At the Party: “So What Do You Do?”

by BJ Ward

I say I’m an electrician
trying to connect the wires of the alphabet—

or a non-profit whiskey maker,
distilling to disquiet—
making myself giddy on sounds—
arranging a concert on the page
with a 26-piece band
the world is invited to—

or that Creation sometimes talks to me
and I try to build an ark of ink
that my fellow creatures
might find themselves in—

an admirable admiral animal—

I try to brew it
so that shock of pleasure
floats through it. 

© BJ Ward. Both poems found in Jackleg Opera: Collected Poems, 1990 to 2013, IO Poetry Series/North Atlantic Books, 2013.

The Star-Ledger

by BJ Ward
287 was the long road to the newspaper plant
my black-handed father would ride beneath
the weight of a night sky.
A father who works the night shift
knows that weight, how it accumulates from within
when his mistakes and debt
begin to press on his children and wife.
And so went his life—

If the stars spelled something real,
they might spell the equation
that my father never mastered—
the news just ran through his hands
and what slid there left the black residue
of the world’s doings, pressed knowledge
that read like misaligned tea leaves in his hardening palms,
and in his life line and heart line and other lines
that would normally speak a fortune,
the night just accumulated itself—
a little sky he would spread over us
when the world redelivered him in the morning. 


 

Brooklyn Book Festival

Poet Laureates Past & Present

Literary readings and highlights

Jaswinder Bolina: Avoiding the Obvious

Poet Jaswinder Bolina discusses writing about race, the process of being translated, and more.

"Have you ever been on a poetry pilgrimage?"

Peter Murphy

Award-winning poets sharing their work at historic New York City locales

Poetry Reading with Edward Hirsch at Cooper Union

June 11 2013, 6:30 pm. Celebrate the release of In Spite of Everything, the Stars at the Cooper Union with a poetry reading and book release party in the Frederick P. Rose Auditorium at 41 Cooper Square. The hand-printed book is presented in a limited edition of 30, with poems by Edward Hirsch and etchings by Glenn Goldberg in collaboration with Ruth Lingen and Poote Press/Picture Books.

Poetry 180

OPEN THE DOOR: HOW TO EXCITE YOUNG PEOPLE ABOUT POETRY

The Craft of Poetry: Featured Syllabi

“Live an orchard life then pulp it for another.”

Andrew Seguin is a poet and photographer. His chapbook, Black Anecdote, is a past winner of the Poetry Society of America’s New York Chapbook Fellowship, and he is the recipient of a 2013 Emerging Poets Fellowship from Poets House. Andrew’s most recent photographic work, The Whale in the Margin, is a series of cyanotypes inspired by Moby-Dick. For more information, please visit andrewseguin.com

Joshua R. Helms Wins Dzanc Books Poetry Collection Award

April 22, 2013, Ann Arbor, MI-Dzanc Books is pleased to announce that Joshua R. Helms is the winner of our 2012 poetry award. Helms' manuscript, Machines Like Us, was selected by contest judge, C. Dale Young, from more than 100 submissions. This collection will be published in September 2014. C. Dale Young notes: "Machines Like Us is a dark and deeply obsessive book. It is almost impossible to forget the three primary characters in this collection after witnessing their twisted and repetitive attempts to connect, after witnessing the fact they cannot separate acts of love from acts of harm." "I'm so very excited to have my first collection of poetry chosen by C. Dale Young and published by Dzanc," Helms reacted. "I have great respect and admiration for the books Dzanc produces and I'm beyond honored to be among the authors they publish. I'm extremely happy that my collection has found a home with such a wonderful press." ABOUT JOSHUA R. HELMS Joshua R. Helms lives in Tuscaloosa, where he's an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama. His poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, Phoebe, and Sixth Finch, among others. Machines Likes Us is his first collection of poetry. ABOUT C. DALE YOUNG C. Dale Young is the author of three collections of poetry, the most recent being Torn (Four Way 2011).  A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, he practices medicine full-time, edits poetry for the New England Review, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. ABOUT DZANC BOOKS Dzanc Books was created in 2006 to advance great writing and to impact communities nationally with our efforts to advance literary readership and our advocacy of creative writing workshops and readings. As a non-profit, 501(c)3 organization, Dzanc Books not only publishes literary fiction, but works in partnership with literary journals to advance their readership at every level. Dzanc is also fully committed to developing educational programs in schools. For more information on Dzanc Books and its mission, imprints, books, authors, awards, and programs, please visit www.dzancbooks.org.

McSweeney’s has a poetry series!

Russian Underground Poetry & Kirill Medvedev

Mon Apr 22, 8:00 PM

Russian Underground Poetry & Kirill Medvedev

at The Poetry Project @ St. Mark’s, 131 E. 10th St., NY 

 

Russian Underground Poetry from OBERIU to Moscow Conceptualism: Alexander Vvedensky and Vsevolod Nekrasov, plus a special appearance by Kirill Medvedev.With Ainsley Morse, Eugene Ostashevsky, Bela Shayevich, Matvei Yankelevich.

Honey Badger Duet

By Sally Wen Mao

Our father wanted to kill us
before we were born. Starve us,
stave off hyenas with our youth—
our muscle as protein, lion’s bait.
We drained the flummoxed milk
out of our mother, who hissed
at predators. Her sonic cry could shred
raglan to scraps. Now we dance
to shed her from our spines.
The long years tilt—we bite spleen
& anodyne. For all the glory
of gore, we imagine ourselves
dead: asleep inside the culverts,
bald, piebald, very lonely. When
the sky’s meat smudges the valley
russet & that blood is so silent
we only listen to snow falling
on distant trains, the hunger stalks
close enough to scoop the pupils
from our eyes & we are danger.
We shovel out old kills from dirt.
Only in sleep do we return
home from hive-coma, disinter
detritus, gulp down the dead.

Celebrate Poetry Month in NJ

New Jersey's gift to its poets . . . is that it's a place of many places, essentially amorphous, freeing us to look at the world.

– Stephen Dunn

Poem as Screenplay: Six Video Collaborations

What's the difference between a poem and a screenplay? 

According to these filmmakers, not much. 

Blessed Are The Weak (For They Are No Good)

by Alexis Pope
This apple I hold with both hands
& step toward the sun
rising my temper out
of the earth. I hope to go
back inside for a few hours, light
my way into your center
parts. Each time I reach for
the apple, my fingers crush
& bend into each other like
a centipede trying to make
my dreams feel moist. The way
you answer every phone call with
another word for hello. What
are we doing here? This empty
mattress turned inside out & my
coils are exposed as well. For each
day I am naked & putting this
mirror to the window for you
to see exactly what I mean
when I say these
are not days exactly. Not minutes
but instead a pruning of less
than fruit. Which is what we are
to each other, I mean. I cut
myself open. I have not
one seed. You have exactly
three. My jealousy erupts
into something green & peeling
from my lap like the anchor
I never dropped into you, but
you see me there. Don’t you?
Under this desk I have hidden
for two months. I have tried
at shadowy. Have failed
at being wonderful. My hair
gets darker each morning
I look outside & see him. The field
goes on for what seems forever
but it’s not forever enough. Enough
I’ve had of rainstorms & no
flowers on the desk I am under. Under
you I died five times
last night. Don’t wake up
without me. Dream thesedays up a little for me. I have
no window to find you.

Alexis Pope is the author of the chapbook Girl Erases Girl (Dancing Girl Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boxcar Poetry Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Anti-, and Sixth Finch, among others. She lives in Ohio where she co-curates The Big Big Mess Reading Series and is Contributing Editor for Whiskey Island Magazine.