| Feature Articles, 2003 |
Articles by date | Articles by topic
12/31/2003 - Remembering Poetry: Learn’t by Heart 12/26/2003 - CD Review: Taylor Mali’s Conviction 12/17/2003 - Support your ears! Dial a poem! 12/8/2003 - Welcome to Cyberia, Attila the Stockbroker! 11/19/2003 - Ears on Fire: Snapshot Essays in a World of Poets 11/12/2003 - Marcellus Nealy: Light Walker 11/10/2003 - William Stafford 10/20/2003 - Federico García Lorca 10/15/2003 - Philip Larkin 10/11/2003 - Philip Levine 10/6/2003 - A poet hidden in every person 9/23/2003 - Too Much of a Good Thing? 9/9/2003 - My Spring Vacation in Laos 9/8/2003 - A New About Poetry anthology 9/2/2003 - Poems from Poetry Africa 2003 8/30/2003 - Louise Glück 8/26/2003 - The Limit Is Limitless: Edwin Torres on Performance Poetry in the Digital Age 8/19/2003 - Searching for the Legend of Q.R. Hand, Jr. 8/12/2003 - The Question of Judging Poetry Good or Bad 8/2/2003 - Peter Meinke Comes out of Retirement 7/29/2003 - Poetry Africa 2003 7/21/2003 - 2003 National Poetry Slam: The Midwest Connection 7/8/2003 - The Reverse Blurb Chapter, by Gary Mex Glazner 7/5/2003 - Musin’ on a Summer Morning 6/29/2003 - All’s Well That Ends Well 6/11/2003 - Steal This Poem 6/8/2003 - Poetry East & West, Old & New 6/5/2003 - Returning To the Open Mic Ritual: Avotcja 5/20/2003 - The View from My Window, by Don Yorty 5/13/2003 - Once Again, Poetry Is Dead? 5/6/2003 - The Charles Potts School of Thought, Action and Poetry 4/4/2003 - National Poetry Month Special 4/3/2003 - Mau Onkongola = Beautiful Words 4/1/2003 - Young Poets Speak 3/30/2003 - Poems of War 3/20/2003 - No, You Shut Up! 3/11/2003 - Slam Poetics, or, Who Is Bill Kennedy? 3/4/2003 - More Poems for Peace 2/18/2003 - What Would Emily Say? 2/11/2003 - Raising Their Voices 2/4/2003 - Poems for Peace 1/20/2003 - Poetry Can Stop War 1/15/2003 - Protest Poetry and Community 1/7/2003 - Dear Editor: A History of Poetry in Letters
Step-by-step by heart, an outline of how to memorize a poem by Bob Holman: “You memorize because you have to... You have to make this poem your own.”
Gary Mex Glazner reviews Taylor Mali’s new live-performance album: “a great addition to any poetry collection, and it is that rarest of spoken word records: it makes you laugh out loud.”
The poemfone phenomenon has flashed on & off across the US -- and we’re desperately seeking poemfone numbers.
Britain’s Poet Laureate Andrew Motion has launched a search for laureate of the football terraces, and we nominate Attila the Stockbroker.
Sandy de Nimes, “the paramour of the plume,” reviews Gary Mex Glazner’s 2002 book of poems, travel stories & essays, “a road worth traveling and a book worth reading.”
Taylor Mignon, our Museletter correspondent in Japan, profiles the multi-talented Marcellus Nealy, “producer of events, poet, radio DJ, and sometimes jambe player... the most experimentally progressive spoken word artist in Tokyo... the only poet I know of who can improvise lines of poesie to the accompaniment of live musical riffs.”
Stafford was a lifelong peace advocate, World War II conscientious objector, Lewis & Clark College professor, Poet Laureate, traveling teacher, prolific and beloved poet of attentive ordinary life.
García Lorca was Spain’s most important poet & dramatist of the 20th century, whose work is still beloved for its passion, pride, love & death -- in his word, duende. He was murdered by Nationalist soldiers at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.
Philip Larkin was a hard-edged, unsparing common-language poet of everyday life & death, known for lines like “They fuck you up, your mum and dad” (from “This Be the Verse”). Larkin was chosen in a 2003 reader’s poll as Britain’s favorite poet of the last 50 years.
Poet of & for the working class, Philip Levine is a master of history, a storyteller working in the colloquial idiom. He taught for many years at Fresno State University & fostered a lively poetry scene in that out-of-the-way place.
Your poetry guides are keeping an eye on local papers all over the world, and we’ve noted a cluster of news stories revealing how many people whose lives have been devoted to other endeavors are also poets, and how many poets are devoting their names & their poems to actions in the world beyond poetry.
UK Museletter correspondent Tim Gibbard’s perspective on why you all ought to be out there producing your own poetry readings & festivals: because “you can only have too much of a good thing if you forget to share it out.”
Our peripatetic Museletter correspondent Gary Mex Glazner has been wandering the world again, travelling to Laos in the spring, and we’re happy to have the stories, poems & musings he has brought home with him.
Victor Infante’s “Poem Begun With a Line by Ted Hughes”is the seed for our newest collection: You’re invited to submit your poem for possible inclusion in our Hughes/Plath collection.
When your guide Bob Holman came back from the 7th annual Poetry Africa festival in May, he brought home not only the story of his own experience there, but a passel of poems from the African poets, a sampling of which we offer for your tasting pleasure.
It was a sweet surprise to see the private poet Louise Glück selected as the public manifestation of poetry in the United States.
Asked to respond to “The move away from the orthodoxy of the book and printed page -- towards what? Poetry in the age of Story Space and Disney...,” he says “The limit is limitless...”
