PIYP Day

To wrap up National Poetry Month, today, Thursday, April 30, 2020, is Poem in Your Pocket Day. The Academy of American Poets has a free viewable/downloadable/printable 62-page PDF that includes poems (American, Canadian, public domain), suggestions for ways to celebrate, and instructions for How to Create a Folded Swan!

on poetry

C. P. Cavafy
(April 29, 1863 – April 29, 1933)

The Windows

In these dark rooms where I live out
empty days, I circle back and forth
trying to find the windows.
It will be a great relief when a window opens.
But the windows are not there to be found —
or at least I cannot find them. And perhaps
it is better that I don’t find them.
Perhaps the light will prove another tyranny.
Who knows what new things it will expose? 

. . . . .
photo
poem

and another…

Here’s another film for your list: “Before Night Falls.” Based on the autobiography of Cuban poet/novelist/playwright Reinaldo Arenas and directed by Julian Schnabel, the film stars Javier Bardem.

for your list

Since you may be streaming more films than usual, and since we like to keep tabs on poetry movies and somehow had not previously mentioned it, “Kill Your Darlings” is a 2013 film starring Daniel Radcliffe as Allen Ginsberg and Dane DeHaan as Lucien Carr. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 77%.

The name of the film, by the way, is a phrase attributed to William Faulkner, though it’s credited to him primarily in collections of quotations. In On the Art of Writing (1916), Arthur Quiller-Couch said, “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetuate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — wholeheartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”

congrats!

Congratulations to Andrew Shattuck McBride, Jill McCabe Johnson, and the many fine writers whose work is included in For Love of Orcas, which has just received a prestigious Nautilus Book Award in the category Animals and Nature.

Congratulations, also, to Clyde Ford, whose book Think Black won a Nautilus Gold Award in the Social Change and Social Justice category, and to Eric Scigliano, whose book The Big Thaw was awarded Special Honors as 2019 Nautilus Grand Prize Winner.

See the complete list of Nautilus Book Award winners.

noteworthy

If, in your weeks of isolation, you’ve managed to burn through the poetry books on your shelves, here are more, from various reliable sources:

• Bustle: National Poetry Month required reading
• CBC: 29 works of Canadian poetry
• The Guardian: the best recent poetry
• League of Canadian Poets: The Many Gendered Other Reading List
• The New York Times: new this week

Happy reading!

press here

Streaming live from print shops around the world every Saturday: United in Isolation. Find the link on Facebook. It starts at 19:00 CEST (that’s 10:00 a.m. Pacific), and most of the videos should remain viewable for at least a while. (Visit Facebook to see the video of Expedition Press from the first week’s video program.)

The programmers, who are making nothing (except great connections) from their effort, say, “Our goal is to unite letterpress printers, both the experienced and the newcomers by building an inspirational video archive documenting letterpress stories from all over the world.”

The lineup for Saturday, April 25, 2020, is:
Peter Duffin, Animales de Lorca, VALENCIA, SPAIN
Judith Berliner, Full Circle Press, NEVADA CITY, CA, USA
Aleksandra Stępień, WARSAW, POLAND
Ane Thon Knutsen, Graphic Design, OSLO, NORWAY

Each press will present for about 15 to 20 minutes.

thank you, Amanda Gorman!

The first-ever Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, Amanda Gorman, strolls through the currently closed Los Angeles Central Public Library to share a powerful poem of hope. Watch her on CBS This Morning and visit the poet’s website to see her impressive accomplishments.

. . . . .
thanks to Holly Harris and Luther Allen for the suggestion

Earth Day

found poem © j.i. kleinberg
Happy Earth Day!

just add color

Tired of jigsaw puzzles? At The New York Public Library website, RaeLyn Grogan suggests pairings of poems and ready-to-color illustrations. For example, the illustration above is by Edmund J. Sullivan, from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Grogan suggests pairing it with a reading of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward Fitzgerald (available, of course, from the NYPL, or on Project Gutenberg). The illustrations can be downloaded as PDFs and printed.