Catherine Halley

Roller Derby Haiku

Roller derby haiku. They call it “girl-powered poetry inspired by derby queens.” We call it a wonder we made it through high school without this stuff. Some of our favorite examples:

Eva at the line
zombie on zombie action
skating corpses fly

and:

crushin’ on U, Doll
gotsta let UR feelings show
brutal valentine

Brutal valentine, indeed!

04.22.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Annie Finch

The Wide Ecstasies of Influence

Jason Guriel’s recent post about acknowledgments, and all the places its comments spun, got me thinking about acknowledgments in a deeper sense.  When we read a book of poetry, aren’t we just as alert to the unspoken acknowledgments–the poetic influences that surround a book like a halo, like roots, like an attic—as to those written on the acknowledgments page?  Don’t those influences shape our reading, just as much?

04.22.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

Martin Earl

Some Practical Advice for Young Poets Considering Exile: Part 2

The catalyst, the fuse, call it what you like, whatever it is that sets sweeping change into motion, often comes in the form of epiphany, the sudden realization that things are not what they had seemed to be a moment earlier.

04.21.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (56)

Annie Finch

A Quote from Simone Weil . . .

04.20.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (212)

Jason Guriel

What One Can Learn About Poets from Their Acknowledgements: Some Rickety Conclusions

They appear every few years, when poets put out new collections, which is to say: they appear infrequently. Indeed, they often resemble afterthoughts, slipped into the backs of books or shrunk down and very nearly dissolved in the tiny type of copyright pages. And the events they record and acknowledge – the securing of grants, the input of peers, the debuts of poems in magazines – are less meteorological than geological. Acknowledgements summarize the occasional moments of friction and achievement in the otherwise tectonically slow grind of poets’ lives.

04.19.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (84)

Camille Dungy

Dyslexicon

(An ode to words removed from the 2008 Oxford Junior Dictionary, a dictionary aimed at children ages 7 to 9, concluding with the newly-added words.)

04.16.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

Catherine Halley

Fanny Howe & Ange Mlinko Win 2009 Pegasus Awards

Please join me and all the Poetry Foundation staff in congratulating Fanny Howe and Ange Mlinko, winners of the sixth annual Pegasus Awards.

Howe is the recipient of the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Established in 1986 and presented annually by the Poetry Foundation to a living U.S. poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition, the Ruth Lilly Prize is one of the most prestigious awards given to American poets, and at $100,000 it is one of the nation’s largest literary prizes.

Poet and critic Ange Mlinko is the winner of the Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry Criticism. Ange Mlinko is the third recipient of the Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry Criticism. The $10,000 prize is awarded for poetry criticism that is intelligent and learned as well as lively and enjoyable to read.

The prizes will be presented at the Pegasus Awards ceremony at the Arts Club of Chicago in May.

Fanny Howe, whose poems first appeared in Poetry magazine in 1973, recently discussed her memoir The Winter Sun with Chris Wiman and Don Share in the Poetry magazine March podcast. More of Howe’s poetry and prose she’s written for Poetry magazine can be found here. You may also read an essay about Howe by Maureen McLane at Boston Review.

Ange Mlinko has published many poems and essays in Poetry magazine. Most recently, her manifesto “The Eighties, Glory Of” appeared in the February 2009 issue. More of her work, including an essay she wrote for this site about the falling out between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov over the Vietnam War, can be found here. Her new-ish column “Lingo” appears in The Nation.

04.14.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)