Haiku is not taken as seriously in America as it is in the Asian countries, but a number of our finest authors and poets have tried their hands at it, including Richard Wright, Richard Wilbur and Rhina Espaillat. Ann McCrae does it as well as anyone. She talks about her art in this entertaining and instructive video.
Juan Matos, New Poet Laureate of Worcester, Massachusetts
I’m happy for my friend Juan Matos! What a superb choice as poet laureate of Worcester, or of Anyplace-At- All! He’s not only an excellent poet —Rhina Espaillat, who should know, considers him one of the very best poets writing Spanish in the United States—but a dear, sweet man, with great reserves of dignity in him. To hear him read make me think of the famous Caedmon recordings of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.
In this article printed in Worcester Magazine, he and Amina Mohammed talk about their reactions to being selected.as Worcester’s poet laureate and youth poet laureate, respectively. I found what each of them had to say profoundly moving. Congratulations and every blessing to them both!
Beauty Will Save The World
Dana Gioia, a poet I much admire, talks about Beauty in this lovely and lovingly produced video. Click here to watch.
2020 Newburyport Literary Festival Poetry Events
This year the Festival honors “the perpetually young” X. J. Kennedy, and we’ve got an all-star lineup of other poets who’ll read for us, including Linda Pastan. Here is a complete listing of the 2020 Newburyport Literary Festival Poetry Events.
Video of the Rhina Espaillat Symposium
Daniella Gitlin and the other wonderful volunteers at Word Up Bookshop in New York have made available videos of the Rhina Espaillat Symposium which took place in October. It was a memorable day. People came from as far away as Los Angeles to show their admiration and affection for Rhina, and she, of course, reflected all that loving energy right back on us. I’ve been comparing her to a mirror ball when I talk about what happened that day.
So much happened that day. These videos are studded with gems. Leslie Monsour borrowed John Tavano’s guitar to sing —beautifully— a song she’d composed using one of Rhina’s Spanish poems as lyrics. Harvard Professor Lorgia García Peña revealed that, ever since hearing Rhina read at Dartmouth over ten years ago, she has carried Rhina’s poems with her as a daily source of inspiration. Paula Dietz of The Hudson Review celebrated her friendship with Rhina. The young scholar Dan-el Padilla Peralta delivered a riveting essay. Juan Matos read his poetry with a passion that moved even the Spanish-challenged, like myself. Nancy Kang and Silvio Torres-Saillant, authors of the first full-length study of Rhina’s life and work, presented new papers. It’s impossible to list all the treasures to be found in this trove. It’s worth coming back to, whenever you want to be reminded what literary community looks and feels like. Here’s a link to the links: Rhina Espaillat Symposium
A Frontier Romance
Wendy Ford, whom I am proud to call my student, has poured her heart and soul and hundreds of hours of painstaking composition into a narrative sequence based on the experience of her great-grandparents, early settlers of Wichita, Kansas.
You won’t go wrong if you judge this book by its terrific cover. Using the time-honored techniques of traditional verse, Ford has written a timeless love-story. Where most tales of romance come to a happy ending, this one is only beginning. Girl meets boy, they fall in love and live happily ever after —but what a life they live together! The man who’ll come to be known as Judge “Tiger Bill” Campbell and his “pioneer bride” Kate ride west, fleeing her irate father, to settle in Kansas—where not much is “settled.” Drought and swarms of locusts destroy their crops; a cyclone tears an infant from them. Wildfires threaten their very existence. As judge, Tiger Bill must stand up to lawless gangs who threaten his life. Nothing, however, diminishes this couple’s love for one another; it spills over into love for their neighbors, as they feed the hungry and defend the outsider. A love story, indeed!
Purchase A Frontier Romance from the publisher, Kelsay Books
Purchase from Amazon
“An Affront Crying Out to Heaven”
Pope Francis tells the simple, plain truth that is at the heart of a true “culture of life”:
Untangling the GOP’s Spin
Here’s an essential viewers guide to the impeachment hearings: don’t let the spin turn your head around: The impeachment inquiry: Untangling the GOP’s spin – The Boston Globe
Walt Whitman and The State of the Nation
The November issue of Poetry includes an essay by Martín Espada—a powerful corrective to what Trump’s rhetoric would have us accept.
Salem State University Writers Series
Alexandria Peary and Alfred Nicol
Oct. 15, 4:30-6 pm | MLK Room, Ellison Campus Center
352 Lafayette Street, Salem, MA
Alexandria Peary is the author of six books, including The Water Draft (Spuyten Duyvil 2019), Prolific Moment: Theory and Practice of Mindfulness for Writing (Routledge 2018), and Control Bird Alt Delete (University of Iowa Press). Her work has received the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Slope Editions Book Prize, and the Joseph Langland Award from the Academy of American Poets. Maintaining a dual career in creative writing and composition-rhetoric, she has published over 150 shorter pieces in places including New American Writing, Gettysburg Review, Poetry Daily, the Poetry Foundation, Yale Review, North American Review, Boston Review, and Crazyhorse (literary) as well as College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Review, and New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, and Pedagogy (scholarly). She is the history editor for the Journal of Creative Writing Studies and the Head Poetry Reader for Baltic.
Alfred Nicol’s most recent collection of poetry, Animal Psalms, was published in 2016 by Able Muse Press. He has published two other collections, Elegy for Everyone (2009), and Winter Light, which received the 2004 Richard Wilbur Award. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New England Review, Dark Horse, First Things, Commonweal, The Formalist, The Hopkins Review, Measure and many other literary journals and anthologies. Nicol’s poem “Addendum” was included in the 2018 edition of The Best American Poetry.