By: Poetic Justice,
on 4/3/2015
Every year to celebrate Poetry Month, we select 32 poets to battle it out in a competition for the ages: Poetry Madness. This year, we decided to do things a little differently: instead of choosing the players ourselves, we asked four awesome poets — Saeed Jones, Andrea Gibson, Robert Lashley, and Hajara Quinn — to [...]
By: Maryann Yin,
on 4/7/2011
Poets & Writers has named James Richardson as the winner of this year’s $50,000 Jackson Poetry Prize.
Here’s more from the release: “Richardson’s most recent books are By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms (Copper Canyon, 2010), which was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award,Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms(Ausable, 2004), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays (Ausable, 2001).”
This award honors talented poets, giving them time and encouragement to write. Mark Doty, Rita Dove, and Gerald Stern served as this year’s judges.
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By: Beth Kephart ,
on 4/26/2009
Leave it to Jane Satterfield, the poet, memoirist, and teacher, to instruct me, again, in what I did not know but should have. We met at Bread Loaf, Jane and I. I've been learning from her ever since.
So that yesterday it was an email that contained, among other gifts, a link to this 2003 Robert McDowell interview with Rita Dove. The title? "Poet at the Dance: Rita Dove in Conversation." I probably don't need to say more.
Except that I will. I will quote from this terrific interview, and I will say, for myself, this: Last week, and the week before, something happened at the studio, a letting go (again, more) that enabled me, for the briefest moment, to skim the floor the way Dove describes such skimming. To trust so completely the dancers who kindly danced with me that I could also trust myself. I'd ruin things, of course. I'd break the spell. But for an instant I grasped what it must be to have the knowing of dance in one's bones. I grasped it. I wanted more.
From Rita Dove:
Poetry is a kind of dance already. Technically, there's the play of contemporary speech against the bass-line of the iambic, but there's also the expression of desire that is continually restrained by the limits of the page, the breath, the very architecture of the language--just as dance is limited by the capabilities of our physical bodies as well as by gravity. A dancer toils in order to skim the surface of the floor, she develops muscles most of us don't even know we have; but the goal is to appear weightless. A poet struggles to render into words that which is unsayable--the ineffable, that which is deeper than language--in the hopes that whatever words make the final cut will, in turn, strike the reader speechless.
Wow, what a wonderful analogy.
Perfect image!
Indeed, poetry is a dance.
Wonderful comparison!
Dance is poetry. Poetry is dance. :)
I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer. - Friedrich Nietzsche
I love the way she describes dance to which I would add that dance is one of the rare forms where you can compose a poem in the air without the aid of a pen. Your body draws the lines, thus turning the dancer into the ultimate painter, too and the result is a sketch whose lines get blurred and disappear as the performers move to another corner of the stage, but whose essence stays with you long after the lights are switched off and the curtains closed.
Many thanks for that interview, I enjoyed it thoroughly.
Greetings from London.
When it comes to poetry, I am a spectator...just as I am when I watch professionals dance The Lambada.*
...A.
* The Forbidden Dance