A, Steve Abbott to Ece Ayhan

Alysia Abbott’s memoir of her father, Steve Abbott, beloved San Francisco poet and editor who died of AIDS in 1992, is beautifully realized, dense with photographs, diaries and documents.

Akhmatova is the walking history of Russian history, antihistory... the woman whose voice cuts specific and sideblades gender. Sexy, political, and pure, she was also one of our chosen Survivor poets.

The official Sherman Alexie site is the place to go for the latest Alexie doings. Alexie went up against Patricia Smith and won the 1999 New York Heavyweight Poetry Bout, was interviewed by Juliette Torrez for Sic Vice & Verse and About.com Poetry, and defeated our own Bob Holman in the 2000 World Heavyweight Poetry Bout in Taos.

Best known as a novelist, Julia Alvarez writes poetry of great beauty, capturing both a feminist and multi-cultural balance in stories and revelations of her life as a woman writer. Her poem “Audition,” originally published in The New Yorker, is posted in Penn professor Al Filreis’ collection.

In his profile of Archie Ammons at AAP, David Lehman called him “independent, unaligned, a bit ornery, and as removed as one can be from any of poetry’s supposed centers of power... an American original.” He died on February 25, 2001 and was remembered by Robert Pinsky for PBS NewsHour, archived in streaming video.

Ammons’ poems are online at AAP, Boppin’ A Riff, Cornell University’s Arts & Sciences Newsletter, and Slate, and there’s commentary and analysis of his work at Modern American Poetry.

“Literature Nation,” from Miekal And’s Joglars crossmedia site, is a poem that weaves your mind in—pick hit for finding the cyberpoem of your dream, really! Miekal And is anarchantileadernon of Dreamtime Village, the man behind The Plagiarist Codex and the brilliant “typofantastic voyage,” “After Emmett,” among many other works, solo and collaborative.

“Dedicated to life, poetry, and the ABC’s of a new art,” Jim Andrews’ Vispo LANGU(IM)AGE site is a well-made digital gallery of Web poem-art pieces, including morphs and pop-up poems, Andrews’ essays on Web art and visual poetry, and a large audio section with works by Andrews and others (listen to Paul McKinnon’s stand-up travelogue, “Wake Up and Smell the Bus Depot.”

In Jacket magazine’s special Ashbery issue, John Tranter gave us “Three John Ashberys” (Mundane, Secondary and Transcendental). Ashbery poems and references are also collected at the Electronic Poetry Center and the materials for Professor Al Filreis’ Penn course on contemporary American poetry.

You can sample the work of England’s premier satiric poet, Attila the Stockbroker, right here on our site. Then go directly to Attila’s own site for books, CDs & a calendar of upcoming gigs.

Margaret Atwood is best known as the author of novels like The Handmaids Tale (1985), Alias Grace (1996) and The Year of the Flood (2009), but she has published poems all along through her career, and her poetry is quite wonderful. Her Web site has recordings of her reading a number of her poems, and you can keep up with her current concerns by reading her blog.

Civil servant, translator and major Turkish poet Ece Ayhan was a master of the untranslateable. His book A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies (translated from the Turkish by Murat Nemet-Nejat, Sun and Moon, 1997) is astonishing—too dark for surrealism, a deep mined mind at work, a subtle music.