Poem-a-Day - "Unmoved — she notes the Chariots"

February 28, 2023

Celebrate Women’s History Month in March with a selection of poems from Poets.org:

“Sugar” by Tina Chang
“Batter My Heart, Transgender’d God” by Meg Day
“Equivalents” by Mónica de la Torre
“The Soul selects her own Society (303)” by Emily Dickinson
“Girls On the Town, 1946” by Rita Dove
“For the Candlelight” by Angelina Weld Grimké
“What It Must Have Felt Like” by Ada Limón
“Ballad” by Sonia Sanchez
“Girl Saints” by Emily Skaja
“Urning” by Layli Long Soldier
“That All, Everyone, Each in Being” by Mai Der Vang
“On Virtue” by Phillis Wheatley

“The women poets of the Harlem Renaissance faced one of the classic American double-binds: they were black, and they were female, during an epoch when the building of an artistic career for anyone of either of those identities was a considerable challenge.”

Anthony Walton, from his essay, Double-Bind: Three Women of the Harlem Renaissance, on Jessie Redmon Fauset, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Georgia Douglas Johnson, and the challenges they faced as Black, female poets.

more at poets.org

Watch M. L. Smoker read “Another Attempt at Rescue.” This is the fourth 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.

Now through July 2023, the Poetry Coalition, an alliance of nearly thirty independent poetry organizations across the United States, will launch “and so much lost you’d think / beauty had left a lesson: Poetry & Grief,” the coalition’s seventh annual programming initiative. For this collaborative effort, the organizations will offer a series of in-person and virtual programs that explore this year’s chosen theme.

The Academy of American Poets, a member of the Poetry Coalition, will publish five micro-essays by renowned poets on poems that helped them better understand or process grief. The essays and subject poems will be featured weekly in March, in the Academy Newsletter and on Poets.org.

more at poets.org

Join us next month, March 23, at 4 p.m. PST / 7 p.m. EST, for the 2023 Blaney Lecture on contemporary poetics by Academy Chancellor Patricia Smith. This virtual event is free to attend with registration. ASL interpretation will be provided. A Q&A session will follow the lecture.

The Blaney Lecture was created in memory of former Academy of American Poets Board member Dr. Dorothy Gulbenkian Blaney, past president of Cedar Crest College and champion of women and education, by a gift from her estate.

more at poets.org

#PoetryNearYou Pick of the Week

Check out our #PoetryNearYou Pick of the Week: Purdue University’s Black Cultural Center presents Nikki Giovanni, who will discuss her life as an artist, her creative process, and how she has used literature to advance civil rights. Tuesday, February 28, at 7 p.m. at Loeb Playhouse in the Stewart Center (128 Memorial Mall Drive, West Lafayette, IN). Register here.

more at poets.org

“I said love sonnets, but there’s different kinds of love in these poems. There’s person-to-person love, of course, but there’s a wider love of community; there’s a wider love of family. There’s un-love in some of these poems; there’s the struggle for love. And I’m very, very happy about the way that the poets interpreted this.”

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

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

Olivet College in Olivet, Mississippi, is seeking an assistant professor of writing.
The Ivy Bookshop in Baltimore, Maryland, is seeking a full-time director of operations. Send a cover letter and resume to staffing@theivybookshop.com by March 15.

Revisit last week’s Poem-a-Day selections with us on Poets.org:

February 19: “Plácido’s Farewell to His Mother” by Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés
February 20: “her aint even at de funeral” by avery r. young
February 21: “Self-Care” by Faylita Hicks
February 22: “Boihood” by Jari Bradley
February 23: “Neoteric Kama No Sutra” by Frank X Walker
February 24: “October Sonnet’” by Adrian Matejka
February 25: “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem” by Helene Johnson

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Poem-a-Day - "Unmoved — she notes the Chariots"

Older messages

"No Room to Form" by John S. Blake

"Indeterminacy" by Charif Shanahan

"Slow through the Dark" by Paul Laurence Dunbar

"Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem" by Helene Johnson

"October Sonnet" by Adrian Matejka

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