"I have found peacefulness somewhere at last"

February 21, 2023
Continue to celebrate Black History Month by reading more work published in Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Black Poets of the Twenties (Harper & Brothers, 1927), edited by Countee Cullen, as well as other poems from Poets.org: 

Your Songs” by Gwendolyn Bennett 
Close Your Eyes!” by Arna Bontemps
October XXIX, 1795” by William Stanley Braithwaite
Return” by Sterling A. Brown
Evening” by Olivia Ward Bush-Banks 
Yet Do I Marvel” by Countee Cullen 
A Triviality” by Waring Cuney  
The Mask” by Clarissa Scott Delaney 
Your Hands” by Angelina Weld Grimké 
Homesick Blues” by Langston Hughes 
The Dreams of the Dreamer” by Georgia Douglas Johnson 
Trees at Night” by Helene Johnson 
“To the extent that the choice to dig in one’s heels and survive at all costs is a human trait, I think we can locate it in every culture. The blues is just one place. Certainly, as a person of African American descent, this is particularly familiar to me. But I think humans possess the resilience and the creativity to reinvent themselves in response to nearly any situation, and to reflect upon and celebrate the very process.”

Academy Chancellor Tracy K. Smith, in conversation with Chancellor Emerita, Elizabeth Alexander. Read the full interview, The Line Between Two Worlds, on Poets.org. 
more at poets.org
“I had never seen my father cry before that moment. And I think he understood the power of words and the power of poetry in that moment of documenting this incredible historical moment for the state of South Carolina.”

Read and listen to an interview with Academy Chancellor Nikky Finney from PBS Newshour as part of their arts and culture series, CANVAS. 

“Poet and educator Ama Codjoe has been selected as the Guggenheim’s 2023 Poet-in-Residence, and she is in the midst of planning programming slated to begin this spring. Codjoe intends to use her residency to explore sensory poetics, ‘how poetry can also be a primary experience using our other senses: touch, smell, taste,’ she says. Her work will be anchored by Audre Lorde’s words: ‘I feel, therefore I can be free.’”

Read more about the Guggenheim Poet-in-Residence program, which was launched in collaboration with the Academy of American Poets, and Codjoe’s plans for the year ahead here

“I kept coming back to [Gwendolyn Brooks’s] poem, ‘To Prisoners,’ where I think, in her mind, she was thinking about the mindset of actual prisoners and trying to get them to think beyond their bars. But I think of it as prisoners of conscience, prisoners of fear, prisoners of racism, of education, anything, you know. That we can close our minds and see no way out, that we can be prisoners of so many things.”


Read and listen to our Poem-a-Day interview with Patricia Smith, author of Unshuttered (Northwestern University Press, 2023) and Incendiary Art (Northwestern University Press, 2017), winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry. Read and listen to Smith discuss the Poem-a-Day curatorial approach and more on Poets.org
more at poets.org
Watch Sean Hill read Rafael Campo’s poem “Canción de las Mujeres: Some Uses for the Moon.” This is the third film in Above Strands of Earth: Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation at Tippet Rise, a film series produced in collaboration with Tippet Rise Art Center and the Academy of American Poets. Directed by Matthew Thompson and shot at Tippet Rise Art Center. Learn more at https://www.brinkerhoffpoetry.org.

Request your free copy of the official National Poetry Month poster in time for the April 2023 celebration!

The 2023 poster was designed by Marc Brown, creator of the popular Arthur series. The artwork incorporates an excerpted line from the poem “The Carrying” by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón

more at poets.org

 #PoetryNearYou Pick of the Week

Join McNally Jackson Bookstore in celebrating Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s new collection, Quiet, with Academy Chancellor Natalie Diaz and Safiya Sinclair. Tuesday, February 28, at 6 p.m. EST. Register for this virtual event here

more at poets.org
Watch Joseph Drew Lanham, Poet Laureate Fellow and poet laureate of Edgefield, South Carolina, as he discusses how he’s inspired by the natural world. 
Revisit last week’s Poem-a-Day selections with us on Poets.org:

February 12: “Challenge” by Sterling A. Brown
February 13: “Love Poem Attempt 3/?”  by Taylor Byas
February 14: “Wetland” by francine j. harris
February 15: “An Act of Love” by Tommye Blount
February 16: “St. Valentine, Bishop of Terni, probably beheaded, was also the patron saint of asthma, beekeepers, and epilepsy, so he might have said” by Lynne Thompson
February 17: “The Lose Your Mother Suite VI. ‘across the surface of my studied speech’” by Remica Bingham-Risher
February 18: “The Eyes of My Regret” by Angelina Weld Grimké
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