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There are still a few days left in National Poetry Month! Explore this selection of Book Post articles celebrating the luminous world of poetry.
Review: Anthony Domestico, Poetry on TV
“How might we lovers of poetry convince those who don’t even like poetry, who find poetry intimidating or think with Marianne Moore that ‘there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle’?”
Review: Ange Mlinko, Poets Translating
“The paradox is that we’re a both country of immigrants and legendarily monolingual. Perhaps, being immigrants, we’re always newly born into a rootless present; our own linguistic history evaporates at our backs.”
Review: Charles Simic, What is a prose poem?
“How does one describe a genre that declares total verbal freedom from convention and about which every generalization one makes is contradicted by another poem that doesn’t look like the previous one?”
Diary with Recipe: Patricia Storace, The Appetites of Poets
“Witnessing Keats as he tastes gives him to us, suddenly incarnate, like seeing the words of his poems inked in his own handwriting. There he is: breathing. And looking, as an artist does, through a nectarine to see everything.”
Review: Reginald Dwayne Betts, Letter to Yusef Komunyakaa
“Dear Yusef,
The story I tell most often about poetry begins with the hole. A contraband copy of Dudley Randall’s Black Poets slipped under my cell door in solitary introducing me to Sonia Sanchez, Claude McKay, Nikki Giovanni, Lucille Clifton, Etheridge Knight, and more. I tell less often what happened weeks later…”
Anna DeForest: Grieving Lessons, on Victoria Chang’s ”Obit”
“A collection of poems in the form of dozens of obituaries, for parents, for selves, for language, Obit is easily the most apt and soothing (soothing like chopping wood, like carrying water or yelling into a well) work I have read since before the world upended.”