#poetry

#poetry

In Need of Seawater is not simply a documentary about poetry-it is an experience shaped by memory, voice, and lived history.

Because, let's face it, creative work does require some form of faith. It is a tumultuous thing to launch an idea into a vast nothingness and hope that it makes a light bright enough to be found by others. Luckily, these luminaries were my light, and I hope they may become yours as well, and - more so - that these snippets lead you to more of their work.

Nellie attended Oakland High School when her family moved to a neighborhood outside of Chinatown after World War II, the beginnings of integration for ethnic Chinese residents who'd lived under the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943). Her early life, into her late 20s, was rooted in the patriarchal culture in Chinatown and the white American mainstream. That oppression did not sustain her. Nellie's intelligence, creativity, and compassion yearned to break free.

Join us outside on YBCA's Third Street Courtyard for a poetry and spoken word reading by Kevin Dublin, Magick Altman and Tongo Eisen-Martin. Enjoy the performances designed to bring together intergenerational and diverse voices from the Bay. Included with gallery admission. Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur. Address: 701 Mission St, San Francisco, CA

i want back my rocking chairs, solipsist sunsets, & coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches. i've donated bibles to thrift stores (mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind): remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures;

They are credited with bringing creative inspiration to millions every day - a simple idea that has been copied in cities across the world. In 1986 the first Poems on the Underground appeared in Tube carriages, and both commuters and visitors to London have been pondering their meaning ever since. Transport for London will be marking the 40th anniversary of this "art for all" project with new works, poetry readings and displays of poems at London Underground stations.

In Need of Seawater is not simply a documentary about poetry-it is an experience shaped by memory, voice, and lived history. Directed with sensitivity by Richard Yeagley, the film follows poet, writer, and producer Mark Anthony Thomas as he revisits the poems that defined his early adulthood, written between his early twenties and mid-twenties, and now read aloud more than twenty years later.

Poetry is traditionally taught - at least it was taught to me - as a kind of thing you have to endure in English class; there's no sense of it applying to your life. But poetry, good poetry, is the stuff of life. Poetry asks us to slow down and to think about what we're reading, but also to experience it.

I was so panicked by the grief I might experience if my loved one died that it prevented me from giving my loved one what I needed [to]," says Lambert, 54, who lives in London. That was back in 2017. Over time, through trial and error, Lambert says, she learned she had to put her own feelings aside in the moment and focus on the person in front of her.

I didn't set out to be poetic. I set out to ride. But somewhere between mile 30 and mile 70, between sunrise and sunset, I started hearing the road differently. Not just as terrain, but as verse. The hum of my tires was meter. The climbs and descents, line breaks. The miles, stanzas. Sometimes the words come on the ride itself. Sometimes they come when I'm lying in my tent or sipping juice the next morning. But they always come. Because long rides strip the noise away. What's left is what matters.

In an experiment designed to test the efficacy of guardrails put on artificial intelligence models, the researchers wrote 20 poems in Italian and English that all ended with an explicit request to produce harmful content such as hate speech or self-harm. They found that the poetry's lack of predictability was enough to get the AI models to respond to harmful requests they had been trained to avoid a process know as jailbreaking.

It is impossible to talk about cancer without invoking another Big C: cliche. Illness and pain, journeys and battles, finding appreciation for life while reckoning with death these are the building blocks of cancer stories, at once uniquely devastating and devastatingly common. The poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley, romantic partners for over a decade, took divergent approaches to the Big C. As a writer and editor, Falley strived to eradicate cliche; Gibson, as Falley put it, would instead double down.

Does poetry matter in the face of injustice and violence? These poets say yes. Come out for an evening of readings from this collection of revolutionary poetry with the editors and contributors. Books will be available for sale. November 14th 2025 │ 6:00 - 7:30 PM Pegasus Books Downtown 2349 Shattuck Avenue Berkeley, CA 94704 Share with enthusiasts in or around the area.

I always loved spending time at Midtown Scholar. It is one of my favorite bookstores in the world. It's a converted old theater with cozy wooden walls, several floors of books, a stage, a balcony filled with little tables and a coffee shop. Midtown Scholar is also one of poet Kate Baer's favorite bookstores. So on a rainy day last week, we met there to talk.

Mayra Flores and Cristal González Ávila honor their roots through poetry. Flores brings the stories of her East San José community. Her self-published debut, Flores, bridges generations towards change. Ávila, a daughter of farmworkers in Watsonville, has written and acted for the stage for the last 15 years. Her stories explore domestic violence and housing injustice, and recent playwriting credits include La Cortina de la Lechuga and Luz: Senior Stories, commissioned by Teatro Vision.

