70---> kathryn & hogan

Name: Kathryn Julian

Hometown: Birmingham, Alabama 

Current town: Northampton, MA 

Occupation: Visiting Professor

What does poetry mean to you? 

As a historian, I can’t help but think of poetry first and foremost as a poignant expression of the lived experiences of people past and present. Poetry reflects the textures and nuances of particular places and temporalities. Poems relay myths and truths of the collective and individual human past: the medieval mystic’s prayer, the red clay and hot summers of adolescence, the present earthy chill of New England spring. Poetry is collective memory and collective forgetting, the extraordinary and the mundane. Poems are a resource that help us understand the complexities and contradictions of being human.

Favorite Poet:

I'm currently working my way through Linda Hogan's collections of poetry. Her poems highlight the alliance between ecological activism and spiritual awareness. Hogan's poetry encourages me to think about the intersections of culture, the environment, eco-feminism, theology, and the every day. Her words create a sense of urgency to live within nature. 

“To Be Held”

by Linda Hogan

To be held

by the light

was what I wanted,

to be a tree drinking the rain,

no longer parched in this hot land.

To be roots in a tunnel growing

but also to be sheltering the inborn leaves

and the green slide of mineral

down the immense distances

into infinite comfort

and the land here, only clay,

still contains and consumes

the thirsty need

the way a tree always shelters the unborn life

waiting for the healing

after the storm

which has been our life.

________________________________________________________________________________

Kathryn Julian is a historian based in western Massachusetts. She writes and reads about sacred spaces, ecology, and religion.

69---> nordette & brooks

Name: Nordette N. Adams

Residence: New Orleans, Louisiana

Age: Hacker-evasive

Occupation: Instructional Designer

What does poetry mean to you?

Poetry is a force that possesses my body now and then and has done so since I was four years old. To steal a bit from Emily, poetry “is a thing with feathers,” and, for me,  a thing that swims in the sea / that sits with you at the bottom / when you’re sunken in misery, / or you can sit with it / as its verses sit with you, / expanding your mind and mood / until it’s that thing you do.

Favorite Poet:

Gwendolyn Brooks is still my favorite because her earlier work appears simple, but it’s not. Her work is sly with depth. I wish I were as gifted and linguistically clever. She was also a listener who was willing to learn from others, even those younger than she. She aspired to speak about more than herself in her work and was successful in doing so. What good is an insular, inaccessible poet? Also, I’ve read that she was generous, always willing to help and promote other poets.

One of my favorite poems of hers is “A Lovely Love,” which I recorded for Valentine’s Day for a Poetry Foundation promotion, but I also adore “VII. I love those little booths at Benvenuit’s” and “The Anniad.” Let me stop before I list her entire oeuvre.

"A Lovely Love"

by Gwendolyn Brooks

Let it be alleys. Let it be a hall
Whose janitor javelins epithet and thought
To cheapen hyacinth darkness that we sought
And played we found, rot, make the petals fall.
Let it be stairways, and a splintery box
Where you have thrown me, scraped me with your kiss,
Have honed me, have released me after this
Cavern kindness, smiled away our shocks.
That is the birthright of our lovely love
In swaddling clothes. Not like that Other one.
Not lit by any fondling star above.
Not found by any wise men, either. Run.
People are coming. They must not catch us here
Definitionless in this strict atmosphere.

________________________________________________________________________________

Nordette N. Adams is a published poet, fiction writer, and journalist. She grew up in New Orleans, moved away at 20, and returned in 2007. Listen to a recent interview with Adams, Andy Young, and Julie Kane on Sue Larson’s radio show, The Reading Life, WWNO.

68---> kelly grace & smith

Name: Kelly Grace Thomas

Hometown: Long Beach Island, NJ

Current City: Los Angeles, CA

Occupation: Manager of Education and Pedagogy for Get Lit- Words Ignite, as well as poet, editor, and author

What does poetry mean to you? 

