A “For Sale” sign covers the gate to a cotton farm in Adrian, Georgia in October 2015. Credit: REUTERS/Brian Snyder.

In the United States, the small American family farm has been in decline since the 1930s; “today’s farms are fewer and larger,” the U.S. Department of Agriculture said in its most recent food statistics report. The same can be said for poet Knud Sørensen’s native Denmark, where high-tech, large-scale agriculture has also increasingly replaced small Danish farms.

In addition to writing prose, biographies and poetry, Sørensen worked as a land surveyor in rural Denmark for nearly three decades, watching first-hand as many of these changes were taking place and often writing about what he saw. Now, those poems have been collected in the new book “Farming Dreams,” which was translated from Danish to English by Michael Goldman.

Credit: Spuyten Duyvil Publishing

“It was a really turbulent time in Denmark. He saw farmers going bankrupt, farming communities dissolving,” said Goldman, whose own hometown in Southern New Jersey has lost almost all of its farms. “He was right in the middle of it out there, restructuring roads, redrawing lines. And so in the day he was working on that, and at night writing down the changes he saw.”

In many ways, this collection serves as both a celebration of the earth and a warning of how much can be lost. In the poem “While We Still Have It,” Sørensen writes of the beauty of the grain, beets and crops, which may not be here forever; in “The Map Has No Symbol For Pain,” he argues that a map cannot fully capture the momentous changes that happen to the land. The collection is also an elegy to the vanishing farming communities, perhaps most notably in the poem “When Hans Nielsen’s Farm Was Cut in Half by the Country Road.”

But Sørensen is no Luddite, nor is he an strident idealist.

“He is not blaming anyone or saying we did anything wrong, but instead saying that we really need to consider our choices,” Goldman said. “He is saying we have to remember our humanity and not just consider the latest technological and flick innovation. That we have to remember how we connect to people and each other and the land.”

That plea is best articulated in “The Dream,” a poem about the simple beauty of working the earth. Read that poem, or listen to Goldman read it aloud, below.

The Dream
By Knud Sørensen
Translated by Michael Goldman

I want to make it simple
and easy to understand:
You start by preparing your land and afterwards you
sow. Then the sun shines and it rains and the sun shines again
and one day the green shoots come up. So you watch
the shoots grow into plants and the plants grow and
flower and set seed and the sun shines and the seed matures
and it’s time to harvest.

So you harvest. So you thresh and some of the seed you save
for sowing next spring and some of the seed you save
to use during the winter and the rest of the seed
you sell.

Over the winter you take care of your livestock.

In this way you live until you die. Everything else is just ripples
on the surface. Dairy consolidations factories revolutions sales percentages meat cattle versus milk cows all that is unreal. What is real is earth sun rain and the air
that is warmer in the summer than in the winter.

So simple.

(“Drømmen” ©1972)

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Danish author Knud Sørensen (b. 1928) was a certified land surveyor for 28 years, a time during which he became intimate with the Danish agricultural landscape. A book reviewer for 14 years, he has also written 48 books and won more than 20 literary awards, including a lifelong grant from the Danish Arts Council.

Michael Goldman (b.1966), founder of Hammer and Horn Productions, promotes and produces translated works of Danish literature. More than 100 of Goldman’s translations of poetry and prose have appeared in literary journals such as Rattle, Harvard Review, World Literature Today and International Poetry Review.

The post This Earth Day, remembering America’s vanishing farms appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

The Milky Way is seen in the night sky around telescopes in May 2015. Credit: REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh

When Adrian Matejka and his family moved to Indianapolis in the 1980s, he says he was not a very cool kid. He was near-sighted, unathletic, his biological father was gone — and he lived in the city’s Section 8 housing.

The 1980s was the era of the space shuttle, and, like many kids, he watched with fascination. But his interest also went further than most; he quickly became, he says, a full-blown sci-fi and comic book geek. In many ways, this served as a kind of diversion.

“You could be here or on another planet, and every place you go offers an opportunity to be a different person,” he said. “I saw on some basic level this opportunity for escape from who I was and where I was.”

In 2013, some 25 years after he left Indiana, Matejka – who had grown up to become an award-winning poet and a finalist for both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize — moved back to the state. It was a decision that came with an unexpected overload of memories: about Indiana, about escaping poverty, about his childhood fixation on space. To make sense of that, he began writing poems, which have been collected in a new book called “Map to the Stars.”

The book’s poetry, which is semi-autobiographical, is set between the years of 1981 and 1988. Within those years, it traverses the high-flying realms of astronauts, space shuttle launches, planets, and Star Trek, but also the earthly problems of growing up poor: powdered milk, shut-off electricity, thin walls, squabbling neighbors. At many moments, we see the poem’s narrator look to the stars for escape.

Adrian Matejka. Credit: Stephen Sproll

“We didn’t have any solar system models at PS113, so I had to get my own,” Matejka writes in the poem “Mail-Order Planets.” “I dove into dumpsters searching … dug through frozen dinner boxes; /apple cores … three months of collecting; I had enough money to order our system from the back of a Star Trek comic … but the solar system never came.”

Star Trek is a recurring motif in “Map to the Stars,” with titles to several of the poems even mimicking the show’s use of “stardates,” a fictional way of measuring time that was relayed as voice-over in the show’s “captain’s logs.”

In the poem, “Stardate 8809.22,” which is set in 1988, the narrator is old enough to realize that — because he grew up black, poor and near-sighted — perhaps he would not make it to space after all.

“By the time we get to this, the speaker has given up on all these far flung ideas of making it to outer space. I imagined this poem as the resolution of all that,” Matejka said. “The whole book is about systems, some economic, political, or interpersonal.”

“Map to the Stars” unpacks human systems like race, poverty and parenting. But it also examines larger ones — like the system of gravity and momentum. “The things,” Matejka says, “that make the universe spin.”

Read “Stardate 8809.22” below, or listen to Matejka read it aloud.

“STARDATE 8809.22”

If there was ever a chance to go to outer space,
it wasn’t here; it wasn’t for me, as off balance
on this distant planet as a buster getting a mouthful
of knuckles. If there was a possibility of making it
out of this heliosphere, there never really was here.
Four eyes giggling at me like a laugh track. Black
skin, you can’t win in the space race no matter
what Sun Ra says. Everyone except him agreeing
on these facts like a laugh track. Looking up through
the round circumstance of a basketball hoop from
a suburb of amateur astronauts. Looking up from this
corner of black constriction; wind knocked out
of words. This cricket‑ticking suburb of fanciful
neighbors & their distant, but unrelenting chatter.

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Adrian Matejka is the author of four collections of poems, including “The Devil’s Garden” (Alice James, 2003); “Mixology” (Penguin, 2009), a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series; and “The Big Smoke” (Penguin, 2013) which was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. His new book, “Map to the Stars,” was published by Penguin in March 2017. Among his other honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a Simon Fellowship from United States Artists. He is the Ruth Lilly Professor/Poet-in-Residence at Indiana University in Bloomington.

The post This poet explores the high-flying realms of space — but also the earthly problems of growing up poor appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Poet Doug Van Gundy said “something about the landscape that shaped us” has drawn many poets back. Credit: Abbey Oldham, PBS NewsHour

On a recent Saturday at a brewery in Parkersburg, West Virginia — a town known more for its oil and gas museums than its craft beers or arts community — Marc Harshman, the state’s poet laureate, huddled over the bar with two fellow writers to write haikus to their beers.

“Sharp, this bracer / knocks me, falls clear to my heart: / the high should come soon,” Harshman read aloud, and there were laughs. Then he grew serious: “Mornings with Grandma: / deep memories flood through me. / Taste alone did this.”

The brewery was packed with poets and people who appreciate poetry; they had just finished up a reading to celebrate the first anthology of poetry and literary writing from West Virginia published in some 15 years.

“Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods” is the first anthology of poetry and literary writing from West Virginia in some 15 years.

The poetry read that night, and contained in the anthology, is not what you might expect out of West Virginia, or from regional poetry. For one, it does not fall into the trap of nostalgia or tackle traditional subjects in traditional ways. Instead, it examines, often unsparingly, topics as wide-ranging as environmental dangers, sexual identity, family conflict, discrimination and rebellion. At many points, the poetry asks questions about how to leave the past behind — or at least how to learn to live with it.

“[It is not] the Appalachian poetry that is nostalgic about Grandma’s quilts, and ‘I remember the canned beans,’” poet Doug Van Gundy, who co-edited the anthology, told me.

Its title, “Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods,” is a nod to how animals, seen from a distance, can be as mysterious and little-known to humans as West Virginia is to the rest of the country.

Harshman, who often crisscrosses the state in his role as poet laureate, said the poetry coming out of West Virginia no longer just celebrates rural life and industry.

The anthology, which features 63 fiction writers and poets, has “work that combats stereotypes from a state like this — that it’s a place of lesser sophistication, of lower literacy, conservative in all the worst ways instead of the best ways,” he said.

In his poem in the anthology, called “Shed,” Harshman describes rural life but also warns of its risks: “A man comes to believe almost anything when he lives on the inside of himself long enough,” he writes.

