Following are eight poems from last Tuesday’s poetry jam on twitter, ranging from plainness and fresh strawberries to a celebration of punctuation. Poems of Complication 2 By @mdgoodyear, @llbarkat, @PoemsPrayers, @mxings, @togetherforgood, @cascheller, @mmerubies, @MonicaSharman, @DancinButterfly, @thegypsymama, @TchrEric and @KathleenOverby. Not to mention @shrinkingcamel. Edited by @glynn_poet. Plainness I saw two plain women today. One […]
Poems of Complication 1
Below are the first group of poems coming from our poetry jam on Twitter this past Tuesday. The prompts, courtesy of @mdgoodyear, came from lines from the following: “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” by Robert Lowell; “Ode to the West Wind” by Percy Bysshe Shelley; “Ode to the Confederate Dead” by Allen Tate; “Ode on […]
Prelude to a Poetic Jam
It always takes a few moments for participants in our poetry jams to collect themselves, eat the last of dinner, calm down, and generally settle themselves as they prepare to jam. Tuesday’s poetry jam was no different, except an errant camel named Bradley, having imbibed a certain volume of wine at dinner, wandered on to […]
The Songs of King Tut 4
I consider breaking this into two posts but the last poems from Thursday’s Treasures of Tutankhamun-inspired poetry jam on Twitter turned out to be so short that I decided to keep all of them together. This concludes the poems that resulted from the jam. The Songs of King Tut 4 By @llbarkat, @PoemsPrayers, @mmerubies, @KathleenOverby, […]
The Songs of King Tut 3
Poetry jams can take odd twists and turns, which is part of the fun on participating. You’re moving and posting down one stream of thought, and then an almost alien idea enters the conversation and away everyone goes. We’ve been talking (offline, in real telephone conversations) about some of what was learned Thursday with the […]
The Songs of King Tut 2
The poems from Thursday’s Treasures of Tutankhamun-inspired poetry jam continue. The Songs of King Tut 2 By @llbarkat, @PoemsPrayers, @mmerubies, @KathleenOverby, @MonicaSharman, @togetherforgood, @mxings, @mdgoodyear, @mattpriur, and @PhoenixKarenee, edited by @gyoung9751 Once in Egypt Isn’t Egypt in Africa? Isn’t the Nile one of Africa’s rivers? Nefertiti, Egyptian, African, Queen. My father fell in love with […]
The Songs of King Tut 1
This past Thursday, we had another one of our poetry jams on Twitter, this one augmneted by a new technology tool (see the main home page for what it looks like). The prompts from @tspoetry were all taken from Treasures of Tutankhamun, published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Technology, Tut, Twitter, TweetSpeak – we […]
Poetry Meets Technology
Marcus Goodyear and Matt Priour have been conspiring over the past several weeks to create a tool – a game, actually – that might be used for TweetSpeak poetry jams, among a lot of other uses. It debuted at TweetSpeak Poetry on Thursday night. And it worked. Anticipation was high. Two of our online poetic […]
National Poetry Month: Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe published his 1st poetry collection in 1827, at 18 years old. A tendency to run up debts & gamble kept him in constant state of reinvention.
National Poetry Month: Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell (1917-1977) was born to a prominent Boston family. He attended Harvard for two years, and then transferred to Kenyon College, where he studied poetry under John Crowe Ransom. Then he took graduate courses at Louisiana State University, where he studied under Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. His second book of poetry, Lord […]
National Poetry Month: Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) became widely known and appreciated only after her suicide. She published her first poem at age 18 (in the Christian Science Monitor) and had only one book of poetry, Colossus, published by the time of her death. (Before her death, she had published the semi-autobiographical The Bell Jar under the pseudonym Victoria […]
National Poetry Month: Jack Gilbert
Jack Gilbert (1925 – ) published his first book of poems, Views of Jeopardy, in 1962, and his second, Monolithos, nearly 20 years later. In between he moved to Europe, traveled as a lecturer on American literature for the U.S. State Department. He’s also the author of three other books of poetry: Transgressions: Selected Poems, […]
National Poetry Month: Edna St. Vincent Millay
At the age of 20, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) entered her poem “Renascence” in a contest and won fourth place, which meant publication in The Lyric Year – and a scholarship to Vassar (makes you wonder what the first place winner received). She graduated in 1917, and that same year published her first volume, […]
National Poetry Month: The Best American Poetry 2009
It takes work to put together an anthology like The Best American Poetry 2009. The editor, in this case David Wagoner, reads scores of literary journals (online and print), general publications, and books of poetry, sifting through literally thousands of poems to select 75 that he or she considers the best of the year. Wagoner, […]
National Poetry Month: T.S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) is credited with having written the single most influential poetic work of the 20th century, The Waste Land (1922). (Think “April is the cruellest month…”) A native of Missouri (there are Eliot family connections all over St. Louis), he lived in England for most of his life and became a British […]
National Poetry Month: Donald Hall
Donald Hall (1928 – ) attended the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference when he was 16, the year he published his first work. Over his career, he’s published numerous works of poetry; written several works of non-fiction, including two biographies; written several children’s books; edited numerous anthologies and textbooks; written short stories; and was named U.S. […]
National Poetry Month: Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich (1929 – ) is no stranger to controversy. During the 1960s, her poetry became more confrontational, exploring women’s issues, racism and the Vietnam War. In 1973, she published Diving Into the Wreck, which won the National Book Award for poetry and which Rich shared with her fellow nominees Alica Walker and Audre Lord. […]
National Poetry Month: Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes (1902 – 1967) wrote 14 books of poetry, three books of poetry in translation, innumerable plays that have been published in some 11 works, letters, short stories, novels – an incredibly productive and creative career. All of his work, collectively and individually, represent a profound chronicle of African-American life from the 1920s to […]
National Poetry Month: Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967) is another writer whose poetry, like Walt Whitman and Robert Frost’s, could qualify him as “America’s Poet.”
National Poetry Month: Louise Gluck
A native of New York, Louise Gluck has written numerous books of poetry (including A Village Life: Poems, reviewed here last November), won the Pulitzer Prize and a host of other awards and prizes, and in 2003 became the U.S. Poet Laureate and the judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. In 2008, she […]