Category: Poetry

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Dial-A-Poem, a Very Analog Project of the ’60s, Goes Global

As interactive, technology-based artworks go, Dial-A-Poem is closer to Alexander Graham Bell than it is to ChatGPT. The brainchild of the artist and poet John Giorno (1936-2019), the project officially kicked off in early 1969, with six jury-rigged phones and answering machines housed at the Architectural League of New York, all connected to the same phone number and each set up with an audiotape that would play once a call came in. Anyone could call the 212 number and hear a randomly assigned poem — though sometimes the recording was a piece of music, a song or a speech — usually introduced by Giorno himself and then read aloud by writers and other cultural luminaries like John Ashbery, William S. Burroughs and Anne Waldman. Read more

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RFK Jr. Said Autistic Children Will Never Write a Poem. He Ignores the Rich History of Neurodivergent Poets and Writers.

There’s a remarkable corpus of poetry written by autistic people, who have also written novels, plays and virtually any kind of literature imaginable. The Autism Books by Autistic Authors Project catalogs 133 collections of poetry authored by autistic individuals, which represents only a fraction of the work created by autistic poets throughout history. Read more

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The Best American Poetry of the 21st Century (So Far)

No list can be comprehensive or infallible, but we did not approach this one lightly. After considering various criteria, we landed on work that felt consequential. We were looking for poetry that had struck its readers, for whatever reasons, as unforgettable, enduring, and influential: maybe because it came as an unexpected gift from a friend or loved one, or in the form of a classroom discovery; maybe because it reframed the world in such a way that culture or society felt foundationally shaken. Maybe it was just because, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, it takes the top of your head off. Read more

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Jamaican Poet Jason Allen-Paisant’s ‘Self-Portrait as Othello’ Wins TS Eliot Prize

In Self-Portrait As Othello, Allen-Paisant draws a connection between Shakespeare’s Othello, a Moorish general who is often treated as an outsider in Venice, and the experiences of Black immigrants today. His poems move between Jamaica, Prague, Paris and Oxford among other places, and he weaves in lines of French, Jamaican patois, Italian and German. Read more

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Kimiko Hahn Wins $100,000 Award from Poetry Foundation

Cornelius Eady, Toi Derricotte and Kimiko Hahn are among this year’s winners of awards from the Poetry Foundation, which announced some of the poetry world’s most lucrative prizes. Hahn, a faculty member of Queens College in New York City whose books include “The Unbearable Heart” and “Earshot,” won the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement. Read more

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