In Ronnie Bruce’s short film Typography, poet Taylor Mali lets it all hang out about how people talk today. Hipsters. Kids. Cooliodoolios who don’t want to sound too committal about anything. Every utterance is just a little fart with a question mark at the end. ‘You know?’
I don’t happen to have [...]

Mature Poetic Content: If you think this shouldn’t exist here in this site, well… sorry, but this site switched tracks long ago. You just didn’t know it.

When I see a recitation
from a poet
I want to intervene
Drag him into a street fight
Crack a crutch
across his head
It’s attempted
resuscitation
~Editor

Well, I think I’ve just been punched in the [...]

In my poetic web adventures I went and found this big long movie by George Quasha about poets trying to tell everybody what poetry is. What is poetry? It’s not an unanswerable question. It’s a stupid question. But these poets do try to answer it. It’s a rather long movie [...]

This is a clip from a documentary film, Meanwhile, a butterfly flies, about filmmaker Jonas Mekas. He shares a few thoughts about culture, country, poetry and what those things really are.

Poet John Ashbery has published a new book of poems called Planisphere.  Boy, I hated this guy’s poems a few years ago.  But I kept reading them because of some instinct for self-inflicted mental damage.  And I kept reading him.  Not understanding him at all.  But I liked the words as they passed me by.  [...]

I am a clipped in user
of information keyed and shining
on a glass partition with an ascending
staircase behind the twitching
lozenges
My fingers hunt
the sleek and they twirl
along the draped wires
to find the pressed-in
prong which is
bent
You cannot throw me
or catch my attention
from the sideview
just remember
that I passed the pickup
and won
Number crunchers adore me
because the arguments
are bluffing really
people don’t [...]

Remember the book?  Of course you do, because you have plenty of them in shelves, half-read, dusty, bent, torn, coffee-stained, wine-colored, smudged, smelly, misprinted, broken and cherished. They catch your glance as you walk from one room to another, reminding you of a year or a moment when you were doing something else but had [...]

by Lethe Bashar
The poet is the editor of Escape into Life, arts/culture web-zine and fine art auction. He is also working with an illustrator from Argentina on a graphic novel. Besides that he keeps up an essay-blog, The Blog of Innocence, that covers topics in the arts, social technology, and a general philosophy of [...]

by Lethe Bashar
The poet is the editor of Escape into Life, arts/culture web-zine and fine art auction. He is also working with an illustrator from Argentina on a graphic novel. Besides that he keeps up an essay-blog, The Blog of Innocence, that covers topics in the arts, social technology, and a general philosophy of [...]

The Rumpus has a piece that Charles Bukowski wrote as a forward to a book of poems by William Wantling in 1974.  He writes about meeting the other poet for the first time and liking him.  It must have been a big thing to be liked by Bukowski because he seems to have a problem [...]

My latest little film. It’s actually a cinegram. The subject is trains. Time. Memory. The present doesn’t exist. You can’t find it with measurement. You can’t even define it. The future is not there yet. You cannot see it. The only thing that really exists is [...]

The Walt Whitman Archive has a 36-second recording taken from an old wax cylinder of what is thought to be Whitman himself reading four lines from his poem, America.
Listen to Walt Whitman reading America
Here’s the text of the poem:
America
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,Strong, ample, fair, enduring, [...]

DOWNLOAD MP3 AUDIO
Sascha Cooper is our Little Poetry Contest winner.  Her poem, A Blank Canvas, is a meditation on the power of creativity in normal surroundings.  We didn’t get many poems for the contest so it only makes sense to pick a single winner.  Perhaps more poets will want to enter the next Little Poetry [...]

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For the last day of National Poetry Month 2009, here’s a reading of Ode to a Nightingale, by English poet John Keats.  It was written in 1819 after the poet had been listening to a nightingale in the yard of a friend one morning.
Here is the text of the poem:
My heart aches, and [...]

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In 1839, Henry David Thoreau and his brother made a river voyage in a boat that they built themselves. This voyage became the subject of Thoreau’s first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, published in 1849 at his own expense. In this thirty-three minute excerpt, Thoreau finds himself [...]

Poetry Through the Ages is an excellent site that offers clear and concise explanations of different poetic forms, a general history of poetry and a simple guide to reading and appreciating difficult poems.
“When a poem arises, it feels like the bosom of the poet lifts up and births the spoken or written moment. The point [...]

I Sing the Body Electric is a poem that celebrates the life of the body and its equal status with the soul.  Walt Whitman is probably the greatest poet in the English language since William Shakespeare.  Some might argue with this but there is no other poet who so muscularly tore the page to shreds [...]

Write a poem for National Poetry Month!  Just let your mind wander and write a poem of any kind in the comments area for this post.
Get your poem done by 12:00 am PST Friday April 24, 2009.
Your poem can be any length.  It can rhyme or not.  Just make a poem and let me read [...]

Our roll of poetry for National Poetry Month continues with an animated poem by Maurice Kilwein Guevara.  His poem has two Spanish-speaking women planning to speak only English as they enter a Sears store.  It’s funny on the surface but it’s also a serious look at how people try to avoid being themselves in order [...]

Here’s another animated poem. This one is by Kwame Dawes who grew up in Jamaica and now lives in South Carolina. I like the way the poet is unafraid to show pleasure in the language of the poem. This seems to be a happy poet.