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The Poetry (and Politics) of Tweets
I shouldn’t admit this, but my introduction to tweeting was the eighteen-day Egyptian revolution. Of course, I’d heard of Twitter, but had dismissed it as of no interest to me. Yet, as with so many of my disdainful preconceptions, experience forced me to change my view. As I surfed TV channels and internet news sites nearly hourly during those eighteen days, I noticed that all the newscasters were at some point reading tweets from Egyptians in Tahrir Square. Naturally, I was gripped....
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You Will Always Long
Of the four birds lunching in my Tucson back garden, the one that keeps grabbing my attention is the one pecking at the gravel ground-cover instead of at the seeds in the bird-feeder. She (I’m guessing “she’ from the drab-gray body, though I don’t recognize the species) has an alarmingly long curved beak that comes to a dagger-like point. The beak looks to me more like a....
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Between the Heartbeats
Edward Hirsch’s Poet’s Choice is not a new book; this collection of his weekly columns from Washington Post Book World came out in 2006. But it’s a book I keep returning to, so I want to make sure that you poetry lovers out there know about it. I keep returning to this book because I love catching Hirsch’s enthusiasm for the worldwide body of contemporary and recent poetry that he introduces his readers to. Yes, the famous names are there....
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Poetry is Like...a Large Foam Dinosaur
In high school, when I first began approaching poetry as a craft to be honed, I assigned myself writing exercises on metaphor. My theory was this: a poem can be written that compares love to any other animal, vegetable, or mineral. The unlikelier the comparison, the more profitable the exercise. For example, love is a claw-footed bathtub. Love is a supermarket circular. Love is a hand grenade (that one’s easy). A similar claim can be made about poetry, that it lends itself easily to many, um, similes. A poem is like a rosebud, like Russian nesting dolls, like anything small and compact that contains multitudes....
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Advent in Arizona
Having lived all my life in the Northeast, I associate the liturgical seasons with certain weather. Advent is snow-blown and dark, as is Christmas. Ash Wednesday ranges from hard-packed ice to melting-snow mud; Easter ranges from the chilly beginning of brightness to sunny warmth and the first green shoots. Wintering this year in southern Arizona, I’m having trouble grasping that Advent is here. Brilliantly sunlit skies and daytime temperatures in the 60s: this can’t be Advent....
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Current Issue
Issue 72
Memoir by Lauren Winner, Poetry by James Harpur, Art by Guy Chase and Adrian Wiszniewski
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