Poetry

Happy National Poetry Month! All throughout April, we will interview poets about working in this digital age. Recently we spoke with the United States’ first children’s poet laureate, Jack Prelusky.

Prelutsky did not enjoy studying poetry during his primary school days, but he has since published eighty volumes of children’s poetry.

In his new collection, I’ve Lost my Hippopotamus, the poet talks about real and imaginary animals. Check out the highlights from our interview below…

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In honor of National Poetry Month, we’ve dug up a video of President Bill Clinton reading the poem “Concord Hymn” by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

President Clinton recorded this video for “The Favorite Poem Project” in 1999. This project was founded by the 39th poet laureate of the United States, Robert Pinsky. Altogether, 50 short video documentaries were made for this project.

Emerson wrote this poem in 1836 for the memorial of the Battle of Concord. This monument commemorated those who lost their lives in that famous battle of the American Revolution. What’s your favorite Emerson poem?

Happy National Poetry Month! All throughout April, we will interview poets about working in this digital age. To kick things off, we have award-winning children’s poet Douglas Florian.

Florian (pictured, via) started off as a cartoonist for The New Yorker. He now works as children’s poet and illustrator. He has also exhibited his abstract paintings.

In his new collection, unBEElievables: Honeybee Poems and Paintings, the poet explores the world of honeybees. Check out the highlights from our interview below…

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Poets & Writers has awarded Henri Cole the $50,000 2012 Jackson Poetry Prize.

Cole has published eight poetry collections. His 2004 title, Middle Earth, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Cole also serves on the faculty at Ohio University and as the poetry editor of The New Republic.

Here’s more from the release (PDF link): “[This] prize is given annually to honor an American poet of exceptional talent who deserves wider recognition…Mr. Cole was selected by three esteemed judges-the poets Louise Glück, Marilyn Hacker and James Tate. There was no application process. Poets were nominated by a panel of their peers who remain anonymous.”

Happy National Poetry Month! Over at Writers Digest, Poetry Asides blogger Robert Lee Brewer launched the Poem-a-Day Challenge. At the same time, poets around the country have joined the annual National Poetry Writing Month.

The challenge is simple: write a poem every day in April. The challenge kicked off on yesterday and will run until May 1st to accommodate international participants. Follow this link for all the details.

Here’s more about the challenge: “If you want to share your poems throughout the month, the best way is to paste your poem in the comments on the post that corresponds with that day’s prompt. You’ll find folks are pretty supportive on the Poetic Asides site. And if they’re not, I expect to be notified via e-mail.” Will you participate? (via Debbie Ohi)

Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver is seriously ill.

To help the poet through this difficult time, Julie L. Moore and Julie Brooks Barbour and have started a blog where friends readers and poets can share “how they have been influenced or changed by her work.” You can visit Oliver’s Beacon Press site to learn more about her celebrated career.

Here’s more about the blog: “If you would like to take part in this project, please email a post to one of us, no longer than 200 words, at jbsundries(at)yahoo(dot)com or moorej(at)cedarville(dot)edu. Post your note as in-line text; email attachments will not be read. Posts should be written in letter form, beginning with ‘Dear Mary’” (Link via Orion; Photo via Molly Malone Cook)

Artist Jon Cotner thinks that poetry shouldn’t just be studied, but rather should be looked at as ”a way of life, a mode of knowing.”

With this in mind, the artist created ”Poem Forest,” a work created for the New York Botanical Garden that brings poetry back to nature–having visitors read lines from different poems while walking through the park.

eBookNewser has more: ”Cotner’s installation takes classic lines from poetry and imposes them on a 20 minute walk through the park. He explained on the BMW Guggenheim blog: ‘Poetry can wake us, and in the process we create a shared world or ‘the commons.’ But what characterizes this common world? How can we describe it? With such questions in mind, I shaped Poem Forest.’”

How can indie bookstores can survive Amazon’s dominance? In an article by poet and publisher of Black Ocean Janaka Stucky published at Poetry Foundation, the publisher suggested they think about poetry readers: “People who read poetry are the unsung customer base for independent bookstores.”

Instead of competing, Stucky recommends that indie book stores take advantage of their status as local businesses within their communities: “the service a bookstore provides isn’t just book-selling; it’s being the cultural center that book lovers need in their communities. Unless bookstores can not only acknowledge their role as beacons of culture, but really embrace that role and market themselves as such—as long as they try in vain to compete with one of the world’s largest retailers at its own game—they will slowly lose ground as they steadily morph into increasingly bizarre hybrids of book-music stores, bookstore-cafes, and bookstore–tapas restaurants.”

Stucky’s piece is a response to an op-ed in The New York Times that condemns Amazon for paying customers $5 not to shop in stores and a piece in Slate that justified the practice.

Do you love the mix of Edwardian drama and World War I scenes of the second season of Downton Abbey on PBS? Below, we’ve collected links to four free digital poetry books  from the period that you can download right now.

Over at the New York Times, reporter Julie Bosman covered how publishers are taking advantage of this popular show to promote historical fiction and biography.

One reader added this comment: “The poets who wrote of the horrors of World War I represent some of the greatest poets of all time. I’m not referring to Rupert Brooke, who romanticized the war, but to Siegfried Sassoon, Edward Thomas, and particularly to Wilfred Owen [pictured], who died a week before the armistice and whose poems are truly heartbreaking. Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is one of the best.”

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Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich once again quoted Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” after being sentenced to 14 years in prison for corruption.

In 2008, he read a Rudyard Kipling poem at a press conference. Follow this link to read the complete poem he quoted. The disgraced politician published The Governor with Phoenix Books in 2009.

Following his impeachment by the Illinois House of Representatives in 2009, Blagojevich concluded his political career with ‘Ulysses’ by Lord Alfred Tennyson. Here’s a link to the full poem.