Van Gundy — who left West Virginia for school in Utah, North Carolina and Vermont before coming back home for love — is blunter.

“We’re not just a state of Trumpian contrarians. We’re far more complex than that,” he said, something showing up in the poetry being written there.

Take, for example, the work of Randi Ward, who has two poems in the anthology. Ward also grew up in West Virginia and left — for Denmark, Iceland and the Faroe Islands — before returning home to care for her beloved, ailing grandmother. Her short, incisive poems can raise your hair:

“Grandma”

What’s left of her
paces
the sagging porch
wearing one sock,
crying
for the dogs.

Ward’s grandmother, Clara Beach. Courtesy of Randi Ward

“I would have rather shoved my left hand down a running garbage disposal [than come back]” Ward told me, knowing it was “going to be a dogfight” dealing with a dysfunctional family who struggled with mental illness and the trauma of war. But Ward did come back, she said, and so her poetry often reflects “a moment as trigger.”

This can be seen in her poem, “Daddy Longlegs,” also included in the anthology, which was written after her family farm fell into ruin. As a child, Ward said, it was fun to pick up the daddy longlegs on the farm and ask where the cows had gone, to see if the arachnid lifted its legs in the wind that way. As an adult, after the farm was lost, she felt only guilt and shame:

“Daddy Longlegs”

I’m tired
of asking
you where
the cattle
have gone —
stop pointing
at me.

The struggle of leaving and coming back home is a recurring theme in the anthology. In the poem “Ritual,” poet Kelly McQuain writes about a visit to West Virginia in which he helps his mother get a bat out of the house and then quickly prepares to leave, his bags already packed. “In these ways,” he writes, “we rescue ourselves.”

The anthology, it must be said, does include West Virginians who have left, never to return. It also features writers who have newly arrived from elsewhere and see West Virginia through a different lens. But perhaps the most interesting work is from the poets who had left and were drawn to come back.

“You put in a vine in Australia and a vine in France, and it’s the same root stock but two different grapes. The dirt that you’re grown in makes a difference,” Van Gundy said. “It colors and flavors who you become.”

Van Gundy’s poem in the anthology is about country music; he is the kind of poet that sometimes whips out a fiddle out on stage. It’s a sentimental subject, but he is direct, instead of maudlin, in exploring it. The poems ends with an analogue between musicians and poets who come back, writing of the “voices that got just far enough away, from these mountains, to get flung back home.”

In many ways, these voices did not exist when Van Gundy, Harshman, or Ward were young — or at least they were not accessible to poets like them.

Poet Laureate March Harshman, poet Randi Ward, and co-editors of the anthology Laura Long and Doug Van Gundy, part of the growing poetry community in the state. Courtesy: Randi Ward

“There was next to zero poetry community when I was a child,” Van Gundy said. Things changed for him at 19, when he somehow came across the poem “Northern Pike” by James Wright, a poet from Ohio; he can still recite it from memory. “[Before that] I didn’t know you could write about crawdads in a poem, and being conflicted about doing what you do as a man in Appalachia … that just opened a door for me.”

As for Ward, she said she was exposed to just one poetry program as a child — but that it “probably saved my life.”

Today, West Virginia’s poetry community looks very different. There are regular poetry readings and gatherings in libraries, bars, schools and theaters. There are literary journals and writing contests.

There are also now MFA programs at West Virginia University and West Virginia Wesleyan College, the latter of which was formed just six years ago by the previous poet laureate, Irene McKinney; now deceased, she was described to me as a “force” and “a lightning rod.” Today, the program draws applicants from around the country, and major writers such as Terrance Hayes and Patricia Smith.

The national Poetry Out Loud program, which encourages high schoolers to memorize and recite poetry before a crowd, has also come to West Virginia. Harshman, who is a children’s author in addition to poet, is a judge for the contest, as is Ward.

And, Ward says, teachers are increasingly using contemporary Appalachian poetry in schools. There’s also a growing number of poets who visit those schools “to say: we’re here, we’re alive, we’re doing stuff, you don’t have to go away to do that,’” she said.

Van Gundy hopes that in some small way the anthology, which was given to every high schooler who participated in the Poetry Out Loud contest, can also help.

“I imagine some lonesome kid who is bookish and loves language and loves being here but doesn’t fit in,” he said — a kid, perhaps, like the one he once was — “picks up this book and says ‘Oh, I can stay here, this is permission.’”

“Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry From West Virginia” is published by West Virginia University Press. It’s available online here.

The post Returning home, these West Virginians are rewriting the poetry of Appalachia appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

A woman demonstrates at a protest rally in 2012 in Sanford, FL, supporting slain teenager Trayvon Martin. Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

Order of Events
By Simone John

We started talking about the All-Star Game,
him tellin me to go check for him if it’s on.
It wasn’t. The game started at 7:30PM.
In perfect pitch Mary J. Blige asked,
Does that star spangled banner yet wave?
The crowd clapped in response.
Ne-Yo closed the half-time show:
For all we know, we might not get tomorrow
Let’s do it tonight

But the call dropped at 7:16. Then: sirens.
Windows washed in red light. Occupants
peering through parted curtains, watching
EMTs lift the limp wrist of a stranger
in the street. Elsewhere, brown boys
sat around the screen, waiting
for the game to begin.

Trayvon Martin. Sandra Bland. Elisha Walker. Shade Schuler. Some names we know well, while others are unfamiliar. The Black Lives Matter movement asks us to say the names of the black men and women who have died in encounters with police. Poet and educator Simone John wants us to also understand their stories, through her debut collection of poetry, “Testify.”

Simone John. Credit: Stephanie Lamb

In “Testify,” John weaves together her own lyricism with primary sources and official documents. There’s the dashboard audio recording from 2015 when a police officer stopped Sandra Bland, a black woman who was found hanged in a jail cell after that confrontation. And there’s court testimony of the death of Trayvon Martin, a black teenager who was shot in 2012 while walking to the corner store by a neighborhood watch volunteer.

The poem “Order of Events” opens with two lines of court testimony from Rachel Jeantel, who had been on the phone with Martin moments before he was killed. When Martin’s lawyer asks Jeantel to set the scene, she tells him that she and Martin had been talking about a basketball game.

“One of the things most difficult for me to process [about this case] was the mundanity, that it was just an ordinary day, that he was walking to the corner store,” John said. “And there is something so mundane about these two people having a conversation about the All-Star Game.”

The case had a powerful impact on John, who wasn’t much older than Martin at the time of the shooting. She is 25 now.

“It stirred up feelings for me about how the United States does not value black life — and that even your youth won’t save you,” she said.

[READ MORE: After viral story on D.C. girls, understanding the real perils for missing children of color]

In addition to court documents, “Order of Events” weaves in lyrics by the singer Ne-Yo and details from news stories about the moments after Martin was shot.

John calls this approach “documentary poetry,” using her art form to chronicle real-life events.

“With documentary poetry, you are documenting first, by creating a record of something that happened,” John said. “It’s also sometimes a counter narrative to what the larger conversation is.”

In “Testify,” John often zooms in and out of the courtroom, or between different perspectives, like from Bland to the police officer, layering over all of these with a razor-sharp, often first-person voice of the narrator.

Testify. Credit: Octopus Books

John says she was inspired by the prose poetry book “Jane: A Murder,” by Maggie Nelson, which is about the unsolved murder of Nelson’s aunt, and which similarly uses different layers and lenses to document and examine violence.

In her poem “Elegy for Black Women #4,” John writes of 21 black trans women who have been killed in the United States over the last few years. Many of these deaths were not well-covered in the media. This poem — as well as many of the poems in “Testify” — is a critique of race- and gender-based violence, as well as how these victims are remembered.

“When they hunt you with / abandon and misname you,” she writes. “I will / call you queen, call you / cousin, homegirl or / sister-friend” — and then she lists all 21 women’s names.

It troubled John that because of the frequency of these events and the speed of the news cycle, some names “become immortalized and become chants,” while others quickly fade away. “Testify” was her effort to counteract that.

“I want to know how many more people can be brought into the conversation,” she said. “Like civic journalism… it’s a way to record and for people to talk about, reflect and witness what we’re seeing.”

[READ MORE: Using poetry to uncover the moments that lead to racism]

Below, listen to John read her poem “Order of Events”:

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Simone John is a poet, educator and freelance writer based in Boston, Massachusetts. She received an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College with an emphasis on documentary poetics. Her poetry and essays have appeared in “Wildness,” “The Pitkin Review,” “Public Pool,” and the “Writer in the World.” She is a contributing editor at Gramma Poetry. Find her online at simonejohn.com and on twitter @simoneivory.

The post From Trayvon Martin to Sandra Bland, these poems use court documents to honor black lives cut short appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Scranton Lace Company, as pictured today. Photo by Francine Mackinder Douaihy

After a century of operation, the Scranton Lace Company, one of the largest employers in the area, abruptly closed, mid-shift, in 2002. The mechanization of looms contributed to its end, along with risky investments. The actual building still stands, abandoned.

