All posts tagged: Poems

May 2024 Poetry Feature: Pissed-Off Ars Poetica Sonnet Crown

By REBECCA FOUST

    1. (Written after the workshop)

Fuck you, if I want to put a bomb in my poem
I’ll put a bomb there, & in the first line.
Granted, I might want a nice reverse neutron bomb
that kills only buildings while sparing our genome
but—unglue the whole status-quo thing,
the canon can-or-can’t do?  Fuck yeah, & by
“canon” I mean any rule, whether welded
by time, privilege, or empire, & also by
the newer memes. Anyway, I want the omelet
because of the broken eggs. I want to break glass
into dust, to spindrift it into new form. I want
to melt mortar down into quicklime that burns.
Less piety, please. Any real response to my poem
will do—laugh, cry, yawn—or STFU & go home.

May 2024 Poetry Feature: Pissed-Off Ars Poetica Sonnet Crown
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May 2021 Poetry Feature: Humberto Ak’abal, Translated by Loren Goodman

Poems by HUMBERTO AK’ABAL

Translated by LOREN GOODMAN

Table of Contents

  • Holes
  • Courage
  • Love
  • Mirror
  • Stone bread
  • We sow
  • Mrs. Wara’t

Humberto Ak’abal (1952 – 2019), a poet of K’iche’ Maya ethnicity, was born in Momostenango, Guatemala. One of the most well-known Guatemalan poets in Europe and South America, his works have been translated into French, English, German, Italian, Portuguese, Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, Scottish, Hungarian and Estonian. The author of over twenty books of poetry and several other collections of short stories and essays, Ak’abal received numerous awards and honors, including the Golden Quetzal granted by the Association of Guatemalan Journalists in 1993, and the International Blaise Cendrars Prize for Poetry from Switzerland in 1997. In 2005 he was named Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture, and in 2006 was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

Loren Goodman was born in Kansas and studied in New York, Tucson, Buffalo, and Kobe. He is the author of Famous Americans, selected by W.S. Merwin for the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets, and Non-Existent Facts (otata’s bookshelf, 2018), as well as the chapbooks Suppository Writing (The Chuckwagon, 2008), New Products (Proper Tales Press, 2010) and, with Pirooz Kalayeh, Shitting on Elves & Other Poems (New Michigan Press, 2020). A Professor of creative writing and English literature at Yonsei University/Underwood International College in Seoul, Korea, he serves as the Chair of Comparative Literature and Culture and Creative Writing Director.

May 2021 Poetry Feature: Humberto Ak’abal, Translated by Loren Goodman
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February 2021 Poetry Feature

Poems by REBECCA MORGAN FRANK, JEFFREY HARRISON, CALEB NOLEN, and ALEXANDRA WATSON.

Contents:

  • Rebecca Morgan Frank  |  I hold with those who favor fire
  • Jeffrey Harrison  |  Hazards, 2020
  • Caleb Nolen  | The Deal
                           | Jonah Years
  • Alexandra Watson | when the party’s over or, portrait of an addict zero days sober or, my mom sent me this book healing the addicted brain 

  

  

February 2021 Poetry Feature
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LitFest 2021: Poems by Tommye Blount and Natalie Diaz

LitFest Poems 2021

Amherst College’s sixth annual literary festival will take place virtually this year, from Thursday, February 25 to Sunday, February 28. Among the guests are 2020 National Book Award poetry finalists Tommye Blount and Natalie Diaz. The Commonis pleased to reprint four of their poems here.

Join Tommye Blount and Natalie Diaz in conversation with host John Hennessy (poetry editor of The Common) on Saturday, February 27 from 11am to noon.

Register and see the full list of LitFest events here.

LitFest 2021: Poems by Tommye Blount and Natalie Diaz
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Corey

By MIK AWAKE


Became a skinhead
a year after he moved from
Bumblefucktucky.
Hit me with his cast.
Hurt people hurt people
often with their hurt parts.
Who broke his arm?
His step-dad step on him?
They was poor, but they was white.

Corey
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Some Do

By MATT SALYER

Check me on fleek like the night
kitchen mothers, pucker and hum some; come,
I like to liquor louche; let’s watch the flock
of spring-heeled bound as borough cabs
exhaust their carbon phantoms like a gauche
of fuck. Do you unzoo, unrouge
to rat as white, what roughshod? Do.
I want the carnal as straight metacognition,

Some Do
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That Awkward Unbalance that Becomes the Beautiful: an Interview with Archibald MacLeish

TOM FELS interviews ARCHIBALD MACLEISH

Photo courtesy of Amherst College Archives

In May 1965, Amherst College student Tom Fels ’67 interviewed three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Archibald MacLeish. The below interview, conducted at MacLeish’s home in Conway, Mass., is adapted from their conversation, a portion of which originally appeared in the town newspaper the Amherst Record.

Archibald MacLeish, one of the best-known American poets, playwrights, and public intellectuals, was born in Illinois, and educated at Hotchkiss and Yale, later taking a law degree at Harvard. After participating in World War I, he forsook the life of an attorney to focus on poetry, making his living for several years as an editor of Fortune magazine. Under President Franklin Roosevelt, he was for five years the Librarian of Congress, and later, during World War II, an assistant Secretary of State. After the war he taught at Harvard for thirteen years before taking the position of Simpson Lecturer at Amherst College (1963-67). MacLeish was the author more than fifty works of poetry, nonfiction, and drama.

Tom Fels is a curator and writer based in southern Vermont. His work in the arts includes exhibitions at the Getty Museum in Malibu, CA, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, as well as numerous articles and books. He is the author of two books on the 1960s, Farm Friends and Buying the Farm. Fels met Archibald MacLeish after the poet’s delivery of his convocation speech at Amherst College’s Frost Library in 1963. This interview was the first of many that have played a part in Fels’s writing and research. Among the latest is a conversation with MacLeish’s fellow former Harvard faculty member Daniel Aaron in The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture (June 2013).

Listen to a recording of the interview here, or scroll down to read.

 

 

That Awkward Unbalance that Becomes the Beautiful: an Interview with Archibald MacLeish
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