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poetry

  • SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
    3/31/2022

    Over a River Strangely Rosy: Reading Poetry in Wartime

    by Joan Neuberger

    "It’s my job to explain things about Russia and its various incarnations of empire. I know how to do that — I’ve been doing it for a long time. But, in this moment, analysis seems to me to be somehow incomprehensible and profoundly unsatisfying."

  • SOURCE: Boston Globe
    1/5/2022

    Poetry and the Struggle for Justice

    by Paul Lewis

    "During the antebellum period, newspapers and magazines featured poems that advanced a wide range of causes, including women’s rights, peace, and temperance" – and abolition.

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    4/8/2012

    A Poem That Shows How to Remember the Holocaust

    by James Loeffler and Leora Bilsky

    "Lemkin’s anguished text also explains why the world had already begun to forget the Holocaust. Genocide represents more than a large-scale physical assault on human bodies, he suggests; it is also an attack on the very existence of minority cultures. In a genocide, books are burned and memories are extinguished."

  • SOURCE: Public Books
    3/16/2021

    The Poetics of Abolition

    by Manu Samriti Chander

    Two new books on Black literary culture in the nineteenth century cast new light on how writers imagined freedom outside of the definition created by the European enlightenment. 

  • SOURCE: CNN
    2/1/2021

    Amanda Gorman's Success Stirred A Bleak Undercurrent

    by Manisha Sinha

    Some critical response to young poet Amanda Gorman's Inaugural reading echoes the racist dismissal and condescenscion contemporaries leveled at the founding-era work of Phillis Wheatley.

  • SOURCE: NYT
    9-25-17

    In a Lost Essay, a Glimpse of an Elusive Poet and Slave

    George Moses Horton's “Individual Influence” is interesting not just for his lofty, abstract words about the primacy of divine influence, but for the context in which they were preserved: in a scrapbook of material relating to a prominent scholar who was forced out of the university after publicly opposing slavery.

  • SOURCE: Mosaic Magazine
    4-3-14

    The Walter Benjamin Brigade

    by Walter Laqueur

    How an obscure and maddeningly opaque German Jewish intellectual became a thriving academic industry.

  • SOURCE: Guardian (UK)
    3-27-13

    WWI poem wins UK poetry award

    A poem inspired by her late mother's stories of the first world war, which has drawn comparisons with Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, has won the poetry journal Agenda's editor Patricia McCarthy the National Poetry Competition.McCarthy, who has published several poetry collections of her own, beat 13,040 other entries to win the anonymously-judged prize. Her winning poem, "Clothes that escaped the Great War", tells of the plodding carthorse who would take boys away to war, and then return, later, with just their clothes. "These were the most scary, my mother recalled: clothes / piled high on the wobbly cart, their wearers gone," writes McCarthy.

  • SOURCE: BBC News
    2-26-13

    Lost Rudyard Kipling poems published

    More than 50 unpublished poems by Rudyard Kipling have been discovered by a US scholar.Thomas Pinney found the manuscripts in a number of places including a Manhattan House that was being renovated and among the papers of a former head of the Cunard Line.Pinney described it as a "tremendously exciting time for scholars and fans".The poems will be published alongside 1,300 others in the first ever complete edition of Kipling's verse on 7 March...