Today’s Throwback Thursday selection is “Desire,” from Joy Harjo’s Mad Love and War (1990). The collection won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America in 1991, and Harjo was the 1990 recipient of the Before Columbus American Book Award. . . Desire Say I chew desire and water is an explosion…
This week’s Throwback Thursday selection is an excerpt from Aimé Césaire’s long poem Notebook of a Return to a Native Land (2001), edited and translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Wesleyan University Press also published a bilingual edition of Césaire’s original 1939 Notebook in 2013, edited by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman. . . And…
Today’s Throwback Thursday selection is “One Moon in Binoculars,” from Heather McHugh’s 1988 collection Shades. . . One Moon in Binoculars How could this homely instrument have power to pull the whole moon closer, hold ten textures in the intimacy of a glance? The silvers tremble severally splashed and sanded, spine-wise, spidery, in sharp and…
This morning we woke to the sad news that James Tate has passed on. To honor Tate, this week’s Throwback Thursday selection is “Aunt Edna” from Selected Poems (1991), winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the William Carlos Williams award. In addition to Selected Poems, Wesleyan also published Tate’s 1990 volume, Distance from Loved Ones. Tate was…
Today’s Throwback Thursday selection is Hilda Raz’s “From Your Mouth to God’s Ear” from her 1997 collection, Divine Honors—the winner of the Nebraska Book Award for Poetry in 2002. . From Your Mouth to God’s Ear Off the cliff, into air, the mother shout blackberry-jam thick, stirred down into a soothing lick on the needle-pricked…
Today’s Throwback Thursday selection is “Near and More Near” from Elizabeth Willis’s 2006 collection Meteoric Flowers. . . Near and More Near We’re so close to the ocean I can taste it, like the volcanic in Picasso. A hand can fit perfectly over a mouth. I know about the thighbone, but what’s this connected to?…
Today’s Throwback Thursday selection is an short excerpt from New Time (1999). Celebrating National Poetry Month and Leslie Scalapino, founder of O Books. . . wild gap — of dawn, not it — not so much the particular interpret- tation (of events) — but as (that) it happens at all …
Today’s Throwback Thursday poem is “Wherever,” from David Ignatow’s 1996 collection I Have a Name. The book was the winner of the 1997 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. . . Wherever Wherever I go, into food stores, into the john to piss, I am haunted by the poem yet to be written,…
This week’s Throwback Thursday post features work from Pierre Joris’s 2001 collection, Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999. Joris is teaming up with multimedia artist Nicole Peyrafitte for two events sponsored by San Francisco State University’s Poetry Center. The first, on March 18th (7PM), will be at City Lights Books and is co-sponsored by City Lights. The second event is on…
Martha Hill (1900–1995), the first Director of Dance at the Juilliard School, was one of the most influential dance figures of the twentieth century. Her leadership was instrumental in cementing dance’s position as an art form and as an area for serious scholarship. She carved out a place for contemporary dance in America, paving the…