I'd like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. The point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer

A metal spoon with a lathe-turned wooden handle. A toolkit so tiny it fits in your hand. An album cover from a Chuck Berry record. These are among the significant objects chosen by 22 senior poets that reflect their life experiences: work, people, place, wisdom, identity. On Tuesday, Nov. 4, the poets will gather at Mother Foucault's Book Shop in Portland to read the poems,

San Francisco Poet Laureate emerita and special guests present her latest collection of paired poems and artworks about twelve species from the Pacific Coast of the United States and United States territories. Shuck's art will be on display, and she will participate in a short Q & A about her work. was San Francisco's seventh Poet Laureate. Her poetry draws on her multiethnic background which includes Polish and Cherokee heritage, and her experiences as a lifelong resident of San Francisco.

This autumn, down in tunnels where London's stories flow, TfL is sharing poems as the colder breezes blow. For four short weeks, six voices will accompany your ride, From Hungary, New Zealand, Africa, and far and wide. Sheenagh Pugh brings Days of November, racing to get things done, While Janet Frame reminds us that we strain beneath the sun. Katalin Szlukovényi writes of crowds and modern ties, Pressed close on busy networks where our tangled worlds collide. For history and remembrance, two poems

Darrel Alejandro Holnes is an Afro Panamanian American poet and playwright whose books include Stepmotherland, winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and an International Latino Book Award, and Migrant Psalms, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize.

Yet as soon as Damani and his band Mino Yanci started playing, Tongo began reciting poetry. Something clicked. "I wasn't even a guy that was really into poems, if I'm honest," admits Damani. "But when I heard him, all of a sudden, I was into poems." Realizing they'd stumbled onto something, Damani extended an invite for Tongo to meet up again at Zoo Labs studio in West Oakland.

Forget about apples and oranges nothing rhymes with orange anyway. Never mind those plums that William Carlos Williams sneaked from the icebox. The most poetic fruit of all is the blackberry. Not the mushy sugar bombs packed into plastic clamshells at the supermarket. Those are insipid, bland, prosaic. I mean the ragged, spicy volunteers that grow untended at the edge of a meadow or the side of a road. The kind you go out and pick in late summer or early fall. You'd be amazed at how many of those end up in poems.

Bruce Smith joins Kevin Young to read "Open Letter to My Ancestors" by Mary Ruefle, and his own poem "The Game." Smith, the author of eight poetry collections, including the forthcoming "Hungry Ghost," has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in addition to fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The film's protagonist, Ed Saxberger ( Willem Dafoe), is a New York poet who quit writing verse decades before but still listens to the greatest hits of yesteryear. That's how he happens to put on a recording of Pound reading his Canto LXXXI: What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross/What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee/What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage.

The artist Maira Kalman has always had an idiosyncratic approach to defining elegance, having co-authored a book titled "(un)Fashion," and illustrated E. B. White's " The Elements of Style." For the cover of the September 22, 2025, Fall Style & Design Issue, she chose to portray the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé. "I spent a year reading French poets with my poetry group," Kalman said.

In it, Wiman looks back on the violence that marked both his childhood in West Texas and his family's history, and seems to gather that his past made his writing career inevitable. His conclusion is somewhat counterintuitive, because when he first began reading poetry, in college, he believed that "it had absolutely nothing to do with the world I was from." But he no longer believes that assumption was entirely accurate.

To 2049 by American poet Jorie Graham is one of my favourite collections of recent times and rereading it recently was incredibly rewarding. Filled with slippery and existentially evocative lines such as Years pulled their / lengths through us like long wet strings, it had me pointing at some of the pages gasping: I wish I wrote this! (a condition I frequently suffer from, known as poem-envy).

The Frank O'Hara poem "Katy" features seven lines of self-assessing declarations. It is the fifth line that I get the most mileage out of: "I am never quiet, I mean silent." When I am teaching writing workshops, specifically with young writers, teen-agers who-in many cases-have not let their sense of wonder be battered by waves of irony or cynicism, I ask them what distinctions they see between "quiet" and "silent."

I remember my voice entering the blend, the anonymous shallows clean and barely rippling, or sharing a duet with Krista, a bent harmony, our first altos meeting and crossing like a pair of notched sticks.

Antrobus explains that his father's insults were tied to his father's insecurities, reflecting a damaging struggle with identity marked by racism and family dynamics.

"Salute," like many of Schuyler's best works, is a form of strenuous mental calisthenics presented as an easygoing nature poem. "Past is past," it begins.