Northern California Museletter correspondent Martha Cinader seeks out the mystery & meaning of a man every poet seems already to know, who is remarkably absent from the World Wide Web: “Part of the answer is the humble nature of this man, but another part is the stuff that legends are made of...” And she returns from her search with... a poem!
Jessie Lendennie is not only our Museletter correspondent in Ireland -- she’s also an independent poetry publisher who has wrestled with the question of “how we judge when a piece of writing is bad and when it’s good in as true as sense as possible, while keeping vested interest at bay.”
Florida Museletter correspondent Stazja McFadyen spoke with well known poet, creative writing professor & self-avowed “book person” Peter Meinke, who offered comments on page vs. spoken word and a piece of “Naked Poetry” for your reading pleasure.
Bob Holman returned from the 7th annual Poetry Africa festival held in Johannesburg, South Africa in May, 2003 with a renewed sense of the power of gathered poets... “Africa, specifically South Africa, is ready for a larger voice in world poetry, and Poetry Africa shows how to do it...”
Museletter correspondent Greg Gillam on the biggest Nationals ever, “a nation of poetic temperaments” gathered on the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago in August 2003. Can Chicago do it again? How will the Heartland teams fare in the competition? How is Poetry Slam evolving at what seems to be a turning point in its history?
An invitation from Gary Mex Glazner, our New Mexico/Southwest correspondent and author of the forthcoming book How To Make Your Living as a Poet, to take part in “a unique experiment in poetic creativity.”
Our SoCal correspondent Larry Jaffe returns to About Poetry after a long hiatus with memories of the poet’s life in Hollywood and the two very LA Rays in his life.
Now the odd story of Taylor Mali, Thomas L. Friedman, and “the poem that wouldn’t sit still” has come to a more or less quiet conclusion, but we cannot help but ponder how the Internet dilutes authorship, and how easy it is to lose control of one’s poems.
New England Museletter correspondent Victor Infante on poet Taylor Mali and how New York Times journalist and Yale commencement speaker Thomas L. Friedman appropriated a bowdlerized version of one of Mali’s poems off the Net without attribution.
Our wandering Museletter correspondent Gary Mex Glazner traces the intermingling threads of ancient & modern poetry in this report: from English-language cafe poetry in Bangkok, Thailand to old-fashioned letterpress word art in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
On the open mic poetry scene you can see & hear not only up-&-coming younger poets, but also established writers & performers who come back for the special energy of an open mic -- poets like Avotcja, profiled here by our correspondent Martha Cinader.
Two letters from inveterate East Village correspondent-at-large Don Yorty: a reading of Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers,” and a letter with yellow spring and sonnets.
Victor Infante offers a rebuttal to Bruce Wexler’s article in Newsweek, “Poetry Is Dead, Does Anybody Really Care?” And klipschutz is moved by the debate between these two to write a triptych of poems, “Two Swan Songs & A Second Coming.”
klipschutz introduces us to “dynamo-slash-lightning-rod of underground letters” Charles Potts -- poet, publisher and founder of the Temple School of Poetry. Plus four poems by Charles Potts.
Got poems? Whether you’re a fan of language or a poet at heart, you can explore haiku, hip hop and other hallowed howlings with us all through April, National Poetry Month. We gathered poetry and poetic features from all over the About network for this one.
UK Museletter correspondent Tim Gibbard says more Mau Onkongola is what the world needs now, & we agree. His column put you in touch with two poets who are busy with Words of Beauty in Britain: Rosemary “Big Mouth” Dun & Clayton Scott.
Say what you want about the Internet eating the Book.... we still love the impulse to writing that the keyboard contains. Read this poetic dialogue between two 12-year-old New Yorkers, and then ask if there might not be a better way to bomb Baghdad: with the poems of Esther Woo and Dylan Jane Rossman.
A collection of classic war poems.
Neal Pollack wants poets & writers to shut up about the war, already. But Museletter correspondent Gary Glazner reminds us of the poetry of witness, Miklós Radnóti for one, and the reasons why poets should never shut up.
Nick Piombino creates a virtual literal boxing match out of the clash between poetry slammers & performance poets and Canada’s new Parliamentary Poet Laureate, George Bowering.
Poets all over the planet are making poems for peace, and we’ve been busily weaving the best of them into a tapestry, our Poems for Peace collection. May its power grow as more poetic voices join in...
An Indeath Interview by Robyn Su Millerz with Emily Dickinson, who speaks out on the current movement toward war, the poets’ anti-war protests & the recently cancelled White House symposium on “Poetry and the American Voice” in her poems.
Poets speak out against the war with Iraq: An essay by Victor Infante on the movement of poets against the impending war. “All Laura Bush wanted was a poetry reading. What she got, evidently, was a firestorm...”
Our new anthology: “The world is moving ever closer to war, and in the face of what feels inevitable, we must do what we can... what we can do here is to gather the voices of poets in a great chorus for peace.”
“Which is louder, the earsplitting drums of war or the consciousness surprise poem?” Anne McNaughton’s New Years Day poem is the seed for a new collection here, the necessary successor to our Poems After the Attack anthology: Peace Poems.
A story about a flowering of activist poetry in her local community (Vallejo, CA) is the first Northern California news column from Martha Cinader, the newest addition to our reassembled cast of Museletter correspondents.
OR, Fifty-Odd Years of Pissing Off Poets... Southwest/New Mexico correspondent Gary Mex Glazner returned to Museletter with his thoughts on reading Dear Editor, selected editor-poet correspondence chosen by Poetry magazine editor Joseph Parisi.
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