News and Links for Poets
Poems from Guantánamo
Despite the Pentagon’s best efforts to silence the "Gitmo" detainees, their pro bono lawyers worked to publish a slender volume of their poems. Poems from Guantánamo has just 22 poems written in the cages of a prison camp on an island of hell. Some of the nearly 800 detainees - sounds so temporary, doesn’t it? - have been there for going on 6 years. Ninety per cent, according to the DoD, have no connection to al-Quaeda, and a mere five percent were captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan (what fields)? One of the poets included in the book, Latif, was in Pakistan seeking medical treatment when he was turned over to the US for a $5000 bounty. These men have a lot to say about the nature of their captivity. The book, edited by Marc Falkoff, was published this year by the University of Iowa Press. To read more about the book or hear audio files, visit: http://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/2007_fall/falpoefro.html
Poetry ... helps turn us toward what we should or must not ignore. Robert Pinsky
Writing Workshop at the Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences - June 16-26, 2008 - UMass, Boston
Join writers Brian Turner, Larry Heinemann, Carolyn Forché , Sam Hamill, Demetria Martí nez, Bruce Weigl, Martha Collins, Lloyd Schwartz, Lady borton, Martin Espada, Macdara Woods, Fred Marchant, Doug Anderson, and others. For more info visit http://www.joinercenter.umb.edu/writers_workshop.html or email Michael.Sullivan@umb.edu
Woven Voices: Messages from the Heart
Weaver Sarah Haskell is seeking positive messages of hope, dreams, wishes or prayers from people all over the world, written on paper. She will cut these into strips and weave them into brightly colored prayer flags. The flags will be hung in various communities, and as the flags unravel they will release their messages. If you are interested in being part, send your message, preferably hand written, on any size, color or weight paper to Sarah Haskell, PO Box 452, York, ME 03909.
Split This Rock Poetry Festival
DC Poets Against the War, The Institute for Policy Studies, Sol & Soul and Busboys and Poets are sponsoring a Festival in DC to run from March 20th through March 23rd, with an emphasis on poems of provocation and witness. For more information visit http://www.splitthisrock.org./
Robert Pinsky to open Sunken Garden Poetry & Music Festival 2008 Hillstead Museum, 35 Mountain Road, Farmington, CT 06032. All performances begin at 6:30. Contactt 860-677-4787 or mailto: poetry@hillstead.org. Schedule:
June 11th - Robert Pinsky & Merge
June 25th - Connecticut Poetry Circuit Winners & Coleman Barks
July 9th - Billy Collins & Sheila Jordan
July 23rd - Patricia Fargnoli & Ilya Kaminsky
August 6th - Paul Mulddon & Rackett
August 20th - CT HS Students & Trio del Sol
The Solstice Summer Writers’ Conference
Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, MA hosts a weeklong writers conference from June 22nd - June 28th. Poetry faculty will be Francisco Aragon, Stephen Dunn, Patricia Spears Jones, & Cleopatra Mathis. Special Guest will be Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River, and Gone, Baby, Gone. Details and applications at http://www.pmc.edu/solstice
Geraldine R Dodge Poetry Festival
The 12th Biennial Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival will be held at Waterloo Village in Stanhope, New Jersey from Thursday, September 25 through Sunday, September 28, 2008
http://www.grdodge.org/poetry/ Listen to Taha Muhammad Ali read his poem Revenge at the 2006 Festival http://www.grdodge.org/2006festival_revenge.htm#
Charles Simic, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer from Strafford, NH has been named the US Poet Laureate, succeeding another NH resident, Donald Hall. The post comes with a $35,000 stipend. He also just received the American Academy of Poets Wallace Stevens Award for “outstanding and proven mastery” of the art of poetry, which comes with a stipend of $100,000.
Paradise Motel
Millions were dead; everybody was innocent.
I stayed in my room. The President
Spoke of war as of a magic love potion.
My eyes were opened in astonishment.
In a mirror my face appeared to me
Like a twice-canceled postage stamp.
I lived well, but life was awful.
There were so many soldiers that day,
So many refugees crowding the roads.
Naturally, they all vanished
With a touch of the hand.
History licked the corners of its bloody mouth.
On the pay channel, a man and a woman
Were trading hungry kisses and tearing off
Each other's clothes while I looked on
With the sound off and the room dark
Except for the screen where the color
Had too much red in it, too much pink.
Grace Paley of Vermont, poet, short story writer and antiwar activist has died at the age of eighty-four. She has served as poet laureate of both New York and Vermont, and received numerous prizes for her work, including the Lannan Literary Award, a National Book Award and a senior fellowship recognizing her lifetime contribution to literature from the National Endowment for the Arts. Since the 1960s, she was very active in the antiwar, feminist, and anti-nuclear movements. She was also one of the “White House Eleven," who were arrested in 1978 for unfurling an anti-nuclear banner on the White House lawn. The following link will take you to the BU video with introduction by Robert Pinsky, of her reading on that campus earlier this year. http://www.bu.edu/phpbin/buniverse/videos/view/?id=98
Daniel Berrigan and Adrianna Amari pair his poems with her photographs of Baltimore Cemeteries in a new book entitled Prayer for the Morning Headlines, coming out October 9th from Apprentice House.
Paul Muldoon replaces Alice Quinn as poetry editor for the New Yorker. He has said that he hopes to publish poems that will make a profound change in the reader. Visit his official website for sample poems, etc. http://www.paulmuldoon.net/
