Frank Bidart
is an illusion. It’s true, it’s human nature to try to
unbend

what for centuries human nature—with great wisdom, great
pain—bent.

What had to be built we knew instinctively must be built
without

asking permission of the ignorant doing the building. But natural
pity

soon ends
when what pity unleashes is CHAOS, is

horror.
The cauldron that has always been the source

of force
we have learnt slowly, in time, how to control. Have learnt to

enslave
(you would harshly say) more subtly. More, you would say, cunningly.

Think the American Civil War,—
. . . followed by a century of Jim Crow.

If you do not become a master
you are a slave.

        •

The voice of What had to be built leaves certain
words bodiless. The Lost Cause, strange

fruit, was lost, for us, in a song about lacerated flesh.

When a master stares at himself in the future

what he fears is that the world will do to him what
he did to the world when he was the world..
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Color photograph of a page from one of Anne Carson's artist's books
"Walking Backward Into Myth"

"We could say of Carson’s inventive translations and iterations of Euripides: he may be long dead, but he’s alive here, and so too, vividly, is Carson. She has worked with Euripides’ text, with the contemporary context, with wit and humor and intertextual tendrils, with 'the line' in many of its forms, with rhyme and wordplay, with drawing and space in the margins, to 'seize the invisible and give it purchase.'”

via HOPSCOTCH TRANSLATION
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Cover of Wanda Coleman's pamphlet, Art in the Court of the Blue Fag, from Black Sparrow Press
What Sparks Poetry:
Dana Levin on Wanda Coleman's "The Woman and Her Thang"

"Standing at the magazine rack at Beyond Baroque, I opened Coleman’s chapbook at random and read: 'She kept it in a black green felt-lined box.' Ten monosyllabs—how I loved saying them, each one a kind of floating stone in the mouth—introducing the speaker’s 'thang': seductive and dangerous, wreaking havoc on her love life."
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18th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival
January 10-15, 2022

We are pledged to create an extraordinary week of virtual poetry workshops and events for you in the safety of your home.
 
Workshop Faculty: Kim Addonizio, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Chard deNiord, Mark Doty, Yona Harvey, John Murillo, Matthew Olzmann and Diane Seuss. One-On-One Conferences with Lorna Blake, Sally Bliumis Dunn, Nickole Brown, Jessica Jacobs, and Angela Narciso Torres. A special Craft Talk by Kwame Dawes. Special Guest Poet: Yusef Komunyakaa. Poet-at-Large: Aimee Nezhukumatathil.
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