Poetry has for centuries been an essential element in Persian public culture, and poems are flying out to the rest of the world from the present-day uproar in Iran.

from Weekend Edition, National Public Radio:
“Poetry From Iran, One Tweet at a Time,” by Davar Iran Ardalan
“Persians are known for their poetry. So it is not surprising that as recent dramatic events have unfolded in Iran, so many Iranians who have been alerting the world have written poetically — even in their tweets.” The story is accompanied by a selection of tweets from Iranian engineering student and Web developer Parham Baghestani, translated by NPR staff.

from The Two-Way, National Public Radio’s news blog:
“Poet Simin Behbahani: Neda Is ‘Voice Of The People Of Iran’,” by Mark Memmott
“Simin Behbahani, a poet known as the lioness of Iran and for championing women’s rights, has a message for the men and women of her nation: ‘Don’t give up the fight for freedom.’” In a phone interview with NPR from Tehran, Behbahani recites two poems she has recently written about current events in Iran, “Stop Throwing My Country To The Wind,” addressed to her country’s government, and “For Neda Agha-Soltan,” addressed to the young woman who was killed during the protests on June 20 after the Iranian election. English translations of both poems are included in the NPR posting.

More about Persian poetry:
“Poetry connecting civilizations in conflict” (Coleman Barks, Rumi & Iran, 2006)
Ghazals

Congratulations are due to Forum poet Bernard Hamel, whose first poem entered in the InterBoard Poetry Competition was selected by judge Duncan Mercredi for honorable mention in June. The other winners Mercredi chose were

• In first place, “you think you’ve seen everything,” by Justin Hyde, a barroom scene “with a surprise ‘twist’ at the end.”
• In second place, “Castle Hawk” by Brian Edwards, a memoir of “two brothers in tee-shirts, / waiting for something to happen.”
• In third place, “5 o’clock” by Divina, a word painting that illustrates Mercredi’s belief that “poets are deep down, frustrated visual artists.”

More on the IBPC:
General information
Requirements for IBPC nominees
Anthology of the monthly IBPC winning poems
Archive of poems entered in the IBPC from our Poetry Forum

Robert Frost was a philosopher of American life, many of his poems are parables set in timeless rural scenes, and his most memorable lines quite naturally come to mind at ceremonial turning points in Americans’ lives. This week, marking Justice David Souter’s retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts quoted from Frost’s “ Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” in the justices’ farewell letter: “We understand your desire to trade white marble for White Mountains, and return to your land ‘of easy wind and downy flake.’” And in his reply, Souter quoted from Frost’s great Depression-era poem about work and vocation, “Two Tramps in Mud Time”: “You quoted the Poet, and I will, too, in words that set out the ideal of the life engaged, ‘...where love and need are one...’”

from The Christian Science Monitor:
“After 19 years, Souter and the Supreme Court part, with poetry,” by Warren Richey
“As the New Englander retires, he and Chief Justice John Roberts exchange warm letters of farewell — and a few verses of Robert Frost.... The poet Robert Frost speaks to life-long New Englanders like David Souter in ways other poets cannot.”

More on Robert Frost:
Profile of Robert Frost, American farmer/philosopher poet
Library of Poems by Robert Frost
The “Tricky” Poem, study guide to “The Road Not Taken”
Robert Frost Talks About Poetry
A Robert Frost poem handwritten & hidden away: “War Thoughts at Home”
Frost’s Homer Noble Farm Treated Most Ignobly
Poetical punishment for the Frost farm vandals

Have you ever played Exquisite Corpse, the collaborative surrealist art game, with lines of poetry? I’ve done it with 3 to as many as 7 people, each writing a single phrase or line, then folding down the paper and passing it to the next person, who adds another line, etc. You can ensure linkage in the sequence of lines by writing the last word or two below your line, then folding the paper so that the end of your contribution is visible to the next writer (just as you would extend the lines of your drawing a little over the edge when playing Exquisite Corpse as a surrealist drawing game) — or you can agree in advance on a theme or kernel word to have in mind as you write your lines. When your papers are full, have one of the poets read the entire piece aloud — the resulting collage poem is an interesting window into the unconscious connections in the group.

Nils Peterson, the local poet laureate in Santa Clara County, California, has adopted a similar method to come up with a collaborative poem celebrating life in Silicon Valley:

from Silicon Valley Mercury News:
“First official Santa Clara County poem,” by Karen D’Souza
(The news story is accompanied by an audio file of Peterson reading the poem.) “...he invited the community to help write the first official county poem, a vivid snapshot of life in the valley.... About 500 county residents submitted phrases that Peterson sculpted into an epic word collage that mashes up 100 lines from 100 authors, ages 11 to 80. In the manner of a Tweet, each line had to be short and sweet (from nine to 13 syllables long). Accessibility is the key to this collective opus.”