Throughout its history, thousands of people worked at the Scranton Lace Company, including, incidentally, Hillary Clinton’s grandfather. Many more were touched by the factory, once a major landmark and source of pride for the city, as the world’s largest producer of Nottingham Lace. Among them was Margot Douaihy, whose forthcoming book of poetry, “Scranton Lace,” is nostalgic for a time and place that no longer exists.

“Scranton Lace meant quality products. It was the paragon of finery, but also something very useful,” Douaihy said. “I was really inspired by it growing up, and then confused when it closed.”

Margot Douaihy. By Chattman Photography

As she worked through that confusion as an adult, Douaihy began to think more about lace as a metaphor, as an object with both physical and negative space.

“Lace is a ruse, see-through, a two-sided mirror,” she writes in the title poem, “Scranton Lace.”  “So many faces hiding within one.”

While the book is a love letter to Scranton, she said, it also acknowledges the Rust Belt’s limits. Growing up queer in an all-American industrial town, Douaihy said “I felt like an outsider, like I was not a part of the town. I had this internalized homophobia.”

She still wrestles with that, she said, the same way Scranton wrestles with its own complicated history.

Douaihy has since moved away from Scranton and settled in Northampton, Massachusetts, with her partner Bri Hermanson, a scratchboard illustrator who created the drawings for “Scranton Lace.” Scratchboard illustrations are typically made by scratching or scraping lines of cardboard; for these drawings, Hermanson also used physical lace dipped in ink.

Illustration by Bri Hermanson

“To make these illustrations, I had to physically cut lace that was made years and years ago in this factory and essentially ruin it,” Hermanson said. “But it also felt really generative, like I was bringing it back to life.”

When I called them, Douaihy was holding a Scranton Lace ring that Hermanson had given her for her birthday. It was inscribed in 1931 to “Dorothy” as a thank you for her decade of service.

In many ways, Douaihy said, she feels a kinship to the shuttered lace factory, and a sense of wanting to protect it. “Because while it’s no longer needed, it’s still there. So I’m asking: what do we do with it? What’s its sense of utility in this moment?” Douaihy said. “I’m still reckoning with that.”

SCRANTON LACE
By Margot Douaihy

Broken windows fake awake
like marble eyes, lids locked
after the heart stops. Scranton Lace,
elegant ruin, abandoned since her last
bell rang, cutters fired mid-shift.
Time untied when the big clock broke.
Don’t fix it. Why try? There’s no next
act when you’re used. Despite fine
wreaths, doesn’t every graveyard
choke with weeds? Headstones so bored
the undead aren’t sure where to haunt;
dates faded, names imbibed by granite.
In Vulgar Latin, Lace means entice,
ensnare. The factory tricked me every day
as I drove to school, gutters buckling
with pigeon nests. Grandest banisters
in town flaking rust. Dust, love letter
of age, how dare you. Lace lives
in rewind, tin migraine of a glue high.
Each loom taunted by memories of spin,
gears desperate to grind. What is a blade
but an ache to cut? No money to repair it,
tear it down. Welcome sign still floats
above closed doors like elixir so old
it’s turned to poison, slow stripping inside.
In the parking lot, I slept off my first
hangover, learned how much whiskey
I needed to black out: one fist. I fell in lust
with the waitress at the diner behind The Lace.
We kissed in her trailer Friday nights
when her boyfriend hit the late shift.
She called me T. Because I’m trash? I asked.
Because you’re tiny, she laughed.
Your hands, they’re so small.
She was new to women—I was barely one—
but we understood lace, negative space,
code of openings, frames blinking
between braids. Lace is a woman
who is here & nowhere, intact but full of holes.
Lace is an old curse & after the reverse spell
the ruined part of you never fits quite right.
Lace is a ruse, see-through, a two-sided
mirror; so many faces hiding within one.

Below, listen to Douaihy read “Scranton Lace.” Editor’s note: This poem has been excerpted from the original.

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Margot Douaihy is the author of “Scranton Lace” (Clemson University Press, 2017), the Lambda Literary Awards finalist “Girls Like You” (Clemson University Press, 2015) and the chapbook “I Would Ruby If I Could” (Factory Hollow Press, 2013). Her work has been featured in The Colorado Review, The Madison Review, The Adirondack Review, The South Carolina Review, The Wisconsin Review, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review.

Bri Hermanson is a scratchboard illustrator. Her work has been recognized by the Society of Illustrators, American Illustration, Creative Quarterly, the Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles, Luerzer’s Archive, Applied Arts, the Altpick Awards and the 3×3 Directory.

The post In ‘Scranton Lace,’ nostalgia for a time and place that no longer exist appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

International travelers arrive at John F. Kennedy international airport in New York City, U.S., February 4, 2017. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

“In the deep end, every stroke counts.”

“Best not flirt with disaster, lest it decide to commit.”

“Take two opposites, connect the dots, and you have a straight line.”

These are a few of the pithy wisdoms included in “Where Epics Fail,” an upcoming book of aphorisms from Egyptian-American poet Yahia Lababidi.

The aphorism, an ancient art form that’s part poetry and part philosophy, often consists of just a single line; it’s intended to be both memorable and illuminating. For many years the aphorism was considered archaic. But Lababidi — whom Obama’s inaugural poet, Richard Blanco, calls the form’s “modern-day master” — said the 140 character age of Twitter has turned many of us into aspiring aphorists. And he believes the form is more important in a confusing political time than ever.

“In this moment where it seems the grand narratives are failing to hold our attention, maybe the humble epigram can do its work,” he said. “While deceptively slight and slender, then you sit with it, and perhaps it liberates you somehow, or reminds you of what you’ve forgotten.”

Poets, thinkers and artists, he said, do not really teach, but remind us of what we already know.

Yahia Lababidi. Credit: Jeremy Johnson

Growing up in Egypt, Lababadi was surrounded by aphorisms; wit and verse were regularly shared between people on the street, he said, as a way of passing on inherited wisdom. Today, he hopes they can be used by his adopted, and politically polarized, country. His aphorism “Take two opposites, connect the dots, and you have a straight line,” for example, is meant to suggest that the differences we see in one another may not be irreconcilable — that we have more in common than we think.

The other aphorisms in “Where Epics Fail” exhort us to pay attention, believe we can make a difference, keep our hearts open in the face of pain, take responsibility for our actions, avoid ego and do the hard work that comes with sticking to ideals.

Lababadi’s aphoristic style also makes its way into his more traditional poetry; in the poem “Hard Days,” which appears in his 2016 poetry collection “Balancing Acts,” he writes: “These are the hard days / like uncrackable nuts / break your teeth trying.”

But many of Lababadi’s poems feel more personal than they do philosophical, addressing head on the concerns of being an immigrant and feeling like you’re living in a state of exile.

In his poem “Speaking American,” Lababidi writes about struggling to fit in after immigrating to the United States, particularly trying to adapt to the cultural contradictions. Though he wrote the poem 11 years ago, when he first came to America from Egypt, he said it feels even more relevant today, “with the mounting fear and loathing directed at ‘others’” in the current debates around immigration.

But while the poem is critical of his adopted country, Lababadi said it comes from a place of love.

“If you love someone or love a nation … you want to remind them of their best version,” he said, noting he’s critical of Egypt too. “You sometimes want to say: ‘tell me this isn’t really you.’”

Read “Speaking American,” or listen to Lababidi read it, below.

Speaking American

O, it is excellent to have a giant’s strength,
But it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.
– Shakespeare

I’m learning to speak American
(I thought I had it, ages ago)
but the dialects throw me off
each like a language in itself

There’s the official tongue:
addressed to the better angels
of our nature, the huddled masses
all yearning to breathe free

But no one speaks such Shakespearean English
in the streets, there you are treated
to a more familiar manner of speech
the unguarded snarl known as slang

Unlike that poetic flourish on its tiptoes,
this dialect is flat-footed and suspicious
of the very tired and poor that it invites
preferring the right to bear arms in bars

Stray violence or casual hate of shifting shapes:
racial slur, ethnic insult or what specialists term
linguistic xenophobia…
you fill in the blanks, I’d rather not

I’m learning this fickle colossus
and the Big Friendly Giant are one
so, if you want to run with either
best to watch both don’t squash you

Having made a show of separating
church and state, they still Bless you
at every turn, but will also curse you
if you do not bless their troops, in return.

Yahia Lababidi, an Egyptian-Lebanese-American, is the author of six books of poetry and prose. Lababidi’s last book “Balancing Acts: New & Selected Poems (1993-2015)” debuted at No. 1 on Amazon’s Hot New Releases under Middle Eastern poetry. His first book, “Signposts to Elsewhere,” a collection of original aphorisms, was selected as a 2008 Book of the Year by The Independent (UK). His forthcoming book, “Where Epics Fail: Aphorisms on Art, Morality and Spirit,” is being published by Unbound in partnership with Penguin Random House, and is now available for pre-order.

