The Malibu Library is housing a new event: Caffeinated Verse. The event, which will feature coffee and poetry, is a three-month-long series at the library put on by the Poet Laureate Project. Malibu Poet Laureate Ricardo Means Ybarra will host Caffeinated Verse. Each event will feature one poet, followed by an open mic. The series … Continue reading Monthly Coffee and Poetry Comes to Malibu (via The Malibu Times)
Athens, Ohio. Kari Gunter-Seymour wasn’t always a poet. But when her son, a combat veteran, was serving in Iraq, she began writing as a form of therapy to keep herself from thinking of what could happen to him. “It was just a horrible time. The violence there was so profound; the death rate was so … Continue reading New poet laureate wants Athens to be known for its poetry (via The Post Athens)
Analy High senior Sarah Condello represented Sonoma County in the annual Poetry Out Loud contest last weekend in Sacramento, making it through two of the three rounds of the event that featured 46 students from across California. Condello became Sonoma County’s representative in the state contest after winning the local Poetry Out Loud event Feb. … Continue reading Analy High senior scores in state poetry contest (via Sonoma West Times & News)
One of the first rooms at the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam houses a collection of his self-portraits and a timeline of his life. During van Gogh’s first two years in Paris, he painted 28 self-portraits. A wall text states that they “were not meant to show what he was like, but were exercises in … Continue reading Fusing Language and Landscape in Poetry (via Hyperallergic)
Spoken word artist Too Black has a lot to say about being Black in America. But the story of how he first started as a poet might have as much to do with pizza delivery as with race. Too Black didn’t get a lot of tips when delivering pizzas on the Ball State University campus … Continue reading The global perspective of spoken word artist named, Too Black (via NUVO)
Amanda Robinson meets five Auckland writers who are stunningly good at a much-derided art form – spoken word poetry. Perhaps the most cringeworthy phrase in all the arts, the one that makes everyone recoil, including most poets, is “spoken word poetry”. But when it’s good, when a poem reading ends and you realise you’ve been … Continue reading The stars of Auckland’s spoken-word poetry scene (via The Spinoff)
Back in January, in honor of Valentine's Day, Morning Edition announced a love poem request line: Send us your memories of love and relationships, and author Kwame Alexander will find a poem that captures that feeling. We got more than 600 heartfelt, moving responses. You shared stories of being smitten and stories of betrayal; stories of parental love … Continue reading Poem For Your Thoughts: Your Memories Of Love, Captured In Poetry (via NPR)
When you hear a poem in an ad, especially a Super Bowl ad, it’s usually a safe and licensed choice lifted from the long-dead likes of Whitman or Frost. But Coca-Cola went a different direction with its Super Bowl ad, building it instead around a lovely and original poem about inclusiveness, identity, individuality and, yes, Coke. … Continue reading The Poet Behind Coke’s Super Bowl Spot Wants All of Us to Bring More Art to Advertising (via Adweek)
"He’s going to die any minute now,” a college classmate of mine said in 1994, when the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra had just turned eighty and we were eighteen. I asked if the poet was sick or something. “When people are eighty, it’s highly probable that they’ll die at any minute,” he replied. We were on … Continue reading Remembering Nicanor Parra, the Almost Immortal Chilean Poet (via The New Yorker)
There’s a photograph on the jacket of Ocean Vuong’s debut poetry collection of a small boy sitting on a wooden bench. Encircled by the arms of two women in summery cottons, he gazes steadily at the camera. The elegance is deceptive: it was taken when the family were living in poverty in a refugee camp … Continue reading War baby: The amazing story of Ocean Vuong, former refugee and prize-winning poet (via Guardian)
