Thanks to the internet we have the numbers to prove poetry is still a popular medium — at least online. The Academy of American Poets has announced that the Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Kindness” was this year’s most popular poem by a contemporary poet on its website, Poets.org. The poem, which was read by…
Hold on to your fedoras, my friends: Leonard Cohen has spoken from beyond the grave, and the message is: To hell with Kanye West. Yes, just when you think 2018 can’t get any wilder, the lately deceased unofficial poet laureate of the Jewish people pipes up to deliver a warning about false prophets that is…
A new and important translation aims to introduce readers to David Avidan, the most experimental poet in the history of Hebrew poetry, and a poet unjustly unknown to nearly all English-language readers. Avidan was also a filmmaker, a conceptual artist, and a television and radio host. In all his pursuits, he was obsessed with the…
“In a political culture of managed spectacles and passive spectators, poetry appears as a rift, a peculiar lapse, in the prevailing mode,” wrote Adrienne Rich in her 1993 essay “Someone is Writing a Poem.” Later, in the same essay, she tried to explain just how: “In the wash of poetry the old, beaten, worn stones…
The weather in New York City is frightful! So far today it has windy-rained, rain-snowed, thunder-snowed, and just plain old snowed. It is dark and dreary and the floor of the subway cars is releasing a certain warm-wet scent, which is comforting in a disturbing kind of way. If you have spoken to another person…
On a cold afternoon at the end of Fall term, I walked into my college classroom with trepidation. I knew the students well by then: they were intelligent, engaged, and willing to discuss complex poetry and fiction from all over the world. But the reading for that day — a selection of poems by Israeli…
Hope is not easy to come by these days. Unless you know where to look. Ari Satok did – in the unlikeliest of places. Three years ago, the 22-year-old Toronto native spent a year traveling the world, visiting United World College schools in British Columbia, Wales, Hong Kong, Germany, the Netherlands, New Mexico and Swaziland….
Recently, the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), whose wonderful archive we’ve previously covered here, released the debut issue of their journal of art and design “Full Bleed.” Though “journal of art and design” is MICA’s own categorization, “Full Bleed” includes criticism, poetry, memoir, and more. The first issue, focused on the theme of migration,…
