Today, we are pleased to bring you a pair of poems from the latest issue of The Agriculture Reader, which encompasses The New Music, a collection of new poems from Greg Purcell, as well as a host of poetry and fiction from a number of other writers. The launch party for this issue will take place on April 18, 7 pm at Berl’s Poetry Shop, and will feature Greg Purcell, Leopoldine Core, Polly Bresnick, and Alec Niedenthal.
Tommy Pico is best known for his poetry and his work with the fantastic literary venture known as birdsong. Now, he’s making a move into technology with Absent Mindr, a hybrid of poetry chapbook and smartphone app, blending text and audio. The poems themselves are described on the project’s website as “articulating a terrain of contemporary American Indian queer identity that extends from Pico’s roots on the Viejas Indian Reservation of the Kumeyaay Nation, into the hipster haven of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, […]
There are many ways to write about sports, but the Italian writer Gabriele Tinti has opted for a seemingly unlikely blend of form and subject. His recent collection All over takes as its focus boxing, with poems focusing on the likes of Arturo Gatti and Arthur Cravan. I caught up with Tinti via email to learn more about evoking the rhythms of boxing, the process of translation, his friendship with Burt Young, and more.
The poet Bill Knott has died, and this time it seems like it’s not a hoax. He was 74 years old and “the closest thing the American poetry establishment has to a rebel,” publishing vibrant work for decades and teaching his students awe and disappointment. Knott’s poetry was remarkably alive and inventive, surreal and controlled; he could surprise you with what his poems could do, what they could tell you about yourself. He was angry, disappointed, and critical, but he […]
Can poetry provide any consolation for the frigid horrors and endless annoyances of this Polar Vortex? Likely not unless you burn the pages for heat…but it can offer engagement with the peculiar beauty of this benighted season or distraction for those unable to will away the cold. For the most part poets assume two postures towards winter: anger or awe. Winter, on the whole elicits depictions of its ferocity, its ruthless, merciless winds, frozen temperatures, and strange powder, and depictions […]
I’m rarely moved to immediate action, but for I went right away for John Mortara’s “Small Creatures / Wide Field” from The Newer York Press. Hypertext madness in a broken-down house, with odd mythological creature inserts and cheeky choices? Yep. With a killer design on the beta version of Creativist, the sibling to Atavist? ALL IN. John Mortara is a writer, poet and teacher who now lives in Massachusetts. We both went to the same small, regional college for grad […]
Looking at the long history of autumn imagery in poetry one gets the sense that this season, perhaps more than others, served as a sort of initiation, or test for artists, a canvas to push the boundaries of their imagination. Whether because the season engenders this ancient devotion (it does), or because the tradition itself demands some gift or sacrifice to the Lords of autumn (it should), it’s hard to tell, but that tradition contains a gluttony of beauty trying […]
Classic video games might not seem like traditional fodder for a book of poems, but the surprise of it seems to be what Wisconsin-based poet BJ Best revels in. His new collection of prose poems, But Our Princess is in Another Castle, has just been released by Rose Metal Press and takes inspiration from such vintage arcade and home video games as Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Super Mario Brothers, and The Legend of Zelda. And while the focus of the book […]