Head to the Big Apple for the Poets Forum from the Academy of American Poets

Our friends at The Academy of American Poets are hosting a Poets Forum in New York City November 6-8. The Forum will include a series of public events investigating issues central to contemporary American poetry. In-depth discussions with distinguished poets, readings, and walking tours through literary New York will be included. The price of an all-events pass is $110.00. There will be discussions and readings with such luminaries as Frank Bidart, Victor Herández Cruz, Louise Glück, Lyn Hejinian, Sharon Olds, Ron Padgett, Carl Phillips, Robert Pinsky, Kay Ryan, Gary Snyder, Gerald Stern, Susan Stewart, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and C. K. Williams. Other participants will include Charles Bernstein, Anselm Berrigan, Lucie Brock-Broido, Jordan Davis, Timothy Donnelly, Eamon Grennan, Major Jackson, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, James Longenbach, Cate Marvin, Cecily Parks, Claudia Rankine, Tracy K. Smith, and Tom Thompson. Walking tours will explore the literary history of the West Village, Harlem, Walt Whitman’s SoHo, Brooklyn, and the Museum of Modern Art. Tour guides include poets Anselm Berrigan, Jordan Davis, Cate Marvin, Tracy K. Smith, and Tom Thompson. The Poetry Awards Ceremony will be held Friday, November 7 at 7 P.M. with a reception to follow. Reading and reception for the new fall issue of American Poet, the journal of the Academy of American Poets will be held Saturday, November 8 at 8 P.M. All meeting times are subject to change. Visit the website of The Academy of American Poets for further details.

Keep the Poetry Celebration Going!

It’s still National Poetry Month, courtesy of the Academy of American Poets. Today’s poet is Sandra Beasley of Washington, D.C., a recent recipient of the 2008 Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award. The award, sponsored by Poets & Writers— the nation’s largest nonprofit organization serving creative writers— provides two writers with an honorarium and all-expenses-paid trip to New York City in October to meet with agents, editors, publishers, and other members of the New York literary community. Beasley won the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize for her book Theories of Falling (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2008), selected by Marie Howe. Her poems have also been featured in Verse Daily and Best New Poets (Samovar Press, 2005) and in journals such as 32 Poems, Barrow Street, Blackbird, RHINO, and SLATE. Awards for her work include the 2006 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize from Passages North and fellowships to Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Millay Colony. She serves on the editorial staff of The American Scholar. You can learn more about her at her website.

Cherry Tomatoes
by Sandra Beasley

Little bastards of vine.
Little demons by the pint.
Red eggs that never hatch,
just collapse and rot. When

my mom told me to gather
their grubby bodies
into my skirt, I’d cry. You
and your father, she’d chide—

the way, each time I kicked
and wailed against sailing,
my dad shook his head, said
You and your mother.

Now, a city girl, I ease one
loose from its siblings,
from its clear plastic coffin,
place it on my tongue.

Just to try. The smooth
surface resists, resists,
and erupts in my mouth:
seeds, juice, acid, blood

of a perfect household.
The way, when I finally
went sailing, my stomach
was rocked from inside

out. Little boat, big sea.
Handful of skinned sunsets.

Something Different

Today’s poet from the Academy of American Poets, Theodore Worozbyt, is a native of Atlanta. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Arts Councils of Georgia and Alabama. He teaches writing and literature at The University of Alabama, from which he holds an M.F. A. and a Ph. D. Theodore Worozbyt’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Hotel Amerika, Kenyon Review, Kulture Vulture, Mississippi Review Online, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review, and Verse Daily. His manuscript, A Unified Theory of Light, won the 2005 Dream Horse Press chapbook competition.

Gnosis by Theodore Worozbyt Turns out the radiologist didn’t know thing one about radios. I stood there in my stocking feet and waited for the music to begin again. Being generally good with small motors I would mow and mow the lawn stoically with a white hand towel draped around my neck. I was stimulated by the reports of the optical scienteers. Because of the particular reflective and refractive qualities inherent in the molecular structure of the chlorophyll molecule, the wavelength perceived by the human eye as green is in fact repulsed by grass. Thus grass is all other colors. Impossible, impossible! was the catarrh violently discharging itself in the chambers of my thoughts. Grass and vert are green. Reading is black surrounded by white. If not, what? A barely perceptible hum underfoot that turns out to be electricity or some other invisible fluid? A basket heaped with unadjusted watches? The forests filled with white tigers. Fire came from god’s beard. The sun rolled, a chariot wheel flaring its treads across the clouds. Starlight: angelic punctuation on the carbon paper of midnight. New York City sewers crawled with titanic alligators before debunkers in rubber boots stepped in. President Somebody was smoking an Egyptian cigarette and several papers didn’t get signed before the prognosis began to resemble a trumpet: something gold around a hole.

Need Another Poetry Fix?

Jennifer Chang is today’s poet from Poets.org. Jennifer’s poems have appeared in New England Review, The New Republic, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and the anthologies Best New Poets 2005 (Samovar Press and Meridian, 2005) and Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (University of Illinois Press, 2004). She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University and is Communications Director at Kundiman, a non-profit organization that promotes Asian American poetry.