The post What these humble one-liners can teach us about the times we live in appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Stone fruits that have ripened early because of the drought are seen at a farmers market in Los Angeles, California, on May 10, 2015. Camille T. Dungy’s new poetry collection “Tropic Cascade” celebrates the summer bounty of foods like stone fruits, but also worries about our environmental future. Credit: REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Against Nostalgia
By Camille T. Dungy

I supposed you have food there, too, but here it is summer
and we have asparagus, avocado, and stone fruit.
I am so happy.

The yard trees of my youth yield more fruit than we can handle.

I was going to bake chicken with cherries and apricot,
but already it is too hot. I can’t turn on the oven.

Sometimes I bite straight into plums.
Other times I slice them to serve on a platter.

Sometimes I want to move away
so I must remember everything I used to love: stone fruit and asparagus,
draughts of eucalyptus carried through the window on the wind.

Camille T. Dungy. Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffith

It is now, at the end of May, when stone fruits start to be in season. Cherries, apricots, peaches, plums — those fleshy and sometimes delicate fruits, best enjoyed in warm weather, that contain a pit inside. In “Against Nostalgia,” a poem from Camille T. Dungy’s new poetry collection, she celebrates stone fruits and their role in her memories of summer.

“There’s something about being able to be excited about summer and its bounty,” Dungy said. “And this poem is asking myself to remember that that kind of excitement doesn’t have to be place-specific or even time-specific. That I can have a really wonderful memory that is not painful nostalgia, but a kind of joy.”

Much of Dungy’s new collection, “Trophic Cascade,” does this: it asks us, in spite of the pain or difficulty of being human today, to find joy and vibrancy in our experiences. The poems examine modern-day problems such as environmental degradation, the difficulties of living as an African African, and ongoing war and violence. But there is also a strain of hope that runs through them.

“I suppose I could curl into a ball, but that doesn’t seem like a particularly effective survival method,” Dungy said. “Instead, I think: how can I write into hope, into possibility, into survival.”

“Trophic Cascade” is the fourth in a series of what Dungy calls “survival narratives” — each set in different centuries, and each concerned with how we survive in the face of crisis. This new collection,  set in the 21st century, takes its title from the scientific term for when a top predator is added or removed from an ecosystem, often causing a cascading effect on the food chain.

That idea, Dungy said, resonated with her not only as an environmental concept, but also because she wrote the book as a new mother.

“The trophic creature in the book is metaphorically my child,” whose arrival changed everything, she said.

As her daughter, who is now 7, grows up, Dungy said, she has learned not to bemoan the loss of each previous state, but instead enjoy the person her daughter has become.

“And so as I wrote, I was thinking about her leaving those states, as much as about leaving that stone fruit,” said Dungy. “It’s a push against nostalgia. It’s trying to figure out a way to hold more happiness than despair.”

Below, listen to Dungy read the poem “Against Nostalgia”:

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Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers. She has also edited anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, 100 Best African American Poems, and many other print and online venues. She is a professor at Colorado State University.

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When Olivia Vella’s seventh grade teacher asked every student to write a monologue on a topic about which they were passionate, Vella immediately knew what she wanted to say. She wanted to tell girls her age that they were talented, smart and beautiful — no matter how often they were told otherwise.

The slam poem, which Vella performed for her class and on video, begins with a list of ways a girl can fit in — trendy outfit, styled hair, tight Converse shoes. As Vella’s voice shakes, she begins to ask: “Why am I not good enough?” But by the end of the poem, she’s turned the question on its head. “You are loved. You are precious … You are deserving of respect,” she tells the room. “And most of all, you are good enough.”

“I think that you just go to the store and you see this magazine that says: ‘Look at this new way to lose weight.’ Or you see this perfect selfie of someone,” she said, speaking by phone from Queen Creek, Arizona, where she attends Queen Creek Middle School. “And this society wants everyone to be perfect and just be like objects.”

Olivia Vella. Courtesy: Molly Vella

Other kids in the class wrote personal poems, too: about preparing for a parent’s divorce, being separated from family, or having people in class copy your work. But no poem resonated so much as Vella’s.

“Girls were crying. Boys couldn’t stop looking at Olivia in awe,” her teacher, Brett Cornelius, said of the moments following the performance. “It changed [how] they viewed her. And then they were clapping and cheering.”

Vella’s poem resonated beyond the classroom too. A video of her performance of the poem on the middle school’s Facebook page now has 192K views; it has also been reposted on YouTube.

One commenter wrote that though she was 63 years old, the poem spoke to her, because “many of the things you said were things that I struggled with so many years ago … The hair, make up, right clothes, dumbing myself down. I never had the courage to fight back.”

Vella says that the response she has gotten nationwide has been “good overwhelming” and that she’d like to write more slam poetry. Cornelius said he thinks students connected with slam, or spoken word, poems because of how they can be both personal and performative.

“We watched a lot of slam poetry, and these poets were saying all these things kids think and feel every day but don’t have the outlet to say,” he said. “And then these poems gave them the courage to say it.”

Watch Vella perform her poem in the player above.

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A satirical poem by Thom Young. After it was posted to Instagram, it received 2,236 likes.

When Texas-based poet Thom Young joined Instagram around 2010, he noticed a number of poets were already using the platform to share their work. At first, he found this encouraging and began sharing his work there as well, amassing several thousand followers. But as he continued to look around, he also noticed something strange: While most serious, award-winning poets — those who did thoughtful work — got hardly any attention, people who wrote short, trite poetry got tons of likes and followers. Some of these “pop poets,” as he calls them, had become social media celebrities overnight.

And so Young, a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, decided to do an experiment. He thought he’d try writing the most vapid, simplistic poetry he could and post it to Instagram to see what happened.

“I decided that a parody or satire was needed to demonstrate how easy it was to get popular on social media, particularly on Instagram, writing this short, trite poetry,” he said. “And right away I started getting followers and likes like crazy” — going from 9,000 to 46,000 followers on Instagram in less than a year, he said.

Thom Young, courtesy of Thom Young.

Along with the the poetry, Young also created a sort of alter ego, presenting himself as a hipster poet he called Tyler, even using a stock image of a man with a beard. For the past year, he has continued this social media experiment with increasing popularity. He eventually dropped the alter ego, and now uses his real name or initials; just this week, he posted the incredibly short poems: “wait.” and “love made / her wild” against a white background, both of which garnered thousands of likes. While some of his followers clearly understand it’s satire, many others seem not to.

To those who might say the experiment is condescending, Young says that’s not his goal. He does not want to criticize those who write or like pop poetry, he said, but instead hopes it leads younger people to think more about what they read (in addition to being a poet, Young is also a high school English teacher).

“I think the younger generation is mostly interested in ‘fidget-spinner’ poetry. Like they’re just scrolling on their devices, to read something instantly, while the libraries are empty. I think people today don’t want to read anything that causes a whole lot of critical thinking,” he said. “And so in a lot of my captions, I try to talk about the real stuff.”

“Real stuff” means he often points out in his captions that the poetry he’s posting is satire. Or he’ll talk about how smartphone or social media culture can be problematic. He also sometimes points his followers to what he sees as better poetry – including his own. According to Young, sales of his recent poetry books, “A Little Black Dress Called Madness” and “Coffee Nightmares,” have spiked on Amazon since he started posting about them alongside his pop poetry. And some of his followers have now asked him to start posting that poetry instead.

“That was the goal: to expose people to the real poetry and the real craft,” he said. In his English class, he notices that it’s always an uphill battle to get students to read a serious writer like Oscar Wilde, but after they do, some of them really love it and ask to read other books by Wilde. Similarly, on Instagram, “I see that when people read my real poetry, they want more.”

Below, read some of Young’s Instagram poems and captions, as well as a surrealistic poem of his called “Gills,” from his 2015 collection “A Little Black Dress Called Madness.”

“Gills”

by Thom Young

She came home
and had grown gills
and he sat in a pool
of water with dull black eyes
and a tongue that swatted
flies out of the hot dry air
later that night
they ate fried steaks
and hash
things were different
now
but they didn’t say
anything
as they watched
Johnny Carson
knowing he died
long ago

This poem was first published in The Commonline Journal.

Thom Young is a writer from Texas. His 2015 poetry collection, “A Little Black Dress Called Madness,” hit No. 1 for poetry sold in Germany. He is a 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee and his work has appeared in a number of literary journals, including the International Journal of Poetry, Poetry Quarterly, 3am magazine, Word Riot, Thirty West, and more. He is writing a novel about social media culture and poetry called “Instapoet.”
This article has been updated to reflect that Instagram launched in 2010.

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Poetry can do a kind of “dream work,” says poet Matthew Zapruder. Credit: REUTERS/Ilya Naymushin

“I have a confession to make: I don’t really understand poetry.”

So goes the opening line of poet Matthew Zapruder’s forthcoming book “Why Poetry,” which looks at why a lot of people feel alienated by poetry (this line is one he’s heard countless times before) and what can be done to remedy that.

The book is part personal, part explanatory and part polemic, saying: Here’s my experience with poetry, here’s how it works, and here’s why we desperately need it.  It is the last part that is perhaps most interesting in an age of information overload. Zapruder argues poetry is a necessity, because the knowledge we gain from it can be deeper and more human than from other texts.

