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12/30/2002 - Remembering Marta Mitrovich
Looking back across 2002, we count our losses, the poets who have passed on... Marta Mitrovich, who lit the poetry fires in Orange County, California, remembered here by Victor Infante.

12/18/2002 - Museletter Correspondents Gift Picks: CDs
Your guides and our newly reassembled roster of Museletter correspondents were here to help you fill in your last-minute holiday gift list with these, our favorite poetry recordings.

12/11/2002 - Museletter Correspondents Gift Picks: Books
As a way of reintroducing you to our newly reassembled roster of Museletter correspondents, we asked them to suggest their favorite poetry books for your gift list.

12/4/2002 - Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
Bob Holman reviews Walter J. Ong's analysis of the oral tradition and how writing changed human society and consciousness: “the perfect gift for the grapholect in your life.”

11/20/2002 - The Business of Fancy Dancing
Gary Glazner reviews Sherman Alexie's new film: “the initial steps of a great new American filmmaker, a filmmaker with the skills of a poet... the little guy not scared to let you see his own true story, his self at its most vulnerable....”

11/6/2002 - Dig Infinity! The Life and Art of Lord Buckley
Bob Holman reviews Oliver Trager's new book on Lord Buckley: “the Hip Messiah, the Hiparama of the Classics, the comedian sans punch lines, the entertainer who went for astonishment, not laughs....”

10/23/2002 - Zebra International Poetry Film Festival
“Poetry works. It communicates at levels that subvert the systems of follow-up studies and statistics. And the prizewinners at Zebra prove this” -- an account of the first Zebra International Poetry Film Festival by your guide Bob Holman, who served as judge on the Zebra Awards panel.

10/16/2002 - June Jordan, Kenneth Koch, Philip Whalen: The Deaths of Spring
Three great poets, from three distinct parts of the US poetry landscape, passed in spring of 2002. Memories, links & books for June Jordan, Kenneth Koch, Philip Whalen... and to add the recent deaths of two Black Mountaineers, John Wieners and Fielding Dawson...

10/9/2002 - The Real Chancellors of American Poetry
In a discussion of the various crises of the Chancellorships at the Academy of American Poets, we challenged Jeff McDaniel to create a whole new Academy and he gave us this total crossover roster.

9/21/2002 - American Omphalos: Ron Whitehead
Dr. John Rocco reviews Whitehead's Beaver Dam Rocking Chair Marathon: fragments of a lost text: The Bone Man Saga... “our post-Beat Theseus working his way through the labyrinth of America.”

9/11/2002 - Poems After the Attack
Many fine poets responded to our invitation to submit their poems, and we have selected a few of the best to add to our “Poems After the Attack” collection yet again.

8/28/2002 - Poems After the Attack: One Year Later
Looking back across the year that has passed since 9.11.2001, we are proud to offer our own anthology of “Poems After the Attack” here, enlarged once again. May these poems bring you comfort, clarity or grace...

8/21/2002 - Poetry in a Time of Fire
Chris Mansell recounts her adventures in the small press wilderness: “This is a piece on why I started PressPress and how I’m going about it and what the hell I think I’m doing wasting my time on other people’s work when I should be doing my own.”

8/14/2002 - Poetry/Life/Politics: A review of Margaret Randall's new book, Coming Up For Air
Gary Glazner reviews the first book in Pennywhistle Press' new Compendium Series, combining poetry with the poet's life story in prose and photos.

8/7/2002 - Ngoma: Entering the Dreamtime Through Music and Poetry
Ngoma, master of words and music, brings a poem of the didgeridoo, whose deep droning earthy sound, “Primordial Subterranean Funk,” is a world-connection.

7/24/2002 - You Do It Because You Love It
The idea of competition in poetry remains a perennial debate topic... and we think our friend S.A. Griffin's recent comments on the PoetsAllOver Yahoo mailing list are worth rereading.

7/10/2002 - If You Can’t Beat ’Em, Join ’Em, or How the Beat Chicks Hatched
Marj Hahne writes on seeing the women of the Beat generation doing poetry at Beatfest -- “Thank the Goddess... they persisted in spite of their invisibility.”

7/3/2002 - A Wedding Poem: “Why God Created Eve” by Hal Sirowitz
Hal's next book may be My Wife Says -- We congratulate the Happy Couple on their NuptiNuptials!

6/26/2002 - Sparrow's Mathemetrics Spree
Having conquered the worm of Dirty Words in his Bad Poetry Curriculum, Sparrow, former Presidential candidate and full-time Poet Laureate of Comic Relief, has invented a new poetic form: Mathemetrics.

6/19/2002 - New! Poets in the News
Now that the About Poetry Museletter has been incorporated into the larger Books & Lit newsletter, we're gathering links to the latest po-news right here at “Poets in the News.” We hope you'll bookmark this page & come back regularly for the latest updates.

6/12/2002 - The Community-Word Project, Patricia Smith & “The Moment”
All of a sudden we are sitting in the poem as the griot inserts the poem into each of us. A collaborative poem, built on lines written by these children. A poem about possibilities and love, children and poetry... “Left Memories,” by Patricia Smith.

6/5/2002 - Speech Acts: Poetry in performance at the Educational Alliance Arts School
Wanda Phipps reviews a typical poetry reading: Mayhem & madness as the theorist is made to sit under the chair and the stage manager asks for 50 more bucks but the audience decides to go to the bar instead!

5/29/2002 - Piñero & the Poet's Life: Suffering, Creativity, Hedonism & Life Affirmation
Michael Salinger talks with Dahveed Ben Israel of the Last Poets after a screening of this year's poetic biopic, Piñero -- fertile ground for a conversation about the poet's lifestyle, the relation between suffering and creativity, poetic communities and the arts' affirmation of life.

5/22/2002 - The Gulf War Phones by Stephen Paul Miller
We believe in Poets Theater, where the language creates the character... Stephen Paul Miller's one-page play features the Voice of Afghanistan.

5/15/2002 - Hearts and Hands: An Interview with Luis Rodriguez
Let's call him hero, and be done with it: he's devoted his life to blasting holes in the prison walls allowing the poem to pass through... And now he's gone and opened Tia Chucha Café Cultural.

5/8/2002 - Herman Berlandt's International Poetry Museum
Coming soon to a dream near you... Marj Hahne invites us to envision the reality of “Museum: a shrine to the muses,” materializing now in San Francisco.

2/20/2002 - Poems After the Attack
Our collection is still growing, as poets respond both to the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 and to the ensuing “War on Terror” declared by the American government. May the poems offered here bring you comfort, clarity or grace...

2/19/2002 - Atta Poem by Emily XYZ
Emily XYZ is a poet who reveals the inside stories that make you stop to think which is a good thing. She sent this poem our way -- not to endorse an idea, but to do what art does.

2/8/2002 - Top Picks: American Epic Poems of the 20th Century
We proclaimed Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You “the great US epic of the last half of the 20th century” and were immediately accosted: “It’s the only epic poem!” Wrong! we said. Here's your reading list.

1/25/2002 - A Call To Poets Opposed To the Death Penalty
We asked poets who oppose the death penalty to read Eliot Katz's memo on the pending execution of Stephen Wayne Anderson & some of Anderson's poems from Death Row, then send poems to Governor Gray Davis.

1/8/2002 - 2001: The Year in Poetry
Looking back over last year, we can say it was a good one. We used it. Poetry proved its utility, 9.11 brought an outpouring... moot the question of “poetry”: it just was...