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12/15/2004 - More Poetry Picks: The Best of 2004
Poetry Guide Bob Holman continues his personal tour of the poetry world in the year 2004 with more of the best books, recordings & events, the poetry you’ll want to remember: Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Guillermo Gomez Pena, Maria Damon, miekal and, Thomas Sayers Ellis, emily xyz, Rob Fitterman, Vincent Katz, Michael Lally, Spectacular Vernacular Revue, Action Poetry, Amy Ouzoonian, Jim Cohn, Louis Zukofsky, Hip-Hop Poetry, Slam Poetry...

12/1/2004 - Poetry Picks: The Best of 2004
Casting his eye back across 2004 in the poetry world, Poetry Guide Bob Holman chooses the best books, recordings & events, the poetry you’ll want to remember from the past year: Lenny Bruce, C.D. Wright, Kirmen Uribe, Youussou N’Dour, Brian Wilson... Alice Notley, Jean Valentine, Eric Anderson, Mswakhe Mbuli, Michael McClure... Donna Masini, Ron Padgett, Ed Sanders...

11/24/2004 - New picks: Poetry Anthologies on CD
We’ve long believed that a good anthology can be your best map to the poetry world, giving you a sense of the poets’ historical & artistic contexts and introducing you to new poetic voices in the company of old familiars. Anthology recordings like those we’ve selected for you here bring the voices of the past & the future to life in your ears.

11/9/2004 - The About Poetry Book Store
Newly dusted & stocked, the virtual shelves of our Poetry Book Store are a browser’s pleasure, complete with shopping links to help you find the best prices on books for your own library or to give to friends & family.

11/2/2004 - Poems for Election Day
A selection of American poems for Election Day, by Walt Whitman, John Greenleaf Whittier & William Carlos Williams.

10/20/2004 - June Jordan, Founder of Poetry 4 the People
June Jordan was the daughter of West Indian immigrants who endured racism & violence growing up, and created her own voice as “a radical political activist poet with a wicked sense of humor. Constantly pulling the string on rhetoric, homing in on her own foibles, she collapsed overt political issues” into the personal, and inspired generations of poets in her teaching.

10/13/2004 - Paul Hunter, poet without punctuation
Paul Nelson, founder of Global Voices Radio & the Pacific Northwest Spoken Word Laboratory (SPLAB!), interviews Paul Hunter on his new collection, Breaking Ground (Silverfish Review Press, 2004), a book which explores the vanishing American experience of farming on a small scale.

9/29/2004 - The Sound of Thunder Visits Neruda’s Land
José Ignacio Silva A. reports on the American delegation of poets -- Martín Espada, Yusef Komunyakaa & Nathalie Handal, led by Rattapallax editor Ram Devineni -- who travelled to Chile this past July to celebrate Pablo Neruda’s 100th birthday and to launch the magazine in Latin America.

9/15/2004 - More 20th Century American epics
When your guides were recommending a reading list of American epic poems of the 20th century, we were limited to choosing the top 10 and these worthy epics got lopped off the list. But there are more, always more, so we’ve put them on a new list for you. Happy epic reading!

8/24/2004 - Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe! The Empty House Tour
Tom Devaney led visitors on an exploration of the silences, emptinesses & secret recesses of Edgar Allan Poe’s Philadelphia house, in the Empty House Tour in the summer of 2003.

8/10/2004 - “And Yet”... A new Philip Larkin poem
...comes to light after a half century lost in the library. Larkin was chosen Britain’s favorite poet in a reader survey in October 2003.

7/10/2004 - Books To Begin Your Poeducation Now
If you’d been present at the Bowery Poetry Club’s dream weekend on May Day 2004, you’d have earned a degree in poetry. Next best, read these writers, and you’ll have waltzed with some exciting partners and staked a great view of the American poetic landscape.

7/7/2004 - Reading List in a Weekend
Or... How to attend 16 events in two days & three nights at the Bowery Poetry Club and get a complete education in poetry. You could get a degree if you’d been there! And your guide Bob Holman has selected Seven Ways to Begin Your Poeducation from the weekend’s bounty. Miller, Major, Baraka, Brathwaite, Kupferberg, Hirsch & Price: this is not a law firm; these are your next must-read writers.

6/29/2004 - Carl Rakosi, 1903 - 2004
A protégé of Ezra Pound and member of the Objectivists in the 1930s, Carl Rakosi took a 30-year break from poetry to work as a psychotherapist, but he remained an activist in poetry until his death at the age of 100. We gathered articles & links about Rakosi just after he died.

6/15/2004 - México son dos brazos abiertos, by Silvia Antonia Brandon Pérez
Poet, editor & activist Silvia Pérez is just back from the 9th Reunión de Escritores Hispanoamericanos in Hermosillo and Mazatán, Province of Sonora, México, and she brings inspiring memories home from the “Horas de Junio,” a gathering of poets which began locally in 1995 & has grown into a truly international event. And she has given us two poems for your reading pleasure: “Dancing around a thumb” and “The disaster of loving.”