“It’s an intuitive, associative understanding that you can get from poems, which can really open a person up and make them aware of other human beings, of themselves, and of the natural world,” said Zapruder, who has published four collections of poetry and edited the poetry page of the New York Times Magazine. “It does that in a way that can’t be done by any other form of writing.”

Courtesy: Ecco

But this intuitive, associative power, he says, can be lost on people because of the way poetry is taught. He argues that we are too often asked to find the “hidden meanings” in poems, as if a poem is a riddle — telling you something simple, but in the most complicated way possible, as if the poet is being deliberately opaque. Good poetry actually does the opposite, says Zapruder; “it’s something elusive and complex, said in the simplest way possible.” (Though writing about the complexities of life is not always very simple.)

Throughout the pages of “Why Poetry,” Zapruder traverses the poetry of Frank O’Hara, Sappho, Langston Hughes, John Keats, Adrienne Rich and many others, using a wide range of poets and styles to illustrate how poetry can function in many different ways. He unpacks both how their poetry works (through the technique of “defamiliarization,” for example, of making the familiar strange) and also the feeling and imagination they inspire (often, he says, poems provoke both longing and confusion).

In the end, Zapruder said he was happy to have finished writing “Why Poetry,” and to be able to go back to writing poems, instead of about them.

“Writing this book reminded me of the very thing I was writing about,” he said. “Which is that there is a different kind of knowledge, and a different kind of experience, to be gained when writing poems. A search for dream knowledge. It’s a pleasure to get back to that.”

Below, read one of Zapruder’s poems, “I Wake Up Before the Machine,” and listen to him read it aloud.

I Wake Up Before the Machine
By matthew Zapruder

I wake up before the machine
made of all the choices
we are together not making
lights up this part of Oakland
it’s dark so I can imagine
another grid humming in the east
already people are deciding
I lie in the western
pre-decision darkness and almost
hear that silent voice
saying go down there
the coffee needs you
to place it in the device
its next form will help you remember
daylight is coming
but dreams do not go away
they just move off and change
your mind is a tree
on a little hill
surrounded by grasses
that look up and say
father wind
loves moving through you

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Matthew Zapruder is the author of “Why Poetry” (Ecco, August 2017) and four poetry collections: “Sun Bear”; “Come On, All You Ghosts”; “The Pajamist”; and “American Linden.” An Associate Professor in the MFA program at Saint Mary’s College of California, he is also editor-at-arge at Wave Books and from 2016-2017 was editor of the poetry column for the New York Times Magazine. He lives in Oakland, CA.

The post Have we been taught poetry all wrong? appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Images by Jenni B. Baker

For many, “Infinite Jest” is a kind of sacred work. A magnum opus that can challenge readers simply to finish. The “defining work of the 1990s.” One of the greatest books of all time. Or something to be literally consumed.

For poet Jenni B. Baker, David Foster Wallace’s postmodern epic on tennis, recovery and entertainment, is text material for her poetry. Since 2013, Baker has been making poems out of “Infinite Jest” by erasing much of the text, and creating a new piece of writing from what’s left behind.

Credit: Little, Brown

“It’s a challenge when working with a source text, because you want to interpret a text in a way that’s new and inventive, and not a poetic retelling of the original thought,” she said. “While traditional poets start with an idea and find the words, with erasure you start with the words and find the idea.”

Baker has done erasure work before, including an extended series of erasures of a 1960s Boy Scout handbook, and a commentary on the recent election where she blacked out text from the Grimm Fairy Tales. But erasure of Wallace’s work felt like it had a special significance, she said, because of the author’s death by suicide in 2008 after he struggled with depression for much his life.

“Part of what drew me to this project was feelings of grief about [Wallace’s] suicide,” said Baker. “Because you have this feeling that somebody wrote this thing that you loved, that they will be no more, and that there will not be anything more like this. Death is a form of erasure — we are all erased. So it felt like a fitting a tribute to him.”

In the end, Baker plans to do a poem for every page of the 1,079-page novel. She is currently up to page 325. Below, read some of those poems, which range from three words to dozens, from questions to provocations, and from the quiet and plainspoken to the increasingly urgent.

See more at ErasingInfinite.com.

Jenni B. Baker is the co-founder and projects director of Container, a publisher of text objects. Her chapbook, Comings/Goings, generated by applying Oulipian constraints to Washington Post articles, was released in 2015; additional work appears in publications such as The Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Whiskey Island and Washington Square. She is the recipient of a 2017 Individual Artist Award in Poetry from the Maryland State Arts Council.

The post This writer is erasing ‘Infinite Jest’ to find the poetry left behind appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

A boy watches the fireworks from his father’s shoulders during the 2016 Independence Day celebrations in Somerville, Massachusetts. Photo by REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Fourth of July is among poet Dorianne Laux’s favorite holidays. It’s also a holiday she dreads.

For one, she says, fireworks are beautiful from a distance, but the massive displays we shoot off every Independence Day can also hearken a feeling of a war, and the desire to best one another with weaponry.

Laux explores these kinds of conflicting feelings — about fireworks, the U.S. and patriotism — in her poem “Fourth of July.”

“I feel very lucky to be accidentally born in a country that [poet] Carolyn Forche calls in a poem ‘greed and grace,'” she said. “Because on one hand I love this country, but on another hand, I’m old enough and smart enough to know this country is not a perfect system.”

During the Vietnam War, Laux said, she watched her boyfriend and brother get sent off to fight. Her brother came back forever changed, affected by Agent Orange, alcoholism and other consequences of what she calls a “horrific, unjust war.”

Dorianne Laux. Credit: John Campbell

In her poem, the teenage boys throwing firecrackers are a kind of stand-in for how she thinks of America and how it has mishandled its wars.

“I think of the U.S. as an adolescent country. It’s not the old, wise European country, or very young either, it’s somewhere in the middle,” she said. “Like it’s got all kinds of testosterone, and we just don’t know how to handle our power yet.”

But she also jokes that poets have a hard time liking anything.

“Poetry comes from conflict,” she said. “If it’s all nostalgia and wonderful it’s a hallmark card. If it’s a political rant, it’s an essay. Poetry is somewhere in between.”

Below, read “Fourth of July” or listen to Laux read it aloud.

Fourth of July
By Dorianne Laux

The neighborhood cringes behind windows
washed in magnesium light, streamers fizzling
above the shingled rooftop of the apartments
across the street where teenaged boys
with mannish arms throw cherry bombs,
bottle rockets, wings and spinners, snappers,
chasers, fiery cryolite wheels onto the avenue.
Paint flakes off the flammable houses
and onto brave square plots of white grass.
Rain-deprived vines sucker the shutters.
Backyard dogs tear at the dirt, cats
run flat out, their tails straight up.
What’s liberty to the checkout girl
selling smokes and nuts, greenbacks
turning her fingers to grease? The boys
insist on pursuing happiness, their birthright:
a box of matches, crackers on strings,
sparklers, fountains, missiles, repeating shells,
Roman candles, Brazilian barrages.
We peek through blind slats to where they stand
around a manhole cover, the gold foam
of Corona bottles breaking at their feet,
young up-turned faces lit by large caliber
multi-shot aerials. We suffer each concussion,
the sulfer rush that smells like fear, each dizzy,
orgiastic display that says we love this country,
democracy, the right to a speedy trial. We’re afraid
to complain, to cross the spent red casings
melted on asphalt in the morning’s stunned
aftermath, to knock hard on any door, and find them
draped like dead men over the couches, the floor,
hands clasped behind their heads prison style,
shoulders tattooed, dreaming the dreams of free men
in summer, shirts off, holes in their jeans.

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Dorianne Laux’s most recent collections are “The Book of Men,” winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, and “Facts about the Moon,” winner of the Oregon Book Award. Laux is also author of “Awake,” “What We Carry,” and “Smoke” from BOA Editions. She teaches poetry in the master’s of fine arts program at North Carolina State University; she is also a founding faculty member at Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program.

The post This poem grapples with America’s complicated identity appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Destroyed buildings from clashes are seen in the Old City of Mosul, Iraq July 10, 2017. REUTERS/Thaier Al-Sudani

About six years ago, poet and playwright Harry Newman sat down to a write a cautionary poem about war, and the culture around it, as military tensions seemed be rising between the U.S. and Iran, and as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dragged on.

Fast forward to the present — as President Trump has inherited multiple conflicts from the Obama administration, as tensions with Iran are again a focus, and as the battle against ISIS in Syria and Iraq rages on — and Newman says he could have written the poem, which is called “Soon,” just last week.

Newman’s 2016 collection “Led From a Distance,” where “Soon” was first published, is all about the distance of modern-day warfare. “We just know of war what is presented on our screens,” Newman said. “Even drone operators — we’re all operating from a distance now. But we’re all affected by it, even if we don’t see it.”

