"our whole town were a picture postcard and our feelings were on vacation"

July 12, 2023

As we near the middle of summer, reflect on travel, open landscapes, and escape, both real and imagined, with these poems from Poets.org:

“If You Get There Before I Do” by Dick Allen
“Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape” by John Ashbery
“Looking for The Gulf Motel” by Richard Blanco
“Return to Florence” by Cyrus Cassells
“Vacation” by Rita Dove
“Amsterdam” by Safia Elhillo
“Sonnetesque” by Lynn Emanuel
“Souvenir” by Beth Ann Fennelly
“Love By The Sea #2” by Sadakichi Hartmann
“Air In The Epic” by Brenda Hillman
“Summer Vacation in the Subjunctive” by Ashley M. Jones
“Per aspera ad astra” by Huascar Medina
“Reflections” by Ameen Rihani

Revisit Academy Chancellor Carolyn Forché’s Blaney Lecture “Not Persuasion, But Transport: The Poetry of Witness” from October 25, 2013, at Poets Forum in New York City, in which she talks about her travels and the poetry of transport, activism, and witness. Read a full transcript of the lecture.

“The sonnet carries an idea of perfection for me. There are aspects of it that remind me of the sharp facets of a diamond, cut precisely at the right angle to gleam in a particular way. I also love that the sonnet can be both an argument and an oath of one’s enduring love.”

Read our latest enjambments interview with Oliver de la Paz on his collection, The Diaspora Sonnets, published this month through Liveright Publishing Corporation. De la Paz is the recipient of multiple Pushcart Prizes and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Artist Trust, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Read more about him, including a selection of poems from the collection:

“Diaspora Sonnet at the Feeders Before the Freeze”
“Diaspora Sonnet Imagining My Father’s Uncertainty and Nothing Else”
“Chain Migration II: On Negations and Substitutions”

more at poets.org

“We raked our fingers
through the sea bottom.

We stuffed coral with pearls
and molded it.”

From John Lee Clark’s poem, “The Mansion”

Clark, this month’s Poem-a-Day Guest Editor, is the author of the essay collection Where I Stand: On the Signing Community and My DeafBlind Experience (Handtype Press, 2014) and the poetry collection How to Communicate (W. W. Norton, 2022). He is a Braille instructor and Protactile trainer living in Hopkins, Minnesota. Read and listen to a Q&A with Clark about his Poem-a-Day curatorial approach.

more at poets.org

2024 First Book Award

Submissions for the 2024 Academy of American Poets First Book Award, judged by Victoria Chang, will be accepted online until September 1, 2023. The winner of the First Book Award will receive $5,000, publication by Graywolf Press, a six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbria, Italy, and distribution of their winning book to thousands of Academy members.

more at poets.org

#PoetryNearYou Pick of the Week

Join Poetry Coalition member Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in celebrating the launch of Rooja Mohassessy’s When Your Sky Runs Into Mine and The Book of Redacted Paintings by Arthur Kayzakian, alongside poets Jose Hernandez Diaz and Emily Jon Tobias. Friday, July 14, at 8 p.m. PDT/ 11 p.m. EDT, at the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center (681 Venice Blvd., Venice Beach, Los Angeles) and live on YouTube. Register for free here.

more at poets.org

Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C. is seeking a full-time director of marketing and communications.
University of California, Santa Barbara, is seeking a full-time visiting assistant professor in the classics department.
O, Miami Poetry Festival is accepting applications for its 2023–2024 poetry festival fellowship. Apply by July 22, 2023. Learn more here.

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

July 2: “A Prayer in Signs” by Alice Cornelia Jennings
July 3: “Power Out!” by Hayley Broadway
July 4: “Identity Voodoo” by Abiola Haroun
July 5: “Oak Skin” by Kris Ringman
July 6: “Douglass Pool” by Latif Askia Ba
July 7: “Necromancy for the Bitter” by Brian Koukol
July 8: “The Music of Beauty” by James Nack

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"our whole town were a picture postcard and our feelings were on vacation"

Older messages

"Awkwafina Clarifies That She’s Appreciating, Not Appropriating (in Black American Sentences)" by Simone Person

"Snow Globe of Denver" by The Cyborg Jillian Weise

"Marie Bashkirtseff Said" by Annie Charlotte Dalton

"The Music of Beauty" by James Nack

"Necromancy for the Bitter" by Brian Koukol

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