showed at the
Museum of Arts and Design's show, “Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting.”
There's also a photo of an almost all-white peacock and a picture of the
world's tallest man meeting the world's smallest man. I collect dialogue I
overhear on the street. Recently I heard “I got everybody saying it like
they'd been saying it for years” and that will probably turn up in a poem
at some point. A lot of things just appear in my head out of nowhere, or
out of the thin air that's in there. Those usually become poems -- phrases
like “Dinna's Pig” and “First Person Fabulous.” (from interview
with Matthea Harvey at Bookslut.com)
Terrance Hayes
Dispatches:Journal
at PoetryFoundation.org
“If my poetry is a
reflection of any particular "thing," I hope it reflects my
receptiveness. The way a mirror reflects receptiveness, I mean. Hence
reading, inventive imitation and wild exploration are at the root of my
poetic process. I am a happy apprentice to the contents of your local
bookshelf. There are recurring explorations of race, heritage and
masculinity (I'm mostly interested in the intersections of identity and
culture), and rather than deny my thematic obsessions, I work to change the
forms in which I voice them: baritone here, tenor there, soprano, alto...
That's to say, I aspire to a kind of fluid, mutant style. A poetic style
that resists style. Maybe my most recent collection reflects this.
Ultimately I'm interested in a Whitmanesque notion of poetry. A poetry
open-armed and dangerous. A poetry that says as Whitman said: "Do I
contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I
contain multitudes." –Terrance Hayes
3 poems in
Guernica Magazine
Poem
prompt from Terrance Hayes poem
“The Same City”
Steve Healey
Thomas Heise
Brian Henry
Christine Hume
Major
Jackson
During his travels, and
time spent as Curator of Literary Arts at the Painted Bride Art Center in
Philadelphia, the one constant has been the poetry and the poets he has
been honored to work with -- Amiri Baraka, Yusef Komunyakaa, Patricia
Smith, A. Van Jordan, Sharon Olds, Sekou Sundiata; the late Safiya
Henderson-Holmes, Sapphire, Ursula Rucker, and Willie Perdomo among others.
[…] In the end, Jackson doesn't point to any one poet as inspiration but to
the actual poem. "Quite often a poem will begin as an exercise in
imitation of some wonderful poem I might have read that. However, I am
inspired by the life of poets; this has more to do with personal journeys,
the means by which a poet evolves." Excerpt from Mosaic Literary Magazine, Issue 10 (June, 2002):
Interview with Ron Kavanaugh
Major’s
Top 10 Suggested Pre-writing Activities
Lisa Jarnot
(on her
influences) “My first
influences were musicians– the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. Dylan
was really the key because it was through his work that I discovered the
Beat poets. So my first influences were Jack Kerouac and Allen
Ginsberg and Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie and Lenny Bruce and Abbie
Hoffman. When I started college at the University of Buffalo I
studied literature with two poets– Bob Creeley and Jack Clarke.
Creeley turned me on to Robert Duncan’s work. Jack was a Blake
scholar with a wicked intuition about the emotional and intellectual
world. He was the first one to encourage me to become a poet. So, I
tend to be loyal to first sources. My two pole stars are Ginsberg and
Duncan. In between there are a lot of other writers and
artists-– Bernadette Mayer, Christopher Smart, Frank O’Hara, Lou Reed,
Andy Warhol.”
Her blog
The Robert Duncan
Page maintained by Lisa Jarnot
Lisa J's
Poetry Grid: an Incomplete Map of Avant-garde Traditions
A Van Jordan
“That same fearless
hybridization comes into Jordan's newest poetry collection, Quantum
Lyrics. Rather than follow one character's story, this book explores
cultural identity by moving among historical, fictional, and
autobiographical figures. The likes of Albert Einstein and Richard Feynmen
rub shoulders with comic book superheroes, which in turn are juxtaposed
with narrators that tell tales resembling the author's own life.” (excerpt
from Where
Physics, Poetry, and Politics Collide
The American Prospect’s Anna Clark
talks to A. Van Jordan, author of the new poetry collection Quantum
Lyrics discusses institutional racism, writing in the wake of the Jena
6, and the language of poetry.
