"This Little Book of Poetry Made History"
"There is a mystery about a little book of poetry that was published in the 1770s and is now being sold at an online auction in New York. Where was it from the time it first went into print until the 1940s? There is no mystery about the book itself....The poems were the work of Phillis Wheatley, a formerly enslaved teenager, who has been enjoying renewed attention lately, thanks in part to a recent biography that said that Poems on Various Subjects was the first book in English by a person of African descent."
via THE NEW YORK TIMES |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Claire Wahmanholm on "Deathbed Dream with Extinction List"
"I love writing abecedarians. I love that they make me reach for words I would not ordinarily reach for; I love that they gesture at abundance without exhausting it, that they leave more unsaid than said. I love that they open the doors of my existing knowledge and invite me into the dictionary, the thesaurus, the encyclopedia, any number of archives. I love how democratic they are: even the trickiest, least common letter must be used, and the heavy hitters may only appear once." |
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