It’s not really a cento, because the quoted lines are not from other poems, nor is it really like an exquisite corpse poem, because the connections between lines are consciously crafted by a single poet who assembled the poem. Interesting. A new form altogether?

Last week we took note of the found poem growing out of Twitter. This week there’s a report that in Detroit, several poets are using Twitter to create a deliberate collaboration.

from Detroit Free Press:
“Local poets’ collaborative effort will unfold on Twitter,” by Julie Hinds
“What do you call it when free verse meets online social networking? PoeTweet sounds about right.”

More on cento poems:
Cento defined, in our Glossary of Poetic Forms
Cento links, to read examples of cento poems online
“SemiCento,” by Bob Holman
Links to other word games & online collaborations

More on laureates:
Poets Laureate, a brief history
Poets Laureate of the U.S.A., a Net-annotated list

Our profiles of recent U.S. Poet Laureates
Kay Ryan (2008-2009)
Charles Simic (2007-2008)
Donald Hall (2006-2007)
Ted Kooser (2004-2006)
Louise Glück (2003-2004)
Stanley Kunitz (2000-2001)
Robert Pinsky (1997-2000)

Found poems are made from the snippets of language created for other purposes, collaged together, or sometimes simply cut into lines to make visible their poetic nature. It used to be that found poems came from scraps of paper — a torn letter, a strip of newsprint used to wrap a fish, tickets dropped at the entrance to the ballpark. More recently, poets began to notice found poems in the streams of words online, most particularly in spam emails — as in our 2007 posting, “21st Century Found Poetry: Magnets on the Fridge, Spam Words in the Email.” Poems can be plucked from the vast rivers of words emanating from public political figures like Donald Rumsfeld and Sarah Palin.

The brevity and compression of the newest forms of electronic communication — texting and Twitter — would seem to make them particularly susceptible to a poetic reading, and someone has definitely noticed. Andre Gheorghe, a Romanian Web developer, has created The Longest Poem in the World by putting together public tweets that rhyme, making a gigantic found poem that he says is growing 4,000 new verses every day.

Sad news in the Northern California poetry community: David Bromige died at home in Sebastopol on June 3. Born in London in 1933, he lived through the World War II Blitz as a child, studied at the University of British Columbia and UC Berkeley in the 1960s, published many of his books with Black Sparrow Press, and was a professor at Sonoma State University for many years until his retirement in 1993. He was well known and will be fondly remembered by many, many poets — he met Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Duncan in his early years in Vancouver, BC, he knew Ron Silliman and many of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets during his time in the Bay area, and he influenced several generations of younger poets as teacher and organizer of literary journals and poetry conferences at Sonoma State and the University of San Francisco.

Bromige described the place of poetry in his life in a long interview published by Electronic Poetry Review in 2001: “It’s given me my life. It’s given me being. It was my entry to being. I didn’t know what else to do with my life. I had no idea what to do with my life. It seemed like there wasn't anything to do, with a life, and that in itself is a poetic recognition, I think. I didn’t get there as soon as I might have, but I had a very strong "get a job" ethic instilled into me, so I guess I felt the purpose of life was to find a job, and do it as well as you could, and then have all the fun you could fit in, around the edges of it. But when I started to write, then I realized that there was something else that I could do that filled me and was a space I could keep filling with myself. And also that it was something to be obedient to. It was a reason to have conscience, for me, because I really didn’t have much reason to have a conscience. I believe this is often an affliction of the young. So that I wouldn’t consider other people’s feelings. But as a poet, I felt like I had to. Now I’m sure you can meet plenty of people who will tell you I didn’t consider their feelings, thanks very much, but at least I was trying. It’s an incentive to consciousness. It’s an incentive to be conscious, because if you can notice things, you never know when the next thing that you can join with is going to appear. So it was an instigation of consciousness.”

James Garrahan has been putting together a documentary film on Bromige, and has posted a trailer/sound test clip on YouTube, and Sonoma poet and former student Maureen Hurley has posted a lovely remembrance of Bromige. When he died, he was working on a memoir entitled Til There Was You, and an edition of his collected poems is forthcoming in 2010 or 2011 from Reality Street Press in England. In the meantime, here are several places where you can read his work online:

• A feature on David Bromige in Jacket Magazine, Vol. 22 (May 2003)
• Poems, an interview and an excerpt from his memoir at Big Bridge
• A sequence of short poems at the Bromige memorial Web site

We have sent in three very fine poems from our Poetry Forum as this month’s entries in the InterBoard Poetry Competition:

• “Spring,” by Melissa Resch (BostonArtist), a lovely lyric greeting the natural manifestations of the New England season in three-line stanzas.
• “The Big Easy,” Bernard Hamel’s rich invocation of the summer season in a more tropical clime.
• “My Grief,” by Sherrylynne Mitchell (starbluedreamer), a powerful elegiac cry of loss.