Harry Newman. Credit: Eva Orzech

It would be useful, Newman said, if we better understood how the countries we go to war with are often a lot like us. “Bombs falling missiles / skimming over suburbs / so much like our own,” he writes. “It could be our streets [at war], and it might well be,” he said. “I think those are connections we don’t make, or we’re not encouraged to make. And those are really humanizing connections.”

Newman, who has been writing political poetry and theater for the last several decades, said his work comes out of being politically active.

As a college student at MIT, he protested policies of the Reagan administration; later, he became more politically involved through the anti-war work of his first wife, a former political prisoner and torture survivor. His play “The Occupation,” which was put on in July 2001, just ahead of the 9/11 attacks, explored the human dynamics of military occupation, primarily from the perspective of the occupied. Two years later, the U.S. invaded Iraq, using 9/11 as its rationale.

Back then, and in writing “Soon,” Newman said, he was less plugged into the daily news, and would write only after taking the time to read more deeply about a subject. But today, he said, it’s impossible not to also follow each incremental development of the news — even if feels like the spectre of war is raised almost daily.

“It’s the nature of the era that we’re in that we’re compelled to constantly absorb this,” he said. “But you grow inured when you hear these constant announcements of war, some of it contrived and some of it real. To have a real emotional connection you have to let something in and sit with you.”

Below, read Newman’s poem “Soon,” and listen to him read it aloud.

Soon
By Harry Newman

soon the generals
will have their way

and killing will begin
again the modern kind
distant and televised

how strange it is
to think of movies
instead of slaughter

when the images come
the ones we’ve seen
now so many times

bombs falling missiles
skimming over suburbs
so much like our own

we have grown so fat
with violence we need
our murder super-sized
before we can feel it

when the smaller deaths
the ones on the ground
the cameras won’t see
will never be counted

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Harry Newman is a poet based in New York whose work has been published in numerous literary journals, including Rattle, Fugue, Asheville Poetry Review and The New Guard, as well as the online political magazines Counterpunch and Warscapes. His poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize in the UK. Also a playwright, his works include “The Occupation,” “Dry Time,” “The Dark,” and a translation of Patrick Süskind’s “The Double Bass,” which have been staged at theaters throughout the U.S. and in Germany. 

The post How we fail to humanize war appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Policemen arrest black suspects in Detroit on July 25, 1967 during riots that erupted in Detroit following a police operation. Credit: AFP/Getty Images

Fifty years ago this month, a protest in Detroit turned into a riot, which turned into five days of violence that left dozens dead, thousands arrested and a city engulfed in flames. While the event is mostly remembered as a riot, others see it as a revolution — a demonstration of force by frustrated black Americans against aggressive policing in the city, set off by the late-night raid of an unlicensed black club.

Detroit-born poet Philip Levine(1928-2015) wrote the poem “They Feed They Lion” in 1968, a year after the riots, as a way to chronicle the rage he saw in the city over the failures of its institutions.

But Levine had been attuned to that feeling for years; working in Detroit auto shops in the 1950s, he told Detroit Magazine: “I saw that the people that I was working with … were voiceless in a way. In terms of the literature of the United States they weren’t being heard.” He said that his life work became trying to speak for them as best he could.

In 1955, Levine won the Pulitzer Prize for his book of poetry “The Simple Truth,” which examined Detroit’s industrial landscape through quiet elegy and prayer.

The poem “They Feed They Lion,” by contrast, is not a calm poem, Levine wrote later:

It is, I believe, the most potent expression of rage I have written, rage at my government for the two racial wars we were then fighting, one in the heart of our cities against our urban poor, the other in Asia against a people determined to decide their own fate. The poem was written one year after what in Detroit is still called “The Great Rebellion” although the press then and now titled it a race riot. I had recently revisited the city of my birth, and for the first time I saw myself in the now ruined neighborhoods of my growing up not as the rebel poet but as what I was, middle-aged, middle-class, and as one writer of the time would have put it “part of the problem.” Out of a dream and out of the great storm of my emotions the poem was born.

But while Levine saw himself as part of the problem, others did not. In 2011, he was named U.S. Poet Laureate in 2011; he is today considered the voice of a place, and a generation. Black poet and novelist Al Young wrote of him: “How can anyone not love the people-friendly, humanity-championing poetry of Philip Levine?” Fifty years later, Levine’s poem about the race riots helps us remember and understand that time.

“They Feed They Lion”
By Philip Levine

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.

Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones’ need to sharpen and the muscles’ to stretch,
They Lion grow.

Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
“Come home, Come home!” From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.

From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From “Bow Down” come “Rise Up,”
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.

From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.

Below, listen to Levine read “They Feed They Lion” aloud:

“They Feed They Lion” from NEW SELECTED POEMS by Philip Levine, copyright © 1984, 1991 by Philip Levine. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

The post The rage and rebellion of the Detroit riots, captured in one poem appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

This undated illustration shows Tantalus, Sisyphus and Ixion, three kings from Greek mythology who were condemned by Zeus to eternal tortures in Hades. Tantalus reaches for the unreachable fruit, Sisyphus carries the rock that never gets to the top of the hill, and Ixion is shown on the fiery wheel. Image by Getty Images

“Imagine Sispyhus happy.”

That’s the title of one of Nicole Sealey’s many poems about life, death and the search for meaning in her debut poetry collection, “Ordinary Beast.” (It is also the final line of a famous 1942 philosophical essay by Albert Camus).

Imagine the Greek mythical figure, the sentence asks us, pushing his giant boulder up a hill — a seemingly meaningless and ceaseless task. And yet imagine him happy. Imagine Sispyhus content because he accepts, and understands, that life can be both difficult and absurd.

These existential questions weave through much of Sealey’s new collection, which, she said, grew out of her obsessions, “with life, how we live it and death. That, and: Are we being human to one another? Are we being our best? And how?”

Nicole Sealey. Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

“Ordinary Beast” is also populated by myths, whether stories from ancient Greece or legends from America’s indigenous communities. Sealey employs these myths, she said, to widen a small moment contained within the poem into something more.

“The collection as a whole does this thing where it connects people and connects things that wouldn’t otherwise be connected,” she said. “To reiterate the fact that we are all interconnected.”

Questions of life and death (as well as myths) are all in Sealey’s “Virginia is for lovers,” a poem anchored in a small but scary exchange with a friend. While the poem begins at a modern-day gay pride picnic in Virginia, it leaps back in time to a legend about a raid by the Shawnee Tribe. And it ends, as many of Sealey’s poems do, with an image of compassion.

“I think we are all writing the same poem, which is what it means to be human,” said Sealey. “These questions take a lifetime and we won’t get an answer. I will grow and only add more questions.”

Below, read “Virginia is for lovers” and listen to Sealey read it aloud.

“Virginia is for lovers”
by Nicole Sealey

At LaToya’s Pride picnic,
Leonard tells me he and his longtime
love, Pete, broke up.
He says Pete gave him the house
in Virginia. “Great,” I say,
“that’s the least his ass could do.”
I daydream my friend and me
into his new house, sit us in the kitchen
of his three-bedroom, two-bath
brick colonial outside Hungry Mother Park,
where, legend has it, the Shawnee raided
settlements with the wherewithal
of wild children catching pigeons.
A woman and her androgynous child
escaped, wandering the wilderness,
stuffing their mouths with the bark
of chokecherry root.
Such was the circumstance
under which the woman collapsed.
The child, who could say nothing
except hungry mother, led help
to the mountain where the woman lay,
swelling as wood swells in humid air.
Leonard’s mouth is moving.
Two boys hit a shuttlecock back and forth
across an invisible net.
A toddler struggles to pull her wagon
from a sandbox. “No,” Leonard says,
“it’s not a place where you live.
I got the H In V. H I—”
Before my friend could finish,
and as if he’d been newly ordained,
I took his hands and kissed them.

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Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I., and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole Sealey is the author of “Ordinary Beast,” forthcoming from Ecco in fall 2017, and “The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named,” winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her other honors include an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a Daniel Varoujan Award and the Poetry International Prize, as well as fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, MacDowell Colony and the Poetry Project. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere. Nicole holds an MLA in Africana Studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the executive director at Cave Canem Foundation, Inc.

The post This poet’s obsession with death led her to write about how to live appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Are we a nation divided? Filmmaker Jennifer Crandall doesn’t think so. For her new project, “Whitman in Alabama,” Crandall spent two years crisscrossing the state and asking Alabamians to recite Walt Whitman’s iconic poem “Song of Myself.” The goal: to learn more about the people who lived there — and also to find the threads that tie them, and all of us, together.

The result is a deeply affirmative, wise, strange and sometimes funny set of 52 mini-documentaries or episodes, each dedicated to a different verse. In these videos, Whitman is recited in the most unlikely places: in a drug court, on a baseball field, at a skate park, on a farm, in a plane.

Crandall said she had the idea of capturing Southern voices reading a poem by a “dead Yankee” to try to “actualize that we are all writing this poem together.”

Perhaps the best-remembered line from “Song of Myself” is “I am large, I contain multitudes,” and Crandall hits this point home in the diversity of her subjects. A young girl from a Birmingham hip hop dance crew reads a verse on womanhood. An older man and his wife off Route 43 read about faith from their front porch. A judge in Scottsboro does a sort of call-and-response with his defendant on identifying as the poor or convicted. And a mother on a family farm, surrounded by her children and animals, recites lines on living beside beasts.