6/2/2004 - Poems of War
War continues in many places on this globe, and our visitors here continue to seek out poems for wartime reading & meditation, so we have expanded our collection of classic poems of war.

5/26/2004 - The Lonesome Death of Hart Crane
Janet Hamill offers a remembrance of the death of poet Hart Crane, who was only 33 when he committed suicide by jumping off a ship in 1932, and her poem in his memory, “The Lonesome Death of H. Crane.”

5/12/2004 - Letter to a Young Poet
Bob Holman’s notes on the writing of three of his own poems, written in response to a 10th grade student’s project on slam poetry: “1990,” “A Jew in New York” & “AIDS.”

5/9/2004 - Regarding Thom Gunn. Poet. Teacher. Mentor.
The memory-space occupied after death by a poet who teaches other poets expands out through those poets and their poems. Thom Gunn was such a teaching poet and we can see his influence rippling out in the memoir contributed by Gerard Van der Leun, who was his student many years ago.

4/29/2004 - Thom Gunn, poet of “anti-poetic” subjects
Thom Gunn was a British expatriate who lived, wrote & taught in California for the last 50 years. He died in April 2004 in San Francisco. Both his accomplished formal poetry & his compelling free verse often dealt with “anti-poetic” & counterculture subjects, from Elvis to motorcycles to drugs to AIDS & death....

3/31/2004 - Caught in the Act: The making of a live poetry + music CD
Whitman McGowan recounts his experience producing a live poetry performance CD, Caught in the Act (Little Records, 2003), from its genesis in the dream of a European performance tour through collecting recordings and permissions to designing the CD package, selecting & mastering the audio tracks, and enduring the glitches in the actual CD manufacturing process. More than you ever wanted to know, unless you’re thinking about producing a CD of your work....

3/22/2004 - In memory of Cid Corman
Taylor Mignon, our Museletter correspondent in Japan, has sent a poem that he wrote for Cid Corman in the 1990s, which we post here as a memorial. Corman’s poetic voice & editorial presence will be missed, not only among American poets in Japan, but all over the world.

3/15/2004 - Cid Corman, American poet in Japan
Cid Corman was a beloved & amazingly prolific poet, translator of French & Japanese poets, host of the first American poetry radio show, respected essayist and the independent editor & founder of Origin Press, which published a great deal of the most important new American poetry from the 1950s on. He lived in Kyoto, Japan with his wife Shizumi, & carried on voluminous correspondences with poets all over the world.

3/9/2004 - Poets from around the world are news!
Your poetry guides are still keeping an eye on local papers all over the world, looking for poets & poems you may not already know about who show up in the mainstream news media. Here’s a selection of the most interesting stories from the first few months of 2004, from Iran, Texas, California, South Africa, Brazil, Massachusetts, India, Scotland, England & China....

2/24/2004 - Pablo Neruda, Latin American “people’s poet”
Pablo Neruda was a Nobel laureate, diplomat, exile & returned native son of Chile, the most respected & beloved of Latin American poets, still widely read & translated 30 years after his death. His centenary in 2004 prompted lots of publishing, filmmaking & celebratory activity.

2/17/2004 - Langston Hughes, poet laureate of Black American life & culture
Langston Hughes was a radical democrat at the center of the Harlem Renaissance, jazz/blues lyrical poet, humorous storyteller, political playwright, passionate advocate of African American pride, civil rights & artistic freedom.

2/6/2004 - Phillis Wheatley, America’s first black poet
A brief profile of Phillis Wheatley, African slave, first African (American) to be published in the USA... the original voice of the Other on US shores.

2/3/2004 - “Fame” & the lives of the poets
In honor of Richard Brautigan’s birthday January 30th, Barry Spacks posted a lovely & provocative poem to the NewPoetry email discussion list, and that got your guides musing about “the Bitch Fame-Goddess” & the poets who climbed onto “her gerbil-treadwheel.”

1/27/2004 - Not Forgotten: A William McLain Memorial
Poems & recollections in memory of William McLain (1911 - 2003), “Southern California’s oldest performance poet,” who will not soon be forgotten.

1/20/2004 - Notes from the Walla Walla Poetry Party 2003, by Denis Mair
Denis Mair’s notes from the 2003 Walla Walla Poetry Party, condensed for About Poetry by klipschutz, plus a previously unpublished poem by Denis, “Try a Little Dialogue.”

1/7/2004 - Stone Soup Revisited, by Linda Lerner
Linda Lerner tells the story of her return visit to Stone Soup in Boston, a homecoming to the venue where for three decades Jack Powers has enabled poets to experience “the condition of poetry.” Plus two poems: “the poem the rare soul,” by Linda Lerner, and “A Condition, Not an Event,” by Andrew Gettler.