Poetry Wednesday – “Parting the Red Sea” by Ellie Schoenfeld

From Ellie Schoenfeld’s collected poems The Dark Honey If someone asks me what I believe in, I say, “tulips.”

Read Full Post »

another attempt at making a list poem come to life

I’ve been working on various incarnations of this list poem for three years. The idea was good, but it’s been flat and flat and too long and even more too long. Then today, catching up on the activities of the amazing Israeli group Zochrot/Remembering I found a question that made me try again to breathe [...]

Read Full Post »

Poetry Wednesday – a new form!

From a writer I met at dinner on Monday night, a form I’ve never seen. She calls it a “haiku chase”—a series of interlocked haiku, with the third line one becoming the first line of the next and the last line of the very last one repeating the very first first line. It’s like a [...]

Read Full Post »

Poetry Monday

Over at Roaring Out, it’s Poetry Monday, featuring a poem by Tamara Madison from Wild Domestic Watch the video here

Read Full Post »

Me and Martha

I began the Martha Courtot section of This Frenzy accidentally—there was a poem of hers that I loved, “Lesbian Bears,” and hadn’t been able to find for years and years. When her family and friends issued her collected poems after her death I finally had the poem again so posted it. There was nothing about [...]

Read Full Post »

Announcing – Poetry Wednesdays!

Because I love my friend Michelle’s feature “Poetry Mondays,” in which she reads aloud a poem she loves, I’m announcing Poetry Wednesdays, starting with this piece by Mary Oliver. Enjoy! And if you should be moved to start a Poetry Tuesday (or Folksong Tuesday or Great Choral piece Tuesday), let me know and I’ll post [...]

Read Full Post »

Poetry Monday by Michelle Ovalle – Neruda (or On How a Love Poem is Done)

From my friend and sister-poet over at Roaring Out, her reading in Spanish and English of Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet 17. Enjoy! Neruda Sonnet 17

Read Full Post »

Novels vs. Poems

more from Sarah Maquire’s essay “‘Singing About the Dark Times’: Poetry and Conflict”, this time on the difference between the novel and poetry: But it is only in the past three hundred years, initially in Europe and then later in its colonies, that prose, specifically in the form of the novel, has taken over from [...]

Read Full Post »

“that shock of recognition” – more on poetry as liturgy

Saturday was the 5th anniversary of Fringes, the feminist havurah I co-lead. We use contemporary poetry as the words we pray, which works so beautifully. I’ve learned a lot about how to choose poems that work as liturgy, such as using poems with more direct syntax, or ones that more visual imagery and less literary [...]

Read Full Post »

Translating from a Language You Don’t Know

A wonderful interview with sister-poet Rebecca Howell about her translation “Hagar Before the Occupation / Hagar After the Occupation”, by Amal al-Jubouri, posted originally at Arabic Literature (In English): Translating From a Language You Don’t Know

Read Full Post »