“The South is part of who we are, and we need to turn our gaze toward the South or else we’ll lose part of who we are,” Crandall said. “It’s a way more complex place than anyone outside the South gives it credit for.”

Crandall also hopes the readings will help illuminate the broader American identity, by using a text that is about both the individual and the universal. “Whitman allows us to seem large, allows for differences between us,” she said. “It’s an avenue to understand our own identity.”

Below, watch several of the “Whitman in Alabama” episodes; see more at WhitmanAlabama.com.

“Song of Myself” Verse 1 by Virginia Mae Schmitt

“Song of Myself” Verse 43: On The Road

“Song of Myself” Verse 37: John Graham & Chris Freeman

Born in Ethiopia and raised in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Haiti, part Chinese and part white, Jennifer is asked more often than not, “what are you?” Not finding the answer to that question simple, or easy, Jennifer became a journalist and filmmaker so she could explore themes of identity and connection. She worked at The Washington Post where she created the Emmy nominated video series onBeing. With “Whitman, Alabama,” Jennifer returns to that question, “what are you?” while hoping to raise the volume on voices from the American South. Her previous work has received a Knight-Batten Special Distinction Award for Innovation, an Online News Association Award for Innovation, awards from the White House News Photographers Association and recognition from the American Film Institute.

The post What these Southerners reciting Walt Whitman verses can teach us about America appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

A man walks along a street in Marrakesh on March 28, 2008. Credit: REUTERS/Thomas White

Charif Shanahan is the son of an Irish-American father and a Moroccan mother. Growing up black and Arab in America was an experience full of “instability,” he said, and he’s using his new book of poetry, “Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing,” as a way to start conversations around that.

“Instability is the word because there are different ways my body will be read and interpreted depending on who’s looking,” he said. “This creates all sorts of interesting tensions and moments, in a very personal kind of way, of folks being confused, thinking they understand and not understanding.”

Shanahan’s explorations of identity in the book cross borders, from Marrakesh to London to St. Tropez. He also skips through time, from North Africa’s colonial past to the dissonances around race that exist today.

Credit: Southern Illinois University Press

Time and again, his poems reveal how complex identity can be — and the ways in which sharp divisions of race are man-made.

“Part of the violence of race is we’re taught to think about it as hard and fast and fixed and true and clear — that you look at someone and you can tell what they are,” Shanahan said. “It’s much more complex than that.”

Shanahan also explores the more physical violence of race, often through powerful, specific scenes. In one poem, set at a French bistro, a speaker’s white father kisses his black mother and then calls the waiter a racial slur. In another, he sets us on stage at the auction of a Roman girl conducted by Arab slave traders.

“[The book] is about the ways we’ve divided ourselves in all these lunatic, violent, dangerous and counterproductive ways,” he said, “when really we’re a single family, and certainly a single species.”

In the book’s opening poem, “Gnawa Boy, Marrakesh, 1968,” Shanahan writes about a black Gnawa boy — an ethnic minority in Morocco indigenous to North and West Africa — who is marked to die. Read the poem, and listen to Shanahan read it, below.

Charif Shanahan. Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

GNAWA BOY, MARRAKESH, 1968
By Charif Shanahan

The maker has marked another boy to die:
His thin body between two sheets,
Black legs jutting out onto the stone floor,
The tips of his toenails translucent as an eye.
Gray clumps of skin, powder-light,
Like dust on the curve of his unwashed heel
And the face, swollen, expanding like a lung.
At its center, the sheet lifts and curves:
His body’s strangeness, even there.
One palm faces down to show the black
Surface of hand, the other facing up
White as his desert’s sky.
                As if underwater,
He passes from that room into the blue
Porcelain silence of the hall, where the light-
Skinned women have gathered in waiting:
No song of final parting, no wailing
Ripped holy from their throats:
The women do not walk into the sun,
They hide their bodies from it
(those pale wrists, those pale temples):
They do not walk the streets,
They do not clutch their own bodies,
They do not hit themselves in grief—

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Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (SIU Press, 2017), winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. The son of an Irish-American father and a Moroccan mother, he was raised in the Bronx and educated at Princeton University, Dartmouth College, and New York University, where he earned an MFA in poetry. His poems and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including Baffler, Boston Review, Callaloo, Literary Hub, New Republic, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, and A Public Space. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Cave Canem Foundation, the Frost Place, the Fulbright Program/IIE, Millay Colony for the Arts, and Stanford University, where he is the Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry.

The post What does it mean to be multiracial in America? This poet explores how it’s complicated appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

Following a weekend of fear and violence in Charlottesville — where white supremacists and hate groups descended on the city and a car plowed through a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one and injuring 19 — many have shared poetry to grieve, resist or try to understand the America they saw on display there.

Work has been shared by black poets who have long addressed the country’s troubled race relations, often with words of strength, including lines of Terrance Hayes (“I want to be a storm/ covering a confederate parade”), Maya Angelou, ( “today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully”) and Langston Hughes (“America never was America to me,/ And yet I swear this oath—/ America will be.”)

On Poets.org, its poem of the day — one that often speaks to the present moment — was a poem by Nicole Sealey that she said was inspired by an editorial decision to remove a line in a poem of hers about lynchings.

In Charlottesville this past weekend, white nationalists carried lit torches through the streets, calling up memories of mob lynchings of black Americans by white mobs in the 19th and 20th century.

“You should know that human limbs burn / like branches and branches like human limbs,” Sealey writes. “Only after man began hanging man from trees / then setting him on fire… did we come to know such things.”

“This poem resonates to me because it speaks to our past,” Sealey said. “I don’t think we can move forward without an acknowledgement of our past. Not sugarcoating the history of our country, but acknowledging it, and hoping we can move forward.”

On social media, poems were also shared as words of caution against standing by and watching — or not doing enough — in a time of violence:

No such thing
as innocent
bystanding.

— Seamus Heaney (@HeaneyDaily) August 13, 2017

"we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough."

Ilya Kaminsky "We Lived Happily During the War" https://t.co/VkwyEQsnux

— Oliver Baez Bendorf (@ohbendorf) August 13, 2017

Still other poems suggested ways to move forward from here:

Camille Rankine pic.twitter.com/leiP6KAOcb

— dī(ə)ltōn (@lilghosthands) August 13, 2017

" … Devestation occurs// whether we're paying attention or not. The options: repair/ a world or build a new one" – @KavehAkbar

— Mr. Steve Henn (@MrSteveEngHenn) August 13, 2017

#Charlottesville There is so much work left to do for all of us. And we can. And we will. pic.twitter.com/N95yTnDI0Q

— Red Brick Poetry (@BrickPoetry) August 14, 2017

As for Sealey’s poem, it ends with a wish that, a hundred years from now, a person would be “so far removed from the verb lynch that she be dumbfounded by its meaning.”

“It was hoping that 100 years from now we won’t be dealing with the issues we’re currently facing,” Sealey said. “This poem is the hope that lies within.”

Read that poem, or listen to Sealey read it aloud, below:

In Defense of “Candelabra with Heads”
Nicole Sealey

If you’ve read the “Candelabra with Heads”
that appears in this collection and the one
in The Animal, thank you. The original,
the one included here, is an example, I’m told,
of a poem that can speak for itself, but loses
faith in its ability to do so by ending with a thesis
question. Yeats said a poem should click shut
like a well-made box. I don’t disagree.
I ask, “Who can see this and not see lynchings?”
not because I don’t trust you, dear reader,
or my own abilities. I ask because the imagination
would have us believe, much like faith, faith
the original “Candelabra” lacks, in things unseen.
You should know that human limbs burn
like branches and branches like human limbs.
Only after man began hanging man from trees
then setting him on fire, which would jump
from limb to branch like a bastard species
of bird, did we come to know such things.
A hundred years from now, October 9, 2116,
8:18 p.m., when all but the lucky are good
and dead, may someone happen upon the question
in question. May that lucky someone be black
and so far removed from the verb lynch that she be
dumbfounded by its meaning. May she then
call up Hirschhorn’s Candelabra with Heads.
May her imagination, not her memory, run wild.

The post After Charlottesville, people share poems to grieve, resist and understand appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

“Dressing Room,” by Lucia Moholy. Courtesy of a private collection.

The Bauhaus German art school of the early to mid-20th century is today associated with several things: its stark white modernist buildings, its emphasis on re-combining arts and craft, and the male artists and architects who taught there, including Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Often overlooked are the influential women of the movement, especially photographer Lucia Moholy, who took many of the iconic photographs we associate with Bauhaus architecture.

But Moholy is now getting her due, both in an upcoming celebration in Germany of the Bauhaus centenary, and also in a new book of prose poetry by Mary Jo Bang called “A Doll for Throwing.”

