Obituaries : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

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After more than fifteen years, the Poetry in Motion program that put poems by W.S. Merwin, Lucille Clifton, Lorine Niedecker, and Emily Dickinson—among many, many others—alongside ads for Dr. Z’s acne treatment and Lasik surgery on New York City’s subways, has ended.
The New York Times reported last month that the “Poetry in Motion” partnership between the Poetry Society of America and the Metro Transportation Authority would phase out in May and transform into a new SubTalk program entitled “Train of Thought.”
The new program will still feature one poem a year, but will focus more on quotations from history, philosophy, and science. The new quotations will be chosen by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for, according to their press release, “both their significance and accessibility.”
Alicia Martinez, MTA’s Director of Marketing & Corporate Communications, says, “New Yorkers have wide-ranging interests, and we felt that we could include material from a variety of other disciplines in addition to poetry to bring important, engaging, insightful quotes to our riders, and entice them to explore the author or subject further. We believe this approach will reach a broader and larger audience.”
Jim Dwyer wrote a eulogy of sorts last week for “Poetry in Motion” that has made the rounds via email and blogs, but for the most part it has been a quite transition.
The program has spawned similar programs across the country, from Los Angleles to St. Louis to here in Seattle, where we have a Poetry in Motion-inspired program called Poetry on the Buses. Since I only saw “Poetry in Motion” in fits and starts, my main experience with the response to poetry on public transportation has been through Poetry on the Buses, which is mixed to say the least.

06.12.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

D.A. Powell

Conceptual Poetics: A Practicum

I love this idea of valueless, unoriginal poetry based on junk. I’ve been trying to write poems, and now it turns out that I could have just been assembling them. I mean, I’ve done some avant-gardist things in my time (let us call them, for lack of a better term, “poems”), but I think I spent way too much time worrying about making “sense” (who even knows what that means anymore?) So today, since I’m, like so many effete bourgeois Americans, absolutely burdened with leisure time, I went out to see how this concept of Conceptual Poetics might liberate me from the senseless drudgery of writing.

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06.11.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (19)

Rigoberto González

raúlrsalinas (1934-2008)

Elder statesman, Xicanindio leader, poet of the people, giver of hope to the
oppressed and the incarcerated, Raúl Salinas passed away last night in Austin, Tejaztlán.

02.13.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Rigoberto González

Wednesday Shout Out

As the second winner of The Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize hits the bookstore shelves (future shout out, y’all) I am reminded of one of Montoya’s early champions, poet Lee Herrick, founder and editor of In the Grove, where Montoya’s first published poems appeared. Sadly, Montoya’s only book the ice worker sings was published posthumously in 1999, a year after his premature death at the age of 31. Since then, a collective effort by writers of all stripes has kept his memory and art alive. Hence the memorial poetry prize spearheaded by Letras Latinas of the Institute for Latino Studies at Notre Dame, hence the following poem in Herrick’s debut collection of poetry:

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10.17.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Ange Mlinko

“It matters cosmically”

The author of my favorite children’s book has died. The New York Times on Madeleine L’Engle:
The book used concepts that Ms. L’Engle said she had plucked from Einstein’s theory of relativity and Planck’s quantum theory, almost flaunting her frequent assertion that children’s literature is literature too difficult for adults to understand.
Her deeper thoughts on writing were deliciously mysterious. She believed that experience and knowledge are subservient to the subconscious and perhaps larger, spiritual influences.
“I think that fantasy must possess the author and simply use him,” she said in an interview with Horn Book magazine in 1983. “I know that is true of ‘A Wrinkle in Time.’ I cannot possibly tell you how I came to write it. It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice.
“It was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.”