#poetry

#poetry

The poem opens as the world sleeps, and the moon slides in under the turnstile after dark, moves in a silent arc at an ancient pace, dabs its ointment on the gibbon's paw, nitpicks its way through the troop of gorillas, smooths the silverback's fur.

Classic France is a country of nuance with a love of conversation and freedom and an aversion to fanaticism. Contemporary Houellebecq describes France as a museum, where landscape turns into decor and where rural areas are emptying out.

The troubadours, trobairitz, and trouvères were pivotal in shaping the music and poetry of medieval France, reflecting the cultural richness of their time.

James Broadnax, who is 37, describes how he writes: 'I've been here umpteen days never forgetting To forget the absence of my fate. Sloppy ciphered sentences become rage, Provoking thoughts into words spoken Across this blank page.'

A vision lay before him: Fleet Street blanketed with snow, silent, empty, pure white, and, at the end of it, the huge and majestic form of Saint Paul's Cathedral. It was a spellbinding moment: the great thoroughfare temporarily devoid of carts and carriages, the cathedral looming blurrily out of the still-falling snowflakes a real-life snow globe.

Plath excelled at baking, making six-egg sponges and hand-painting labels for honey, while also taking language lessons and writing poetry for the BBC.

Poetry and artificial intelligence can appear as oppositesone deeply human; the other cold and mechanical. Sasha Stiles sees them as expressions of the same impulse. Poetry, the Kalmyk- American poet argues, is one of our most ancient and enduring technologies, a system of meter and rhyme invented to store vital information. She views AI as its natural heir. Stiles's path to AI began with literature, not code.

Best known as a memoirist, Morrison returns to poetry after 11 years with a masterclass of lyric distillation and charged observation, demonstrating that nothing is beneath poetic deliberation. His subjects range from social and political justice to meditations on poetic heroes such as Elizabeth Bishop and sonnet sequences elegising the writer's sister. The interwoven specificity and occasional nature of the poems is captivating:

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

Sophie Grace Chappell is Professor of Philosophy at the Open University, UK. She has been Executive Editor of The Philosophical Quarterly since 2021, and serves as a member of the APA's LGBTQ representation committee. Her books include Reading Plato's Theaetetus (Hackett 2004), Knowing What To Do (OUP 2014), Epiphanies (OUP 2022), Trans Figured (Polity Press 2024), and A Philosopher Looks At Friendship (CUP 2024).

San Francisco Poet Laureate emerita invites writers featured in Women in a Golden State to present at SFPL's Monthly poetry reading. 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. Her most recent book of poetry, Pick a Garnet to Sleep In, was published in 2024, and her book of essays, Noodle, Rant, Tangent, was published in 2022.

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

It makes sense that in our culture of gain and scarcity that [finding a voice] should be a hunt or search or possession, but I don't think that's true," said Vuong, an award-winning poet, novelist, and the featured speaker at the recent annual Eliot Memorial Reading. "I don't think one finds a voice ... I think one develops it throughout one's life ... I'm still discovering mine.

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.

The books on your bedside table? I just counted and there are 17 books in the pile. On the top is John Milton's Paradise Lost. I am a member of an online shared reading group who each week read a couple of hundred lines together. It's a long-term commitment but immensely rewarding and far easier than reading it alone.

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.

Brooklyn's librarians have spoken-and they've delivered a reading list with more range than the G train on a good day. The Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) has unveiled its 100 favorite books of 2025, a staff-curated mix of fiction, poetry, memoir, kids' picks and wonderfully odd gems that prove librarians remain the city's most reliable tastemakers.

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.

How can poetry help us now, when practically every morning brings a fresh assault on knowledge, wisdom and safety? Amid the cruel political discourse horrifying headlines that seem to envelop everything, where is there a place for poetry? What can a bunch of artfully arranged words do? A lot, I'd argue. Words are among the many things under attack. Our stories, the ways that we fill our words with our own meanings, are more precious and urgent than ever.