Poetry, for me, is distilled into two entities, emotion or experience. We turn to poetry to wrangle or wrestle with emotions. We also turn to poetry to understand experience. To examine and create conversation with what life has give us. Ocean Vuong said, “Poets survive by looking.” Poetry is the lense in which the world, ourselves, light and darkness blur or come into focus. Either way it is a poet’s words and attention that give it shape.

Favorite Poet:

Patricia Smith. Hands down. I learned so much about language and surprise by studying Patricia. She is a master at making it fresh. Every time I lean into one of her ripe metaphors, her similes with teeth, I think, language has never bit me like that before. Words have never shocked me in such a way. She is also a master of form, dancing with ghazals and sestinas. And inside these structures she turns language and turns us, until the reader is inside out. I also love that Patricia writes with an urgency, an earthquaking expression, as if to say look, pay attention. Now.

I really love all her work but particularly the book Blood Dazzler. I grew up spending a lot of time on my father’s boat in Florida. It seems we were always outrunning a hurricane. There was always a storm breathing down my neck. I began to think of them as characters. I have always been fascinated how Patricia wrote a book about Hurricane Katrina, from multiple points of view, including the voice of the hurricane.

Why do you like this collection?

I am a sucker for metaphor. I love the way Patricia brings in the voice of Hurricane Katrina through metaphor. “I become /a mouth, thrashing hair, an overdone eye. /How dare the water belittle my thirst.”  She creates a voice that is in charge and taking no shit. The storm is there, hungry for power, demanding worship. I just love how we can see the transition from the need for attention to destruction. This poem also contains one of my favorite lines of all time, “Every woman begins as weather.” The idea of every woman beginning  as storm or sunshine, waiting to gather, fascinates me. It is a fresh and honest connection to emotion and mothering.  It also ties us to the beauty and danger of mother earth.

 "5 P. M TUESDAY AUGUST 23, 2005"

by Patricia Smith

“Data from an Air Force reserve unit reconnaissance aircraft...along with observations from the Bahamas and nearby ships….indicate the broad low pressure area over the Southern Bahamas has become organized enough to be classified as tropical depression twelve.”

-NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER

A muted thread of gray light, hovering ocean,

Becomes throat, pulls in wriggle, anemone, kelp

widens with the want of it. I become

a mouth, thrashing hair, an ovedone eye. How dare

the water belittle my thirst, treat me as just

another

small

disturbance,

try to feed me

From of the bottom of its hand?

I will require praise,

Unbirdled winds to define my body.

a crime between my teeth

because

every women begins as weather,

sips slow thunder, knows her hips. Every woman

habors a chaos, can

wait for it straddling a fever.

For now,

I console myself with small furies

those dips in my dawning system. I pull in

a bored breath. The brine shivers.

________________________________________________________________________________

Kelly Grace Thomas is the winner of the 2017 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle, a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best of the Next nominee. BOAT/BURNED, her first full-length collection, is forthcoming from YesYes Books. Kelly’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: DIAGRAM, Tinderbox, Nashville Review, Sixth Finch, Muzzle, PANK and more. Kelly currently works to bring poetry to underserved youth as the Manager of Education and Pedagogy for Get Lit-Words Ignite. She is also the co-author of Words Ignite: Explore, Write and Perform, Classic and Spoken Word Poetry (Literary Riot). Kelly was a 2016 Fellow for the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop. She is the founder of FeministWrites, a creative collective that connects and champions feminist voices. She is currently a reader for Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She lives in Los Angeles.

67--->jochen & apollinaire

Prénom / Nom: Jochen Gerner

Ville natale: Nancy (France)

Ville actuelle: Nancy

Travail: Dessinateur

Âge: 47

Qu'est-ce qui signifie, pour vous, la poésie?

La poésie prend forme lorsque des images étranges, belles et inédites s’échappent de simples mots.   (1)

Poète préféré et poème préféré: Apollinaire (1880 - 1918)

"Carte postale"

par Guillaume Apollinaire

Je t'écris de dessous la tente

Tandis que meurt ce jour d'été

Où floraison éblouissante 

Dans le ciel à peine bleuté 

Une canonnade éclatante 

Se fane avant d'avoir été (2)

Pourquoi aimez-vous ce poète, ce poème ? 