A. Van Jordan's Poetry Suite
'M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A' Poems Depict Life of a Precocious Child in 1936 Ohio – NPR
interview
Bio
at Spectrum of Poetic Fire
Essay
- The Synchronicity of Scenes A consideration of poetry from the
perspective of cinematography (Cortland Review)
Ilya
Kaminsky
"This is Kaminsky's first book of poems. At 27 he comes
with a voice very much his own. Like Joseph Brodsky before him, Kaminsky is
a terrifyingly good poet, another poet from the former U.S.S.R. who, having
adopted English, has come to put us native speakers to shame... --John Timpane, The Philadephlia Inquirer
"With his magical style in English, poems in "Dancing
In Odessa" seem like a literary counterpart to Chagall in which laws
of gravity have been suspended and colors reassigned, but only to make
everyday reality that much more indelible. This young poet has brought over
into English the heritage of Akhmatova, Mandelshatm and Tsvetaeva, but at
the same time his verses are as fresh as tomorrow’s advertising jingle and
as familiar as folk music. -American Academy of Arts and Letters'
Citation for 2005 Addison M. Metcalf Award
Live
Audio At the Fishouse
Sally Keith
“In their ambition, and
in much of their style, these poems clearly show the mark of Keith’s
mentor, Jorie Graham; but the poems that seem most indebted to Graham
seldom attain the frenzied, existential urgency of Graham’s best work.”
Excerpt from a microreview
of her book Design in the Boston
Review of Books
Suji Kwock
Poem & write-up at Salon.com
22
Drafts of the Poem Generation at Esopus.com
Webcast
of Lunch Poems – “There's love and sadness at the root of those poems.
There is also a bridge, a language that reads," writes Yusef
Komunyakaa who selected Kim for the 2002 Walt Whitman Award for her debut
collection of poetry, Notes from the Divided Country. Garrett Hongo
writes of the collection, "Kim's brilliantly crafted, brave new poems
move us into an emotional union with the seemingly far-flung past of Korea
political geography...what voice, what witness, what glorious
descendancy."
Kim James
Kimbrell
Joanna Klink
“Klink may be placed in a
line of romantic modernism descending from Wallace Stevens, a mode that
makes the world an object of contemplation and reconstruction, while
maintaining the meditative mind’s integrity and blessed rage for order. Her
book emphasizes the humanity of Stevens’s abstract fiction.” Read the rest
of this review at Boston
Review
Noelle Kocot
“An argument
could be made that one of the dominant styles of post-M.F.A. poetry written
during the last few years is a form of modest self-exposure—a
confessionalism lite—that hinges on the disclosure of some quirky
individual experience or character trait. Running parallel to this tendency
is an unaffiliated group of poets (mostly women) writing a rawer version of
personal expression. With three books published in the past five years,
Noelle Kocot is one of the better-known—and just plain better—practitioners
of this poetry. Her previous books, 4 and The Raving Fortune,
sonorously voiced difficult experiences as the tragedies endemic to
families, friendships, and everyday life. Her latest, Poem for the End
of Time and Other Poems, was published after the death of her husband,
and the long title piece is dedicated to him.” (from Alan Gilbert’s review
in The Believer)
Katy Lederer
Dana Levin
Live
Audio – Dana Levin on the first poem she ever wrote
Live
Audio – On her poem Ars Poetica written
from a dream she had
Maurice
Manning
Listen
as Manning talks about his poetry for All Things Considered.
Quantum Cowboys and Honky
Tonk Heroes: A Conversation with Maurice
Manning (Sycamore Review)
Sabrina Orah
Mark
Audio
reading her poems and advice to young poets at From the Fishouse
Audio
On the form of her prose poems at From the Fishouse
Chapbook from
Woodland Editions
Corey Marks
Khaled Mattawa
Jeffrey McDaniel
Joyelle McSweeney
Sarah Messer
Ethan Paquin
Alan Michael Parker
D. A. Powell
Kevin Prufer
Srikanth Reddy Spencer
Reece Paisley Rekdal
Matthew Rohrer
Tessa Rumsey
Robyn Schiff
Patty Seyburn
Brenda Shaughnessy
Richard Siken
Tracy K.
Smith
Reading “Duende” LIVE AUDIO
Reads and discuss her
poetry at From the Fishouse LIVE
AUDIO
Julianna
Spahr
PENN Sound LIVE AUDIO
Larissa
Szporluk
Brian Teare
Ann Townsend
Natasha Trethewey
Watch
a video
of Natasha Trethewey's reading at Emory University on May 8 in honor of her
Pulitzer Prize. (Real Player is required.)
Listen
to Terri Gross' interview
with Natasha Trethewey on the July 16, 2007 edition of "Fresh
Air"
Pimone Triplett
For the most part, her
influences are so openly evinced that her poems become more like homages:
any writer who titles one poem "Self-Portrait as a Dream of Giving Up
the Child" cannot be unconscious of Jorie Graham's many poem titles
beginning "Self-Portrait as...." There is something of the dense
intellection of James Merrill and Eleanor Wilner in her attention to
mythological creatures, and the strong influence of Richard Howard is clear
in her poems on the composer Berlioz's wife and the biologist Linnaeus.