Bang said she became interested in Moholy after she first began learning about the Bauhaus movement and discovered that Moholy “took all those iconic photographs of the pristine white [Bauhaus] buildings in Dessau [in Germany] right after they went up, and yet her name had been virtually erased from history, as is often the case when women collaborate with men in earlier era.”

Moholy was married to Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy, and often collaborated with him. Her work has often been overshadowed by his, and for years was also claimed by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius as his own.

The poet Mary Jo Bang. Credit: Matt Valentine

Bang’s poetry puts the focus back squarely on Moholy and other women of the Bauhaus movement, and also draws from her own life to find parallels between those years and the present day.

“The [Bauhaus] school was started in 1919 just after WWI, and closed by Hitler in 1993 at a time of high unemployment and extreme xenophobia, so there was a kind of bitterness about lost opportunities,” Bang said. “As I was doing this project, there were all these glimmers and echoes of what’s going on in this country now.”

The Bauhaus school sought to respond to the social ills of the time by designing buildings that offered some humanity, making artworks of practicality and beauty and respecting the power of machines — efforts that continue in today’s art and design field.

But Bang said she also found herself thinking about how architecture was not the solution to social problems, “unless you also do something with discrimination and education,” including the discrimination of women.

In Bang’s poem “Two Nudes,” she draws inspiration from a photograph taken by László Moholy-Nagy of Moholy and another woman, and collapses it with details from her own life. “One day I went with a friend on a walking tour,” the poem begins; it ends with the 1925 photograph: “One day we were lying in the sun / dressed in nothing but our skin when a camera / came by and devoured us.”

Read Bang’s full poem “Two Nudes,” or listen to her read it aloud, below.

I was working in a bookstore and as an antidote
to the twin torment of exhaustion and boredom,
one day I went with a friend on a walking tour.
We made it as far as Berlin and there I met the
man I would move with to a boarding house, then
to furnished rooms in the flat of a civil servant,
and from there one morning in January to the
Registry to be married. We then moved to a
studio apartment and two years later from there
to where boys returning from the war would
remove their collars and sew them back on with
red thread to demonstrate the end of their
allegiance to the cruel and fastidious past.
Everyone wanted to be launched into a place
from which you could look back and ask whether
the red was also meant to enact spilled blood.
You could say so, but only if you want to insist
that history’s minutia is best read as allegory. The
fact is, history didn’t exist then. Every day was a
twenty-four-hour standstill on a bridge from which
we discretely looked into the distance, hoping to
catch sight of the future. It’s near where you’re
standing now. One day we were lying in the sun
dressed in nothing but our skin when a camera
came by and devoured us.

Mary Jo Bang, “Two Nudes,” from A Doll for Throwing. Copyright © 2017 by Mary Jo Bang. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org

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Mary Jo Bang is the author of eight books of poems, including “The Last Two Seconds,” “Elegy,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and “A Doll For Throwing,” out now from Graywolf Press. Her translation of “Dante’s Inferno,” with illustrations by Henrik Drescher, was published by Graywolf in 2012. She’s been the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. She teaches creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis.

The post This poet is making sure women of the Bauhaus movement get their due appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

An artwork from Tauno Waidla, an imate at San Quentin, published by the project San Quentin Artists. Courtesy of Nicola White

Prison literature has a long and rich history, stretching back to Jack London, Nelson Algren and Malcolm X. The genre includes powerful work from prisoners incarcerated on death row, which is often surfaced with the help of activists or artists in the outside world. The latest of these projects, “San Quentin Artists,” publishes art and poetry made by death row inmates at San Quentin State, California’s oldest prison and the only one in the state with death row inmates.

Nearly 750 people are currently on death row at the facility, which has a gas chamber, though no prisoner has been executed there since 2006. A recent measure upheld by the California Supreme Court, however, could allow executions to resume.

Arts of San Quentin, published by London-based artist Nicola White, gives an online platform to a number of death row inmates’ work, all made in solitary confinement. “Every man is worth more than the worst thing they have done,” White said by phone from London, where she has also put the inmates’ work on display. “The poetry has a way of expressing emotions that have been frozen in a lot of these prisoners. Because no matter how damaged or worthless people feel, there is something beautiful, and poetry and art has a way of bringing that out.”

Among the prison poets White publishes is Bill Clark, who began writing poetry after he arrived on death row in 1998. Clark, who was convicted the year before of a double murder involving a computer store robbery, maintains his innocence. For him, poetry is both therapeutic and instructive.

“It helps me analyze and scrutinize how things are affecting me and affecting others,” he said, speaking over a prison phone line last week. “It helps me cope with the fact that I’m here. That I must maintain my sanity, integrity, sense of humanity and humor. I’ve written poems about death row that are actually amusing. I find a lot of self-realization in my poetry.”

Several of Clark’s poems also use metaphors to make sense of his experience behind bars. In one poem, called “Pure Lust,” he appears to be longing for a woman, but that woman stands for freedom. “I yearn, I thirst, I hunger,” he writes. “I want her back. Will she give in? Who is this woman? Her name is Freedom.”

These days, Clark, who also draws cartoons, said he more often writes children’s books than poetry. Clark, who has four children, remembers how much joy it brought them to read together and said that after years of writing often grim poetry, he wanted to “write something more positive.”

“Hypocrisy,” a cartoon by inmate Bill Clark meant to satirize the racism he sees in police lineups.

Another prison poet White publishes is Steve Champion, also known as Adisa Kamara, who first got Clark into writing poetry. Champion, a former Crips gang member who was convicted of two counts of murder after a home burglary, is today a well-known prison rights advocate who went on hunger strike in 2012 over the treatment of prisoners at San Quentin.

Champion said he started reading and writing shortly after his conviction. “When I was convicted I had to ask myself some hard questions,” he said. “And once I knew I was coming to San Quentin and death row, I sort of instinctively knew it would be important for me to read and study and learn about myself and the world.”

Out of that reading came poetry, which Champion said “always gives you a glimpse about certain aspects of yourself.”

“You think you’ve got yourself nailed down and then this other layer comes out,” he said. “We’re all evolving and growing and learning things.”

This was a point White stressed when talking about the work San Quentin’s inmates produce, arguing that many people who were on death row are no longer the same person they were when they came in.

“Steve Champion has been in since 1981. He’s since gone on a journey to transform himself form a thug to an enlightened person with a genuine lesson to share. If he were to be executed next month would the world be a safer place? Certainly not,” she said.

Among the lessons Champion wants to share is what he sees as the racist underpinnings of America’s prison system. Champion’s poem, “Transported to Another Time,” was inspired by one of his evidentiary hearings, where he said he saw the vastly different outcomes for people who had resources, access and money, and those who didn’t. The hearing also called to mind for him images of the slave trade because he was put into heavy shackles.

“But I also drew strength from thinking about that, thinking of people packed in a boat like sardines” during the slave trade, he said. “I think: ‘What are you complaining about?’ There is no universal principle in the world that says life is going to be fair.”

Champion also maintains his innocence of the crimes for which he’s been convicted, though he chronicles his life in the Crips gang and the changes he’s undergone since in a memoir called “Dead to Deliverance.”

“Definitely if I could relive that period of my life I would relive it,” he said. “But you can’t simply freeze people in time and look at them in the worst possible moment of their life and say that’s all they are and all they’ll ever be.”

Read Champion’s poem, “Transported to Another Time” below or listen to him read it aloud here.

Transported to Another Time
By Steve Champion

I’m seated on the auction block of the courtroom.
Curious spectators wait to witness a legal lynching.
The court stenographer chronicles every spoken word,
History will not forget this day.
Waist chains gird my wrists and waists.
Lay shackles fastened to my ankles,
I’m transported to another time when men hunted men, cruelly enslaving them.
Not as prisoners of war but for profits.
I am a commodity reduced to invisibility,
where batteries of neuro psychologists and psychiatrists
are paid thousands of dollars not to testify about my humanity,
but about my saneness, my fitness to be tried,
to be executed.
Every morning the sun rises I chant an African battle hymn.
Every evening the sun sets I chant a freedom song.
I am stronger today than I was yesterday but not as strong as I will be tomorrow.
Victory is mine.
County jail buses are vessels containing black, brown and white bodies.
I am transported to another time where slave ships have morphed into slave buses.
Where slave fort is the new prison fort.
Where a whip, a rope, a chain utilized to punish, brutalize and control
are updated to tasers, pepper sprays and stun guns.
Commanded by men and women who wear green, the color of money, the color of greed.
I’m transported to another time when I’m poked and prodded.
Flanked by armed guards. Misdirected and directed to kneel, to be still.
And when the shackles come unclamped, I am not free to walk out of a prison, but into a cage, another fort where I sleep until I am transported to the plantation ,
again.

Read more writing and see more art by inmates at San Quentin here, here, here and here. San Quentin also has an official arts in corrections program, which you can read about here. And a new podcast called “Ear Hustle” is made inside the walls of San Quentin; listen to that here.

Nicola White is a London-based artist who has been working with inmates since 2015. Her other artwork is made from objects she finds while mudlarking along the banks of the River Thames. More of her work can be seen at www.tidelineart.com. More of Steve Champion’s poetry can be read here.

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