Ces poèmes de guerre, écrits sur les champs de bataille, sont saisissants car ils sortent des
tranchées pour aller vers le céleste (Lueurs des tirs, Obus couleur de lune, La tête étoilée). La
délicatesse des évocations semble s'opposer à la violence des événements, tout en paraissant
l'enjoliver pour mieux l'éteindre. (3)

________________________________________________________________________________

Traduit du français par Carrie Chappell/ Translated from French to English by Carrie Chappell

(1) Poetry takes form for me when when strange images, beautiful and novel, elude common expression. 

(2)  

"Post Card" 

By Guillaume Apollinaire

I write to you from under my tent

While succumbs this summer's day 

Where in blinding bloom

In sky hardly blue

A shiny cannon

Withers before having boomed

(3) These war poems, written on the battlefield, are striking because they come out of the trenches reaching towards the celestial (gleams of fire, shell-like color of the moon, starry head). The delicacy of each poem's rendering seems to contrast the violence of the real life event, all the while embellishing it to better extinguish it.   

66---> william & herbert

On the portrait: When I was in high school, I had an English teacher who turned us on to the metaphysical poets. John Donne, Andrew Marvell. I especially loved George Herbert for his poem "The Collar." I’m not a religious person, but the dramatic impact of the sudden interjection of the voice of God at the end of the poem and its humbling effect on the raving speaker, almost like an answered prayer, has stayed with me all these years.

"The Collar"

By George Herbert

I struck the board, and cried, "No more; 

                         I will abroad! 

What? shall I ever sigh and pine? 

My lines and life are free, free as the road, 

Loose as the wind, as large as store. 

          Shall I be still in suit? 

Have I no harvest but a thorn 

To let me blood, and not restore 

What I have lost with cordial fruit? 

          Sure there was wine 

Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn 

    Before my tears did drown it. 

      Is the year only lost to me? 

          Have I no bays to crown it, 

No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted? 

                  All wasted? 

Not so, my heart; but there is fruit, 

            And thou hast hands. 

Recover all thy sigh-blown age 

On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute 

Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage, 

             Thy rope of sands, 

Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee 

Good cable, to enforce and draw, 

          And be thy law, 

While thou didst wink and wouldst not see. 

          Away! take heed; 

          I will abroad. 

Call in thy death's-head there; tie up thy fears; 

          He that forbears 

         To suit and serve his need 

          Deserves his load." 

But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild 

          At every word, 

Methought I heard one calling, Child! 

          And I replied My Lord. 

________________________________________________________________________________

William Horberg is a film producer, musician, writer and artist. He lives in the Hudson River Valley with his wife, the Cuban artist Elsa Mora, and their two children. He is presently Chair of the Producers Guild of America, East, and curates a film and music series at ArtYard art center in Frenchtown, NJ.
 

65---> anna & ses éclaireurs

Prénom, Nom: Anna Serra

Ville natale: Perpignan et tous les endroits que je traverse

Ville actuelle: Paris et tous les endroits que je traverse

Taff : écrivaine, poète, fondatrice Radio O et revue OR

Âge: 29 printemps

Qu'est-ce qui signifie, pour vous, la poésie ?

pƆ  e     ziə

d                   ʁ

       ə                    əʊ 

POÉSIE

DÉSIR

DE ZÉRO

 Poète préféré/ poème préféré:

Je n’ai pas de chouchou. J’ai des éclaireurs. Il y a René Daumal qui m’a appris la fonction de la poésie en Inde, celle de nous faire rentrer dans un état de transe c’est-à-dire de nous faire accéder à un autre état de conscience. La poésie qui mène au réveil. A la renaissance de la conscience. Au zéro qui relance les dés. Il y a Trista Brown qui m’a appris l’élémentaire et le pouvoir de l’absence. Il y a toutes ces artistes qui ont exploré la voix comme on explore l’univers inconnu infini : Meredith Monk, Joan La Barbara, Maja Jantar. Il y a les Récitations d’Aperghis qui ont aussi influencé une de mes performances ("Banban"). Elles m’ont appris le goût du jeu des gestes avec les sons. Mais pour ça il y a eu auparavant Chaplin que j’adore. Il me rappelle l’humour qu’amène le corps qui construit du sens, et l’art d’être libre du sens avec les mots (dans Les Temps Modernes en particulier). Là j’évoque les poètes qui ont pu marquer mon travail de poète mourant d’envie de planter des poèmes dehors, de les planter en faisant jaillir l’enthousiasme dont est forcément constitué mon poème. Mais j’ai encore d’autres influences, des gens proches de moi, qui m’ont amené à la radio, ou encore à la narration ou à la création d’une revue de poésie visuelle et sonore. 

Et surtout il y a Fadwa Souleimane et Maria-Mercè Marçal qui m’inspirent pour tout. (1)

________________________________________________________________________________

Traduit du français par Carrie Chappell/ Translated from French to English by Carrie Chappell

(1) I don't have favorites. I have guides. There's René Daumal who taught me the role of poetry in India, that of entering a state of trance, meaning, allowing us to access another state of awareness. Poetry that leads us to awakening. To a rebirth of consciousness. To a "zero" that relaunches the dice. There is Trista Brown who taught me the elementary power of absence. There are all these artists who explore the voice like we might explore an infinite, unknown universe: Meredith Monk, Joan La Barbara, Maja Jantar. There are the Recitations of Aperghis that also influenced one of my performances ("Banban"). They gave me a taste for the game of gestures with sound. But for that, we previously had Chaplin who I love. He reminds me of the comedy conveyed in the body that constructs meaning, and the art of being free with meanings in words (in Modern Times especially). Here I am evoking the poets who made an impression on my work as a poet dying to plant poems outside, to plant them by making them spring with the enthusiasm that is necessarily the constitution of my poem. Yet, I have other influences, some people close to me, who led me to the radio, or even to narration, or to the creation of a visual and audio journal of poetry. 

And last but not least, there are Fadwa Souleimane and Maria-Mercè Marçal who inspire me in everything. 

64---> ashley & clifton

Name: Ashley M. Jones

Hometown : Birmingham, AL

Current City: Birmingham, AL

Occupation: Creative Writing Faculty Member at Alabama School of Fine Arts, seminar instructor for the University Honors Program at UAB, Founding Director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, Board Member of the AWC, and touring poet!

Age: 27 years old

What does poetry mean to you?

Poetry means conversation, wondering, attempts at discovery, and exploration of the human condition. I started writing poetry when I was 8 years old, and I've never looked back! I find that writing poems is not only exciting for what I can do with language but also for my own exploration of history and my place in it. Lucille Clifton says that we write because we wonder, and there's just so much wondering we all do. Why not do it through poems?

Favorite poem:

My favorite poem "What the mirror said" is by my favorite poet Lucille Clifton. 

"What the mirror said"

By Lucille Clifton

listen,

you a wonder.

you a city

of a woman.

you got a geography

of your own.

listen,

somebody need a map

to understand you.

somebody need directions

to move around you.

listen,

woman,

you not a noplace

anonymous

girl;

mister with his hands on you

he got his hands on

some

damn

body! 

Why do you like this poem?

I love this poem because it affirms my existence, it affirms my somebody-ness. Most of us have struggled with identity and self-esteem and making a place for ourselves in this very confusing/painful/wonderful/thrilling world. This poem tells me that I'm not just a woman; I contain multitudes, an entire CITY. I am some damn body! Not only that, but it is yet another demonstration of how Clifton is able to do so much in a small space, with such small words. That's what keeps bringing me back and back and back to her work—she's so masterful with the small line, the tiny word that holds whole worlds. If you've never read her work, please hasten to it! 
 

Recent poems of Ashley M. Jones include "I See a Smear of Animal on the Road and Mistake it for Philando Castile" and "'There Is A Bell At Morehouse College.'"