poetryandmorepoetry

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I’m about to head out on vacation but I’m leaving you with something very cool, since after all it is National Poetry Month – every year the organizers of the O, Miami Poetry Festival spend the month of April attempting to make sure that everyone in Miami sees at least one poem.

That means sneaking poetry in everywhere – on bandaids and beer cans, in gumball machines, on buses and random city walls, even in sourdough starters and the sides of old strip clubs. And though there have been some big-name guests over the years, most of the poetry is by the people of Miami themselves. (The bandaids, by the way, will be given out to cover COVID-19 needle sticks at some health care facilities.)

This bus stop poem really spoke to me – though any peacock that stole MY bagel would be in trouble.

If you’re not lucky enough to be in Miami right now, you can find a list of all this year’s projects here, along with detailed descriptions of each one.

So please enjoy some poetry, and I’ll see y’all back here in two weeks!

– Petra

Images courtesy of O, Miami

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It’s time for our annual poetry preview – and this year it’s bigger and better than ever. “As I began thinking about this year’s preview, I felt more than ever that contemporary American poetry is far too multifarious for just one person to cover,” says our critic Craig Morgan Teicher. So he enlisted four other poets to help look ahead at a year’s worth of great poetry, and we have part one of that look-ahead today. “And all five of us hope it offers renewal and truth-telling at a moment when both are profoundly necessary,” Teicher says. Check that out here.

– Petra

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Inscription for the Ceiling of a Bedroom

by Dorothy Parker

Daily dawns another day; I must up, to make my way. Though I dress and drink and eat, Move my fingers and my feet, Learn a little, here and there, Weep and laugh and sweat and swear, Hear a song, or watch a stage, Leave some words upon a page, Claim a foe, or hail a friend— Bed awaits me at the end.

Though I go in pride and strength, I’ll come back to bed at length. Though I walk in blinded woe, Back to bed I’m bound to go. High my heart, or bowed my head, All my days but lead to bed. Up, and out, and on; and then Ever back to bed again, Summer, Winter, Spring, and Fall— I’m a fool to rise at all!

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Advice to a Girl

by Sara Teasdale

No one worth possessing Can be quite possessed; Lay that on your heart, My young angry dear; This truth, this hard and precious stone, Lay it on your hot cheek, Let it hide your tear. Hold it like a crystal When you are alone And gaze in the depths of the icy stone. Long, look long and you will be blessed: No one worth possessing Can be quite possessed.

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Happy birthday, Frank O’Hara (b. 27 June 1926)

Having a Coke with You

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it Watch Frank O’Hara read this poem here.

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Robert Frost, March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963.

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834

World Poetry Day - 21st March

Image provided by Unsplash

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A SONG IN THE FRONT YARD

I’ve stayed in the front yard all my life. I want a peek at the back Where it’s rough and untended and hungry weed grows. A girl gets sick of a rose. I want to go in the back yard now And maybe down the alley, To where the charity children play. I want a good time today. They do some wonderful things. They have some wonderful fun. My mother sneers, but I say it’s fine How they don’t have to go in at quarter to nine. My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae Will grow up to be a bad woman. That George’ll be taken to Jail soon or late (On account of last winter he sold our back gate). But I say it’s fine. Honest, I do. And I’d like to be a bad woman, too, And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace And strut down the streets with paint on my face.

– Gwendolyn Brooks. The poet died this day, December 3rd, 2000, at 83 years of age.

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H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

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“I share this honor with ancestors and teachers who inspired in me a love of poetry, who taught that words are powerful and can make change when understanding appears impossible, and how time and timelessness can live together within a poem.” —Joy Harjo, first Native American poet to serve as U.S. poet laureate

Photo: Shawn Miller/Library of Congress

Keep reading

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Sara Teasdale (August 8, 1884 – January 29, 1933)

American lyric poet. In 1918 she won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1917 poetry collection Love Songs. It was “made possible by a special grant from The Poetry Society”; however, the sponsoring organization now lists it as the earliest Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (inaugurated 1922).

In 1933, she died by suicide, overdosing on sleeping pills. (Wikipedia)

From our stacks: Frontispiece “Sara Teasdale. Drawing by Marcel Maurel” and poem ‘Truce’ in facsimile from Strange Victory By Sara Teasdale. With Portrait and a Poem in Facsimile. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933.

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“John Skoyles, once said in a workshop—I think he was repeating something he’d heard from another poet—that if a poem has the word ‘chocolate’ in it, it should also have the word 'disconsolate.’ That is to say, a piece of writing should have internal resonances (which could occur at the level of the word or the phrase or the idea or even the implication) that work semantically like slant rhymes, parts that call back softly to other parts, that make a chime in your mind.”

— Elisa Gabbert, in this week’s Ten Questions; read the rest at pw.org!

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On this day (4 November) in 1948, T.S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize in literature for his profound effect on the direction of modern poetry.