(from Library Journal review of Ruining
the Picture)
Karen Volkman
“Mutable Boundaries:
On Prose Poetry”
The poems of Spar recall Rilke of
the Sonnets to Orpheus, not only in her depictions of the language
of sense experience as a congeries of active agents -- "What, I said,
noise, I said, is you, are you, all?" [10], starts one poem, and
"Berry, eye" ends another -- but also in her use of first lines
that simultaneously suggest both a conclusion and riddle -- one poems
starts "No noise subtracts it," and another "A light says
why" -- thus tossing the reader in media res into a slipstream
of cosmic, sensually redolent speculation, even if the subject remains
aporic, an empty eye-of-the-storm. Another influence is Hopkins -- alliteration
and near-hypertrophied word-play abound, and one poem even declares
"The day un-days" -- and Volkman convincingly melds her
engagement with the ludic quality of words and the marvelously chaotic
commerce of the natural world, a distinctive confluence of forces that
keeps her at a healthy distance from poets who might choose deconstructive
tactics to the exclusion of the image, for example, or mundane confession over the charge of the liberated
word. (from Arras
– Little Reviews)
G.C. Waldrep
“Someone coming to
Waldrep’s poetry aware of his back story—a PhD in history, the author of
the study Southern Workers and the Search for Community, an adult
convert to the Amish faith—might be forgiven for expecting a quieter, more
narrative poetry. The poems in Disclamor
as in Goldbeater’s
Skin, Waldrep’s first collection, are edgy, angular, possessed of
an itchy energy but tempered by a long view of the human enterprise that
rescues them from joining much of the talky, hyperkinetic poetry that has
been the vogue in American poetry for the last half dozen or so years.” --Al
Maginnes posted in Poetry Review
Some have made connections to earlier poets Christopher Smart and Hart Crane
Joe Wenderoth
Greg Williamson
Emily Wilson
“Emily
Wilson writes a poetry of exquisite balance. Generous in her spareness,
clear in her complexity, matching wildness of diction with precision of
sense, nervousness with nerve, her poems are not written for analysis,
perhaps not even for approval. […] One hears echoes from poets as different
(and similar) as Dickinson and Hopkins (echoes within echoes, as Hopkins
echoes Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, and Dickinson extends the ballad and
the hymn). Emily Wilson's poems echo the past in a way that could only belong
to the present.” – James Galvin
Review of
The Keep
Suzanne Wise
From the Fishouse AUDIO ARCHIVE
Review
of Kingdom of the Subjunctive
Rebecca Wolff
Mark Wunderlich
There's an entire phalanx
of American poets Mark Wunderlich's age (he's in his mid-thirties) who
write the way he does. You could even imagine a composite poem. You would
be reading it in the New England Review, or maybe, if a number
followed the title, in Fence. The lines would fall into a carefully
managed form, more of a typographical felicity than a metrical pattern. A
series of exquisite images would be deployed throughout: a jar of sea
glass, the iris of a horse, the branching creases in black suede. Suddenly
the sentences would rise to an emotive moment, a declaration of intense
helplessness. But seconds after you finished reading the poem, it would
settle back into that lovely, melancholic sheen that the models have in
Banana Republic catalogs… (Peter Campion’s review
continued at Poetry Magazine.org)
The Glorious Thing:
Jorie Graham and Mark Wunderlich in Conversation
Monica Youn
Ekphrastic poem “Stealing The Scream”
Poet Rebecca Wolff reads
a selection of poems from her collection, Figment, "Life of Sorts;" "Eminent
Victorians;" "Public Space Suite;" "Don't Look in the
Basket;" "Good Enough for Folk Music;" and "Invidious
Comparison." Woolf also reads the following poems, which have not yet
been published in a collection: "Arcadia et in est;" "One
Morning;" "Tonal Pattern;" "Raised by Wolves;"
"The King;" "Where's the Funeral;" and "Dark
Roads."
C. Dale Young
"Because he is a
physician as well as a poet, C. Dale Young straddles the realm of science
and the world of emotion. In The Day Underneath the Day, he
confidently locates himself at the crucial intersection between body and
soul, invoking that foremost of American poet-healers, William Carlos
Williams...." Washington Post Book World, January 13, 2002
"Young is a
fascinating poet by any standard. Formally, his rich, arresting imagery,
sensuous language, and revelry in the natural worldseem quite similar to
William Carlos Williams, Emily Dickinson, or William Wordsworth. Young's
poetry also exhibits post-colonial tensions, where the poet, who was
formerly an insider, now returns home from self-imposed exile only to feel
at once attached and estranged. —Omaar Hena, VERSE magazine
Kevin Young
About Young's work, the
poet Lucille Clifton has said,
"This poet's gift of storytelling and understanding of the music
inherent in the oral tradition of language re-creates for us an inner
history which is compelling and authentic and American."
Video
and audio of the poet reading 5 poems at The Borzoi Reader
Matthew Zapruder
Andrew Zawacki
“Andrew
Zawacki is a poet of startling, exhilarating capacity. ...(T)he conceptual
and formal subtlety of his writing evokes a complex psychological
reality."—Boston
Review
Rachel Zucker
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