| | | | | | | | Poetry International followed up the month of January – which was filled with local poetry activities, such as the annual Dutch/Flemish Poetry Week, the announcement of the VSB Poetry Prize, and the launch of Dutch poet laureate Anne Vegter’s ‘Hello, Poetry!’ master classes – with a variety of international publications in February.
Our February features included a look back at Irish poet Billy Ramsell’s work for Poetry International Web, and a joint celebration of Chinese New Year and the 100th anniversary of the ‘New Poetry’ movement with a cluster of articles from editor Ming Di – on contemporary Chinese writers’ engagement with New Poetry and international poetry. We also published features from the USA and Netherlands; both resulted in new poet profiles and translations being added to our archive.
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| | | | | Poet and publisher Billy Ramsell reflects on his editorial work for the Poetry International website in a short essay, republished from his blog. The article includes a list of the Irish poets that were introduced to our archive during Ramsell’s tenure. | |  | |
| | | | | Continuing on January’s showcase of Ming Di’s ‘open renshi’ experiment, Poetry International published three other essays on contemporary Chinese poetry, focusing on the legacy of ‘New Poetry’. Publishing poems from 1917 onward, Hu Shi is considered the first writer of ‘New Poetry’ in China, and Ming Di writes about the historical avant-garde context, stylistic features and political spectrum of his work in ‘Re-reading Hu Shi’.
We also published highlights from the new anthology New Poetry from China 1916-2016, which includes short biographies and translated poems from many of the last century’s most important voices.
Lastly, Ming Di also republished ‘A Survey of Poets’ Favorites, Chinese & Western’ from her earlier volume New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry 1990-2012, giving us insight on the international poetry that shapes poetry in China today. | |  | |
| | | | | This month, our editors at the Poetry Foundation, Don Share and Holly Amos, featured three USA poets: Jamaal May, Frank Lima and Claudia Emerson.
Both Lima and Emerson passed away in the last couple years and leave behind an outstanding oeuvre, which we hope will gain a broader international readership. May’s first collection, Hum, was in 2013 to great acclaim; four poems from this book are now available in our archive.
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| | | | | Thanks to Thomas Möhlmann and the Dutch Foundation for Literature, we have introduced three Dutch poets – Vrouwkje Tuinman, Maarten van der Graaff and Ellen Deckwitz – to our archive, as well as updated the existing page of Tsead Bruinja. These profiles include new English translations of the poets’ recent writing. Tuinman, Van der Graaff, Deckwitz and Bruinja, along with the Belgian poets Maud Vanhauwaert and Charles Ducal, are accompanying Dutch poet laureate Anne Vegter on her ‘Hello Poetry!’ tour this spring, during which she stops in various cities in the Netherlands and Belgium to give workshops on reading and understanding poetry. | |  | |
| | | | | In February we launched our monthly column ‘Poetry 360’. During the first week of each month, Poetry International, guided by its various national editors, will bring readers the most noteworthy, informative and conversation-sparking content we’ve encountered on the web, all related to poetry around the world, our partner organizations, and the poets we’ve featured on our website or at our annual festival. Our latest installment can be found here. | |  | |
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