More on the IBPC:
General information
Requirements for IBPC nominees
Anthology of the monthly IBPC winning poems
Archive of poems entered in the IBPC from our Poetry Forum
Background information and reading links for current IBPC judge Duncan Mercredi

We’ve just received the announcement of the poems selected by judge Duncan Mercredi as winners in last month’s InterBoard Poetry Competition. Because our Forum poets did not make a single nomination, we had no entries in the May IBPC and of course no winners.

• In first place, Mercredi chose “Mariposa,” by Tim Blighton, the tale of a lonely drinker roaming bars where “The moon is a busker, borrowing as it travels..”
• He awarded second place to “Evidence Hanging on a Rusty Nail” by Brian J. Mackay, a poem that brings memory to life in the discovery of a brother’s “old football boots... / hanging on a rusty nail in the shed / next to my spare salmon fly rod.”
• In third place, he selected “The Marsh at Dusk” by Steve Meador, a poet’s skillful navigation of the nuances of beauty and danger in the natural world.

More on the IBPC:
General information
Requirements for IBPC nominees
Anthology of the monthly IBPC winning poems
Archive of poems entered in the IBPC from our Poetry Forum
Background information and reading links s for current IBPC judge Duncan Mercredi

YouTube is full of poetry videos based on the filmmakers’ favorite classic poems (we’ve seen comments on Emily Dickinson as “the queen of YouTube poetry”), there are a growing number of Web centers for new collaborations between contemporary poets, filmmakers and visual artists (our videopoetry links will lead you to the best ones), and every few months there seems to be a new film biography of a well-known poet (or sometimes a too-little-known poet). This summer, the film is Gregory Corso: the Last Beat—and it’s more than just a poet bio-pic. The filmmakers began to put together a documentary on Corso’s life and poetry and place among the Beats, and ended up following him on the road trip he took after the death of Allen Ginsberg, seeking creative renewal and the mother whom he believed had gone home to Italy after abandoning him as an infant. The filmmakers actually found her, living in Trenton, New Jersey, and filmed the reunion between Corso and his mother—something to see, indeed.

More on Gregory Corso:
Gregory Corso, 1930 - 2001, Bob Holman’s memories and stories of Corso after his death
Blowing Up the Last Beat, a memoir of Corso by Bob Timm
Poems, books and recordings by Corso online

More on Film and Video Poetry:
Why I Love Making, a meditation on media with poems, by Mike Hazard aka Media Mike
Links to online poetry film and video poetry archives
Our articles on films about poets and poetry

We’ve just passed another anniversary of the InterBoard Poetry Competition—it may be difficult to believe, but our Forum has been participating in this monthly competition for nine years, now! This is the time of year when we look back over all the winning poems from the past year and ask a distinguished judge to choose the IPBC Poems of the Year. Xeufei Jin, Chinese poet who writes in English and professor of English at Boston University, was asked to select the best of the poems that were awarded first, second, or third place from April 2008 through March 2009. All three of the poems he chose came from the same forum—Desert Moon Review, and two were written by the same poet, whose name should be familiar to many of our own Forum poets—Laurie Byro. (These facts make it necessary to remind everyone up front that, like the monthly competition, this judging is done anonymously, with the judge being given only the poems and not the names of the poets or the boards from which they were submitted.) Interestingly, all the Poems of the Year placed second in their original monthly competitions. We’ve added Jin’s commentary to the winning poems, which are definitely worth rereading:

• First Place: “A Fall from Grace,” by S. Thomas Summers
• Second Place: “Living in the Body of a Firefly,” by Laurie Byro
• Third Place: “Virginia Sings Back To the Stones In Her Pockets,” by Laurie Byro

We should soon have the results of the May IBPC—sad to say, our Forum had no entries this month. If you wish to participate in the June competition, it’s up to you to keep the IBPC nominations coming! Please, please, whenever you see a great poem posted on our Forum, no matter where it is, get over to the InterBoard Poetry Competition folder right away to nominate it. And be sure to notify the poet whose work you are putting forward, so that he or she can post the required permission and information before Poetry Guide Margy Snyder selects the next month’s entries.

More on the IBPC:
General information
Requirements for IBPC nominees
Anthology of the monthly IBPC winning poems
Archive of poems entered in the IBPC from our Poetry Forum
Background information and reading links for current IBPC judge Duncan Mercredi