resolve

 
 
It’s New Year’s Eve. The clear vision of 2020 sits on the horizon. Whether or not you make formal resolutions, it seems worthwhile to begin a new poetry year with intent. So here are a few suggestions:

• Poetry travel. Whatever your destination, work poetry into your itinerary. Go to readings. Meet local poets. Spend a little time reading the work of poets who lived or worked in the area.
• Poetry retreat. Set aside a chunk of time — a long weekend, a week, a month — to focus on beginning, expanding, or completing a poetry project.
• Poetry salon. Invite poets and non-poets to share an evening of poetry at your home, office, place of worship, or an outdoor venue.
• Poetry hybrids. Add something to your poems — photography, film, music, found elements.
• Poetry garden. Incorporate poems into your garden on signs, stones, or sculpture.
• Read the poetry book you’ve been avoiding — the one that seems too long, too hard, too old, too out of fashion.
• Support poets. Buy books. Attend workshops.
• Mentor a young poet.
• Initiate correspondence with a poet you admire. Be specific about what you value in the poet’s work. Ask a question. Who knows? You may get an answer.

Want more poetry resolutions? Here’s our list from December 30, 2015.

Happy New Year!

funny stuff

You deserve a smile.

• Cartoon stock
• Nome, a Sonnet, by Lauren Haldeman
• Comics Kingdom
• Tom Gauld
• Ink Brick
• Grant Snider

. . . . .
image by Grant Snider

video poem

With special thanks to Bellingham BTV Channel 10, a number of the 2019 Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest winning poets were able to record their poems for broadcast. Today we feature Porter Chesbrough reading “Going.”

Best-of, number 5

This may be the last best-of post for 2019, or maybe not:

• LitHub
• LitHub (best of the decade!)
• The New York Times
• WBUR (best of Boston)

Happy reading!

The New Yorker’s 2019 poetry

The New Yorker offers an online collection of 25 poems printed in the magazine during 2019. You can read most of them on this page and/or click on the poem title for recordings and a poet bio.

Want more? Go to The New Yorker’s 1310-page (to date) complete poetry archive dating back to 1925.

Seattle City of Lit list

Here’s a new resource, just out from Seattle City of Literature: the Seattle Lit Community Catalog. The searchable online catalog offers (to date) 180 listings from Seattle’s books and writing communities. The geographic boundaries extend somewhat beyond the city limits (Tacoma, Bellevue). (See FAQs.) Browse them all, or enter a search term (e.g., books, poetry, conference, writers, publishers, etc.). Add yours.

merry & happy

Have a very fine Christmas,
whatever, wherever, however you celebrate
and even if you don’t.

. . . . .
J.I. Kleinberg collage

as the fur flies

Perhaps you’ve heard: the movie version of “Cats” is here. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical opened on Broadway in 1982 and is still running, so what could go wrong?

Apparently, more than you’d expect. Rotten Tomatoes, which gives the film 17% on the Tomatometer (as of this writing), says, “Despite its fur-midable cast, this Cats adaptation is a clawful mistake that will leave most viewers begging to be put out of their mew-sery.” Me-ow!

Somewhat hastily released to make scheduled screenings, the film is being reissued with some quick fixes. Here’s Louis Bayard’s commentary in The New York Times.

As the fur flies, it bears repeating that the inspiration for all this drama is a book of rhyming poetry: Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot. If you don’t have a copy on your shelf and the library copy is checked out, you can read it online at Project Gutenberg.

poetry on film

At a time of year when the word home has a particular resonance, we invite you to view the lovely poem/film “Home” by spoken-word poet Erin Fornoff and director/cinematographer David Knox.

More poetry on film here.

on poetry

“Some days I can’t get an idea, and I think, ‘Man, I’m just washed up,’ but it’s just a mood.”
Jean-Michel Basquiat
(December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988)

. . . . .
photo