“[Sarah] Arvio recalls [Derek Walcott's] recipe for authorial integrity: ‘If we are going to call ourselves poets, we should know the canon. If you say ‘horse’, for example, you should be able to name any number of poems with a horse in it and quote the lines’.”

Eva Salzman: With Regrets Autumn 10 Poetry London

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

There’s only so much we can do to better ourselves, and once we’ve done what we can, it still may not have been enough. Here’s a poem by Michelle Y. Burke, who lives in N.Y., in which a man who does everything right doesn’t quite do everything right.

Nocturne

A man can give up so much,
can limit himself to handwritten correspondence,
to foods made of whole grains,
to heat from a woodstove, logs
hewn by his own hand and stacked neatly
like corpses by the backdoor.

He can play nocturnes by heart.
They will not make the beloved appear.
He can learn the names of all the birds
in the valley. Not one
will be enticed to learn his.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2009 by Michelle Y. Burke and reprinted from Lake Effect, Vol. 13, Spring 2009, by permission of Michelle Y. Burke and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Intruder
Jill Bialosky – Knopf

THE FIGURE

From a blank canvas sprang a swirl of color and emotion:
a mysterious figure emerging from a dark thicket.

Was he beautiful? Did it matter?
For once ugliness could be a form of beauty: an equivalent

Read rest of poem, plus an interview with Bialosky, @ On The Seawall: Ron Slate’s Website.

Elegguas
Kamau Brathwaite – Wesleyan Poetry

>down evening sun forever & for ever<
Heartease Which is where she is/in that
soft distance shining & i'm suddenly & at
last happy & very very sad & lonely at th

Read rest of poem @ Wesleyan University Press

Master of Disguises
Charles Simic – Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Master of Disguises

Surely he walks among us unrecognized:
Some barber, store clerk, delivery man,
Pharmacist, hairdresser, bodybuilder,
Exotic dancer, gem cutter, dog walker,
The blind beggar singing, Oh Lord, remember me,

Read rest of poem @ The New Yorker, November 24, 2008

The Poets Laureate Anthology Forward by Billy Collin, Contributors: Elizabeth Hun Schmidt and The Library of Congress – W. W. Norton & Company

“The first anthology to gather poems by the forty-three poets laureate of the United States.”

The Iron Key: Poems – James Longenbach – W. W. Norton & Company

VENICE
James Longenbach

Mrs. Hunter is the only name I have for her,
A rich old woman who engaged my father, a painter,
To document her collection of keys.
Photographs she considered vulgar.

Read rest of poem @ The New Yorker, July 2, 2007

On the first of every month, a new broadside is posted on the project’s website. The jump from page to public stage is ultimately facilitated by “vectors,” interested folks who can download the PDFs and print and post them at will. Broadsides have been tacked on office doors, placed in waiting rooms, left on airplanes, and even slipped, guerrilla style, between the pages of newspapers and magazines.

Open-Air Publishing – Broadsides turn poetry into guerrilla art
September-October 2010 – Alex Dimitrov, from Poets and Writers. Reprinted at Utne Reader.

Read about it @ the New Yorker’s “Book Bench:”

On Memorization: A Twenty-First-Century Ode Posted by Eileen Reynolds @ “The Book Bench,” New Yorker 9/30/2010

In the first drill, the poem is displayed with words missing, and you read it aloud to yourself, filling in the blanks. If you get tripped up, you can tap a blank space to momentarily reveal the missing word. Next, you’re given a line or two of text with the words scrambled, and you have to put them in the correct order.

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

I’ve spent my seventy years on The Great Plains and have lived all that time amidst vivid and touching stories about the settlement of our area, lots of them much like this one, about a long ago courtship and marriage, offered to us in a poem by James Doyle, who lives in Colorado.

Love Story

The kitchen door opens onto dirt
and the second half of the country
all the way to the Pacific. Rusted
prairie trains out of the tall weeds
elbow the last century aside, rumble
from every direction towards Chicago.

My great-grandfather, who would be
150 years old today, put on his one
tall hat and took the big trip
to Omaha for my great-grandma
with the family ring on his vest
and winter wheat lying wait in seed.

He gave her all the miles he had
and she gave him the future I walk
around in every day. The mountains
were too far west to count so they
doubled back over the land and century
and the real weather kept coming from them.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2009 by James Doyle, whose most recent book of poetry is Bending Under the Yellow Police Tapes, Steel Toe Books, 2007. Poem reprinted from the Nimrod International Journal, Vol. 53, no. 1, Fall/Winter 2009, by permission of James Doyle and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

British company Ladbrokes have given [Tomas] Transtromer, 79, odds of 5/1, or one chance in six of winning. He is ahead of three other poets backed at 8/1 — Poland’s Adam Zagajewski, South Korea’s Ko Un and Syria’s Adonis.

After a Death
by Tomas Tranströmer
translated by Robert Bly

Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.

Read rest of poem @ Poets.org

Balance
by Adam Zagajewski
translated by Clare Cavanagh

I watched the arctic landscape from above
and thought of nothing, lovely nothing.
I observed white canopies of clouds, vast
expanses where no wolf tracks could be found.

Read rest of poem @ Poets.org.

Untitled
by Ko Un
Translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé, Young-moo Kim, and Gary Gach

One day I took a pebble from
an East Sea beach and put it in my pocket
but it jumped back out, shrieking.

Read rest of poem @ Jacket.

Mask of Songs
by Adonis
Translated by Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard

In the name of his own history,
in a country mired in mud,
when hunger overtakes him
he eats his own forehead.

Read rest of poem @ Guernica.

Here’s a 2008 interview with Kay Ryan:

Kay Ryan, The Art of Poetry No. 94 – Interviewed by Sarah Fay

When I started writing nobody rhymed—it was in utter disrepute. Yet rhyme was a siren to me. I had this condition of things rhyming in my mind without my permission. Still I couldn’t take end-rhyme seriously, which meant I had to find other ways—I stashed my rhymes at the wrong ends of lines and in the middles—the front of one word would rhyme with the back of another one, or one word might be identical to three words. In “Turtle,” for instance, I rhyme “afford” with “a four-oared,” referring to a four-oared helmet: “Who would be a turtle who could help it? / A barely mobile hard roll, a four-oared helmet, / she can ill afford the chances she must take / in rowing toward the grasses that she eats.” The rhymes are just jumping all around in there, holding everything together.

What’s recombinant rhyme? It’s like how they add a snip of the jellyfish’s glow-in-the-dark gene to bunnies and make them glow green; by snipping up pieces of sound and redistributing them throughout a poem I found I could get the poem to go a little bit luminescent.