Pastoral by Jennifer Chang Something in the field is working away. Root-noise. Twig-noise. Plant of weak chlorophyll, no name for it. Something in the field has mastered distance by living too close to fences. Yellow fruit, has it pit or seeds? Stalk of wither. Grass- noise fighting weed-noise. Dirt and chant. Something in the field. Coreopsis. I did not mean to say that. Yellow petal, has it wither-gift? Has it gorgeous rash? Leaf-loss and worried sprout, its bursting art. Some- thing in the. Field fallowed and cicada. I did not mean to say. Has it roar and bloom? Has it road and follow? A thistle prick, fraught burrs, such easy attachment. Stem- and stamen-noise. Can I lime- flower? Can I chamomile? Something in the field cannot.

Would You Care for a Poem?

Today’s Poem-a-Day submission is by author Caroline Knox. To read an interview with Ms. Knox at the website Jubilat. Jubilat is devoted to the publication of not only the best in contemporary American poetry, but to placing it alongside a varied selection of reprints, found pieces, lyric prose, art, and interviews with poets and other artists.

Line Poem by Caroline Knox Long jetty, long shell-racked jetty, cracked warped planks. Beautiful fish, beautiful sea-bass poached with an August tomato, on an ironstone plate. A snake’s slough, a snake’s spinal cord, a dry-rot stump. A twill tape measure, an audiotape cassette unspooled and puckered, shining. Agate prayer beads, kazoos, whistles, rattles. A bike chain and a bungee cord. A möbius strip and a broccoli elastic. Split vanilla pod inset with paltry-looking flat oily brown seeds. Egg-and-dart molding of vitreous fake sandstone. Contrails, mares’ tails, mackerel sky.

Get Your Poetry Here!

Today’s Academy of American Poet’s submission is by Alan Shapiro. According to the Houghton Mifflin website, Alan Shapiro is the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of nine acclaimed books of poetry. He is a former recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Award and the Los Angeles Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He was recently elected as a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Today’s poem is from Old War, just published by Houghton Mifflin.

Just by Alan Shapiro after the downpour, in the early evening, late sunlight glinting off the raindrops sliding down the broad backs of the redbud leaves beside the porch, beyond the railing, each leaf bending and springing back and bending again beneath the dripping, between existences, ecstatic, the souls grow mischievous, they break ranks, swerve from the rigid V’s of their migration, their iron destinies, down to the leaves they flutter in among, rising and settling, bodiless, but pretending to have bodies, their weightlessness more weightless for the ruse, their freedom freer, their as-ifs nearly not, until the night falls like an order and they rise on one vast wing that darkens down the endless flyways into other bodies. Nothing will make you less afraid.

Get Your Poetry Fix Here!

According to Contemporary Writers.com today’s author, poet and novelist Ciaran Carson was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1948. After graduating from Queen’s University, Belfast, he worked for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland until 1998. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 1978.

His collections of poetry include The Irish for No (1987), winner of the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award; Belfast Confetti (1990), which won the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry; and First Language: Poems (1993), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize. His prose includes The Star Factory (1997) and Fishing for Amber (1999). His most recent novel, Shamrock Tea (2001), explores themes present in Jan van Eyck’s painting The Arnolfini Marriage. His translation of Dante’s Inferno was published in November 2002. His most recent collection is Breaking News (2003), winner of the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year).

Ciaran Carson is also an accomplished musician, and is the author of Last Night’s Fun: About Time, Food and Music (1996), a study of Irish traditional music. He lives in Belfast.

The Assignation by Ciaran Carson I think I must have told him my name was Juliette, with four syllables, you said, to go with violette. I envisaged the violet air that presages snow, the dark campaniles of a city beginning to blur a malfunctioning violet neon pharmacy sign jittering away all night through the dimity curtains. Near dawn you opened them to a deep fall and discovered a line of solitary footprints leading to a porch: a smell of candle-wax and frankincense; the dim murmur of a liturgy you knew but whose language you did not. The statues were shrouded in Lenten violet, save one, a Virgin in a cope of voile so white as to be blue. As was the custom there, your host informed you afterwards— the church was dedicated to Our Lady of the Snows.

Time For Your Medication!

Today’s Poem of the Day from The Academy of American Poets is by Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan. Born in Santa Monica and raised in Los Angeles, Born in Santa Monica and raised in Los Angeles, Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan received her B.A. in English from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, and earned an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow, and completed her M.A. in literature from the University of California at Berkeley. At the University of Houston she was a Cambor Fellow and earned a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing. She is a full-time instructor at Houston Community College, Central Campus. She lives in Houston with her husband, Raj, a scientist specializing in HIV/AIDS research at Baylor College of Medicine, and their three cats.

Terzanelle: Manzanar Riot by Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan This is a poem with missing details, of ground gouging each barrack’s windowpane, sand crystals falling with powder and shale, where silence and shame make adults insane. This is about a midnight of searchlights, of ground gouging each barrack’s windowpane, of syrup on rice and a cook’s big fight. This is the night of Manzanar’s riot. This is about a midnight of searchlights, a swift moon and a voice shouting, Quiet! where the revolving searchlight is the moon. This is the night of Manzanar’s riot, windstorm of people, rifle powder fumes, children wiping their eyes clean of debris, where the revolving searchlight is the moon, and children line still to use the latrines. This is a poem with missing details, children wiping their eyes clean of debris— sand crystals falling with powder and shale.