News
Valentine’s Day has come and gone, but love will never die. Indeed, nor will the erotic poetry of Edward Estlin Cummings. Originally meant to shock the Puritanical sensibilities of the 1920s, Cummings’s poems of sexual and romantic love remain just as fresh and provocative today. The fifty poems included in Erotic Poems (all originally published in Cummings’s Complete Poems) are accompanied by twelve drawings by the poet himself which were recently featured in a slideshow on The Daily Beast. Poems Out Loud decided we’d call in the experts to take a close look at these erotic poems and report back on their findings. David Baker shows us how Cummings is in “so careful a rush”, Patricia Smith takes the express to Chicago, and Ann Townsend introduces the Grape-Vine Lady.
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Poet Todd Boss knows Winter. He was born in Wisconsin, currently lives in Minnesota, and spent his MFA years in Alaska. He started the intermittent, online poetry journal Flurry as “a way of lighting the darkness of the season, staying connected during an isolating time, nourishing the spirit in the midst of a deep freeze, and celebrating nature even at its most foreboding.” Considering I woke up this morning to falling snow, Todd’s announcement that Volume 3 of Flurry is now online couldn’t have come at a better time. This issue features new poems by Robin Chapman, Sharon Chmielarz, Karl Elder, Alixa Doom, and Athena Kildegaard. And be sure not to miss Tim Nolan’s “New Year’s”.
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Translation: “Sometimes I make typos”. A couple weeks ago I shared some random thoughts on video poems. This morning I got an email from a reader pointing out one of his own video projects. It’s a clever idea done well. Click through to check it out.
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Have you noticed the new recordings we’ve added to the Audio section recently? There’s some great readings you shouldn’t miss. To keep up to date on all the recordings available on Poems Out Loud, try subscribing using the RSS feed just for readings or check out the podcast in iTunes.
• National Book Award finalist Thomas Lynch is about to publish a new collection of stories in February 2010 called Apparition and Late Fictions. Poems Out Loud asked him to revisit his only book of poetry published ten years ago. Listen to Thomas Lynch read “No Prisoners” from Still Life in Milford.
• Nick Laird‘s most recent novel, Glover’s Mistake featured a culture blogger as the protagonist. Now this blog features Nick Laird. What goes around, comes around. Listen to Nick Laird read “Light Pollution” from On Purpose.
• Martín Espada has been called “the Pablo Neruda of North America”. He was kind enough to read a poem that guest stars Neruda from his most recent collection which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Listen to Martín Espada read “The Soldiers in the Garden” from The Republic of Poetry.
• A first listen to one of the new poems from Sherod Santos’ forthcoming collection. Listen to Sherod Santos read “Variation on a Theme (I)” from The Intricated Soul: New and Selected available in March 2010.
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“Avatar” notwithstanding, this weekend is an important one for Anglophiles everywhere. Yesterday was the American opening of “The Young Victoria,” a film based on the accession to the throne and early reign of Queen Victoria of England. These film goers may not be donning plastic glasses or “ooing” at 3D effects, but with a roster of producers including Martin Scorsese and Sarah, Duchess of York, expectations for “The Young Victoria” are high. The film has received some backlash for taking liberties with historical facts (Victoria was left-handed, not right, and Prince Albert was never grazed by a bullet in an assassination attempt on Victoria’s life). Nonetheless, we here at Poems Out Loud are eager to see the film. Look for us in line, we’ll be reading In Memoriam.
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From Billy Collins to Todd Boss
In 1980, the same year that Pac-Man (the best-selling video game of all time) was released, Billy Collins published his second collection of poems. It was called Video Poems and it is now out of print. Skip ahead twenty-six years. It’s 2006 and Billy Collins has served as the Poet Laureate for the United States and is just completing his two-year post as Poet Laureate for the State of New York. From what I can piece together, it’s at this time that JWT, a global ad agency with an office in New York City, begins creating animated videos for some of Billy Collins poems. The earliest one, from January 2006, is Collins’ poem “Forgetfulness”. The so-called “animated poem” looks like it could have been a music video for a Pavement song circa 1993, which is a huge compliment. Eleven of these Billy Collins videos are collected here for your viewing pleasure. Now, skip ahead once more (stay with me) to yesterday morning when I’m sipping my morning coffee and checking email. I find a message from YouTube letting me know that the Todd Boss YouTube channel I subscribe to has two new videos. Here is what I find:
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David Baker’s new poetry collection, Never-Ending Birds, was published last month. Yesterday he joined Rafael Alvarado and Brett-Candace Hanson-Smith (yes, I believe that is all one, oddly hyphenated name, correct me if I’m wrong) on the Moe Green Poetry Hour to discuss the new book and all things poetry. It’s a long, fascinating, somewhat rambling conversation that I highly recommend. Rafael and Brett-Candace comment on David’s work in a very innocent (but well-read) way and it’s interesting to hear David respond. Click through to listen to the show.
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Campion’s Film of and from Keats
In his February-May 1819 journal-letter to his brother George, the nineteenth-century English Romantic poet John Keats remarks that “they are very shallow people who take every thing literal. A Man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory—and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life—a life the like scriptures, figurative—.” To her great credit, filmmaker Jane Campion has understood the richly figurative in Keats’ life without sacrificing the literal wealth of its texture. She has evoked the mystery of his genius without giving up the reality of its dailiness. Bright Star, her new film about the almost two-year passion between Keats and Fanny Brawne, is brilliant in its discipline and detail, in what it permits to enter their story and what it excuses from exposition. Campion is as gifted a writer as she is director, and her screenplay is masterful in its extrapolation of the implicit narrative in Keats’ remarkable letters, particularly since what we see on the screen is entirely from Fanny’s point of view: her experience of and with Keats as reflected in his words.
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The inaugural Boston Book Festival is happening this Saturday, October 24th in Copley Square. The schedule of events features an impressive roster of writers speaking throughout the day. Surprisingly though, for a city that’s been home to so many of our country’s greatest poets, poetry won’t have much of a presence at the festival. Though there is one notable exception. You won’t want to miss Former Poet Laureate (and columnist on Poems Out Loud) Robert Pinsky reading from his latest anthology, Essential Pleasures at Trinity Church at 4pm at a reading titled Poetry as Music. In classic Pinsky-style, this won’t be just any poetry reading. Here’s the event description from the Boston Book Festival:
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From between the painted tape of the Franklin Evans exhibit currently on display at New York’s Sue Scott Gallery, Rebecca Wolff read from her latest collection The King last night. In this video she reads two poems: ‘I live in the rectory’ and ‘Content is King’. Rebecca describes ‘Content is King’ as the “crypto title-poem” of the book.
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