Already at 22, Dylan rasps out images in A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall that are elliptical, prophetic, apocalyptic and uncompromising. If this isn't poetry, what is?
This young Toronto-based poet won a place on the best-seller lists with her epigrammatic, haiku-like poetry that sometimes addresses emotionally difficult subjects. This is an unusual accomplishment for poetry in today's culture. Here is this remarkable writer's story.
Bernie Sanders National Live Stream Address. 13-Year-Old Stand-Up Owns Donald Trump. Double Domestication for Dogs? A Survivor's Poem: The Guilt of Being Alive. Gun Control and the Second Amendment.
Patience Carter survived the Orlando shooting. She's now coping with what she calls “the guilt of feeling grateful to be alive.”
Michael S. Harper, who died on Saturday in Rhinebeck, N.Y. at the age of 78, was a major American and African American poet. He was a writer of complex poems that combined history and memory with a deep network of African American cultural, folkloric, and musical allusions and symbols. This brief biography of Harper is from the Poetry Foundation's website. A generous selection of Harper's work can be found on the Foundation's website.
Rap artist Baba Brinkman demonstrates, with examples spanning Eminem and Jay-Z to Chaucer and Lord Byron, that rap is a modern, innovative, and playful form of poetry. Catch Brinkman's Rap Guide to Climate Chaos live in NYC or help crowdfund a Climate Chaos album.
Portraying her subject as a radical voice of the dispossessed, author Jacqueline Mulhallen presents the poet Shelley less as a romantic and more as a traitor to his own class for his revolutionary politics. Here is the Shelley who, though writing when the British working class was in its infancy, grasped and wanted to overturn the oppression under which they lived. It's that red Shelley who inspired among others Karl Marx, even as his poetry became part of the canon.
The Voyage of the Sable Venus, the highly regarded debut poetry collection by Robin Coste Lewis, won the national book award this year for poetry. The title poem unites art history with the history of slavery and racism. Here, Dan Chiasson introduces this book, which has become a must-read across the literary spectrum.
Fracking Dakota: Poems for a Wounded Land, Peter Neil Carroll's new collection, takes us on a fascinating odyssey across an increasingly broken America. With a cast of characters as disparate as Billy the Kid, closet racists, grave robbers, ghosts along the Natchez Trace, blue collar workers and the short-sighted corporations that exploit them, these poems share an undercurrent of looming disaster, a deep knowing that things are about to turn bad. (Cultural Weekly)
eL Seed delights in juggling multiple cultures, languages and identities. His Arabic poetry artwork, inspired by street art and graffiti, aims to create art so beautiful it needs no translation.
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